"Ban social media as a distraction? No, it boosts productivity"
Any manager who thinks staff should be banned from using social media at work is seriously misguided and could be doing grave damage to the business.
Stephen Hawking summed up the thinking of many of the researchers and funders behind artificial intelligence this week when he launched the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge by claiming that AI is "either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity."
Today, AI is reality, thanks to big data analysis, exa-scale storage, and cloud technologies that complement AI algorithms with highly scalable methods to quickly access and analyze massive data sets. #ai
IBM sees great opportunity by offering Watson as a service other companies and developers can access through API's in order to develop their own applications.
Google DeepMind claims to have significantly improved computer-generated speech with its AI technology, paving the way forward for sophisticated talking machines like those seen in sci-fi films like "Her" and "Ex-Machina."
'Chatbots are the new apps," said Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year. "Threads are the new apps," suggested Facebook's head of messaging products David Marcus in January, referring to the threads of conversation in apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
We live in strange times. These are workers without a workplace, striking against a company that does not employ them. They are managed not by people but by an algorithm that communicates with them via their smartphones. And what they are rebelling against is an app update.
Microsoft announced new Yammer integration with Office 365 Groups. The integration gives users access to SharePoint sites and document repositories, a shared OneNote notebook, and task management with Planner.
Syngenta is a global agriculture business that helps farmers make better use of their available resources, primarily through agrochemical and seed production. In order to continue to advance crop productivity, it invested more than $1.4bn in research and development (R&D) across 150 international sites in 2014.
On Tuesday, Google is expected to finally unveil its answer to the Echo, alongside new smartphones and tablets. The Google Home device, which looks a little like an air freshener, is expected to go on sale later this month.
Lenovo, the world's biggest PC maker, has held talks with Amazon on potentially using Alexa in its computers and other devices, according to a Lenovo executive with knowledge of the talks. The executive declined to provide more details.
The world's biggest artificial intelligence companies, including Facebook and Google, have joined forces to mould the ethical rules that will govern how robots and computer programs behave in the future.
About time and welcome. I hope that those with experience of medical ethics are also involved. For two reasons; medicine is likely to be a major player and beneficiary of AI (eg personalised drugs) and medical ethics is a mature field that is used to responding to rapid innovation.
While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next decade, it will affect portions of almost all jobs to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the type of work they entail.
Jaron Lanier - who pioneered virtual reality - stressed that we need to divide "artificial intelligence" into two different things:
-the engineering and the science on the one hand
-the storytelling about it, the narrative that we have about it, the fantasy life of it - perhaps the religion of it.
It doesn't mean one is good and one is bad, but they're just different sorts of beasts.