Our own Jenny Zaino recently discussed some of the interesting developments that Google announced at the Google I/O event yesterday. Francis Bea of DigitalTrends adds to that discussion with a few other developments shared by Google: “With Google I/O introducing and hyping the tech company’s latest batch of products today, Google also announced a whopping 41 new features to Google+. Along side this update, it was revealed that there are currently 190 million active Google+ users – a number Google likely feels compelled to focus on in the wake of news about dwindling user activity.  Read more

Google, in the midst of its I/O conference (see our story here), also has teamed up with NASA to form the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the agency’s Ames Research Center.

According to a post on Google’s Research Blog, the lab will house a D-Wave Systems quantum computer. The goal is to study how quantum computing can solve some of the most challenging computer science problems, with a focus on advancing machine learning. Machine learning, as Director of Engineering Hartmut Neven writes, “is all about building better models of the world to make more accurate predictions,” but it’s hard work to build a really good model. Real-world applications that he discusses include building a more useful search engine by better understanding spoken questions and what’s on the web to provide the best answer.

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Lucena Research, a leading provider of investment decision support technology, today announced the launch of QuantDesk™ Back Tester, the trading strategy simulator component of QuantDesk™. QuantDesk™ Back Tester is a realistic market simulator that allows investors to test trading strategies over critical market periods. Back Tester represents a fourth component of Lucena’s flagship QuantDesk™ cloud-based platform, which allows users to build a strategy using Lucena’s modular algorithms such as scanning, forecasting, optimizing and hedging to help investment professionals validate and refine quantitative investment strategies. Read more

Andrew Nusca of ZDnet recently interviewed MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson about his company’s use of machine learning. Nusca writes, “When I last wrote about MindTouch, the San Diego-based company, I mentioned that there was a lot of money on the line—$83 billion, according to one market estimate—to get customer service right. MindTouch’s latest gambit? Machine learning. Read more

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 07, 2013 — TheBrain Technologies, the leading provider of dynamic visualization and knowledge management software, announced its newest release to its online secure cloud services for information management and team collaboration.

TheBrain Cloud Services, also known as WebBrain.com, lets users create and synchronize their digital Brains online and across multiple devices. Digital Brains are a collection of users’ ideas, notes, files and link relationships all organized and related the way each user thinks.

TheBrain Cloud Services is host to millions of digital Thoughts from users around the world. Read more

Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal reports, “Computer-based educational systems have long helped impart information to students and assess their understanding of it. The next step, one company in the field says, is using their behavior to make predictions. That’s the aim of technology being announced Tuesday by Desire2Learn, a Canadian company that specializes in cloud-based based learning systems it markets to colleges, schools and companies. Desire2Learn, launched in 1999, competes with companies like Blackboard and Instructure. It claims that 10 million learners at a range of institutions have made use of its technology, including some at big U.S. university systems.” Read more

David Meyer of GigaOM reports, “Amazon has announced the launch of a new development center for cloud technologies in Germany, with locations in both Berlin and Dresden. According to a statement from the company, the 70-plus engineers that Amazon will hire will work on technologies for supporting various hypervisors, management tools and operating systems. This is effectively a major expansion of the development team Amazon has already had in Germany since buying Berlin-based Peritor last year – a purchase that led to the release of the OpsWorks devops toolkit this February.” Read more

Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal writes, “Big data has become one of tech’s biggest buzz phrases, despite varying definitions about what it really is. But the financial bets being placed are pretty substantial, with Skytree emerging as the latest example. The Silicon Valley startup on Tuesday is announcing it has raised $18 million in Series A funding, a fairly hefty amount these days for an early-stage software company with less than 20 employees. U.S. Venture Partners, a venerable name in the venture-capital world, led the round. Scott McNealy, the former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, is also participating.” Read more

The Financial reports, “Unlocking the future—that was the theme Rick Rashid, Microsoft chief research officer, used to close his opening remarks April 23 during the first day of the Microsoft Research Machine Learning Summit 2013… ‘This topic of machine learning has become incredibly exciting over the last 10 years,’ [Rashid] said. ‘The pace of change has been really dramatic, so it’s exciting to get so many people from so many different areas to be here today to talk about it.’ Rashid recalled a time in the not-so-recent past when machine learning was in its nascent stage, using rules and pattern recognition to produce results many found less than stellar. But today, he stated, a combination of data, devices, and services has led to newfound respect for the discipline, which is having an increasingly dramatic impact on business and society.” Read more

NEW YORK, April 24, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – Researchers from LIONsolver, Inc. have won first prize in The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s $10,000 Parkinson’s Data Challenge, a contest leveraging “the wisdom of the crowd” to benefit people with Parkinson’s disease (PD).

The contest received an enthusiastic response from the scientific community — the winning entry was chosen following more than 630 downloads of the dataset from teams in 21 countries.

The LIONsolver team’s winning entry provided proof of concept for a “machine learning approach” that could unveil clues to PD onset and progression embedded in data collected on smartphones. LIONsolver’s project proved the feasibility and value of gathering mobile data for monitoring PD, while laying the groundwork for further analysis of larger, and potentially more powerful, datasets using LIONsolver’s machine learning platform. Read more