As AI surpasses human abilities in Go and poker – two decades after Deep Blue trounced chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov – it is seeping into our lives in ever more profound ways. It affects the way we search the web, receive medical advice and whether we receive finance from our banks.

To make it easier to diagnose and study sleep problems, researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have devised a new way to monitor sleep stages without sensors attached to the body. Their device uses an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze the radio signals around the person and translate those measurements into sleep stages: light, deep, or rapid eye movement (REM).

We are only in the earliest stages of so-called algorithmic regulation – intelligent machines deploying big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to regulate human behaviour and enforce laws – but it already has profound implications for the relationship between private citizens and the state.

Given a still image of a dish filled with food, CSAIL team’s deep-learning algorithm recommends ingredients and recipes.

Laparoscopy is a surgical technique in which a fiber-optic camera is inserted into a patient’s abdominal cavity to provide a video feed that guides the surgeon through a minimally invasive procedure. Laparoscopic surgeries can take hours, and the video generated by the camera — the laparoscope — is often recorded. Those recordings contain a wealth of information that could be useful for training both medical providers and computer systems that would aid with surgery, but because reviewing them is so time consuming, they mostly sit idle.

In episode two of season three Neil takes us through the basics on dropout, we chat about the definition of inference (It’s more about context than you think!) and hear an interview with Jennifer Chayes of Microsoft.

Professor David Mindell, who researches the interaction between automation and human behavior, discusses the interdependence of people, robots, and infrastructure.

This week I attended an “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roundtable” of leading scientists, entrepreneurs and venture investors. As the discussion focused mainly on basic statistical techniques, I left feeling unfulfilled. My friend, Matt Turck, recently wrote that “just about every major tech company is working very actively on AI,” which also means that every startup hungry for capital is purchasing a dot ‘ai’ domain name. As the lines blur between what is and what really isn’t, I feel it necessary to provide readers with a quick lens of how to view intelligent agents for mechatronics.

In this article, we explain in plain language machine learning.

Last week I had the pleasure of debating the question “does AI pose a threat to society?” with friends and colleagues Christian List, Maja Pantic and Samantha Payne. The event was organised by the British Academy and brilliantly chaired by the Royal Society’s director of science policy Claire Craig. Here follows my opening statement:

Talking Machines is entering its third season and going through some changes. Our founding host Ryan is moving on and in his place, Neil Lawrence of Amazon is taking over as co-host. We say thank you and goodbye to Ryan with an interview about his work.

The many potential social and economic benefits from advances in AI-based technologies depend entirely on the environment in which these technologies evolve, says the Royal Society. According to a new report from the UK’s science academy, urgent consideration needs to be given to the “careful stewardship” needed over the next ten years to ensure that the dividends from machine learning – the form of artificial intelligence that allows machines to learn from data – benefit all in UK society.

Ballyhooed artificial-intelligence technique known as “deep learning” revives 70-year-old idea.

From self-driving cars to the internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI) has reached new levels of sophistication in recent years. With that in mind, this week MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) launched an industry collaboration focused on using machine learning to create functional human-like systems.

“Robot’s Delight – A Lyrical Exposition on Learning by Imitation from Human-Human Interaction” is a video submission that won Best Video at the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2017). The team also provides an in-depth explanation of the techniques and robotics in the video.