Artificial intelligence is real now and it’s just getting started

[Buster's Uncle]

Artificial intelligence is real now and it’s just getting started
Gigaom
By Derrick Harris  January 9, 2015 2:01 PM



Artificial intelligence is already very real. Not conscious machines, omnipotent machines or even reasoning machines (yet), but statistical machines that automate and increasingly can outperform humans at certain pattern-recognition tasks. Computer vision, language understanding, anomaly detection and other fields have made immense advances in the past few years.

All this work will be the stepping stones for future AI systems that, decades from now, might perform feats we’ve only imagined computers could perform. There are brain-inspired neurosynaptic microchips under development, and quantum artificial intelligence might only be a decade away. Some experts predict general artificial intelligence — perhaps even artificial superintelligence — will happen easily within this century.

The effects that AI is having and will have on business, the economy and, most importantly, humanity certainly merit consideration. It’s a discussion we’ll have at our Structure Data conference, which takes place March 18 and 19 in New York, and includes some of the top AI and machine learning researchers, practitioners and thinkers. Confirmed speakers so far include:
Ron Brachman, Yahoo
Rob Fergus, Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research
Ahna Girshick, Enlitic
Jeff Hawkins, Numenta
Steven Horng, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School
Anthony Lewis, Qualcomm
Gary Marcus, New York University
Dharmendra Modha, IBM Research
Naveen Rao, Nervana Systems
Ashutosh Saxena, Stanford University
Julie Shah, Massachussetts Institute of Technology
Davide Venturelli, NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Brian Whitman, Spotify
Dan Zigmond, Hampton Creek

We plan to confirm additional speakers in the next couple weeks. We’ll delve even further into the topic of AI in all its facets at the inaugural Structure Intelligence conference. That’s currently scheduled to take place in San Francisco in September, and more details will be available soon.

Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden (who’ll be back this year) at Structure Data 2014.

Of course, Structure Data is about more than just AI — it’s about managing, analyzing and making use of all sorts of data for all sorts of applications. In addition to the lineup of speakers we announced in December (from companies including BuzzFeed, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, Tableau and all three major Hadoop vendors, to name several), other newly confirmed speakers include:
Eric Brewer, vice president of infrastructure, Google
Julie Brill, commissioner, Federal Trade Commission
Krish Dasgupta, vice president of data platforms and technology, ESPN
Victor Nilson, vice president of big data, AT&T
Bill Ruh, vice president of global software center, GE Global Research
Bill Squadron, executive vice president of Pro Analytics, STATS

The data revolution is at an inflection point and looks set to shoot upward in the next few years. Come here some of the smartest people in the space discuss what it will mean across industries and societies.


http://news.yahoo.com/artificial-intelligence-real-now-just-190133621.html

[Geo]

Increasingly better at pattern recognition and voice understanding? Sure, that's why at work Ms. Computer still for instance mixes up 4s for 7s, or sometimes 'recognizes' spoken commands in background chatter.