He has more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications, IT Infrastructure, and security industries. Previously he held positions as general manager data center division and senior vice president core technology at Trend Micro. Before that John was senior director of product management at Lucent Technologies. He has lived and worked in Europe, Asia, and the United States. John graduated with a bachelor of telecommunications engineering degree from Plymouth University, United Kingdom.

For the past five years, the hottest thing in artificial intelligence has been a branch known as deep learning. The grandly named statistical technique, put simply, gives computers a way to learn by processing vast amounts of data. Thanks to deep learning, computers can easily identify faces and recognize spoken words, making other forms of humanlike intelligence suddenly seem within reach. Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have poured money into deep learning. And the technology's perception and pattern-matching abilities are being applied to improve progress in fields such as drug discovery and self-driving cars.

NASA's Curiosity Rover is living its best life through a massive dust storm on Mars, while Opportunity has been forced to hunker down. An artist's conception of a Martian dust storm, which might also crackle with electricity. A giant dust storm has enveloped the entire planet of Mars, with dust clouds reaching up to 40 miles high, NASA announced Wednesday. The dust storm has silenced NASA's solar-powered rover Opportunity since last week, by obscuring the sun. The robot rover has gone to sleep because its solar panels are unable to provide or recharge its batteries.

There's been a lot of recent focus on applications for aerial robots, and one of the areas with the most potential is indoors. The thing about indoors is that by definition you have to go through doors to get there, and once you're inside, there are all kinds of things that are horribly dangerous to aerial robots, like more doors, walls, windows, people, furniture, hanging plants, lampshades, and other aerial robots, inevitably followed by still more doors. One solution is to make your robots super small, so that they can fit through small openings without running into something fragile and expensive, but then you're stuck with small robots that can't do a whole heck of a lot. Another solution is to put your robots in protective cages, but then you're stuck with robots that can't as easily interact with their environment, even if they want to. Ideally, you'd want a robot that doesn't need that level of protection, that's somehow large and powerful but also small and nimble at the same time.

I've been told it helps to take a deep breath. But unfortunately, I cannot do that." The setting is a competitive debate being held at Watson West, IBM's AI outpost in San Francisco's tech-centric SOMA neighborhood. Noa is Noa Ovadia, a champion debater from Israel. The speaker greeting her is her opponent--whose inability to breathe deeply makes perfect sense given that it's a piece of software, generating Siri-like female speech that emanates from a human-sized black column with a screen on its front. This is indeed the first time that the software in question, Project Debater, has shown its stuff outside of secret trial runs. Since 2012, IBM Research has been teaching it to debate humans on a vast array of subjects--making it a successor to Deep Blue (which beat Garry Kasparov in a six-game chess match in 1997) and Watson (which won a Jeopardy tournament against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011). That was good enough to make the exhibition a success in the eyes of Noam Slonim, a senior technical staff member at IBM's research center in Haifa, Israel and the person who originally proposed the Project Debater idea in 2011. The effort now includes dozens of researchers at multiple IBM labs and is led by Slonim's Haifa colleague Ranit Aharonov. Merely seeing the software keep the audience engaged over a 20-minute debate "was a very positive feeling," he tells me at a post-debate reception. Witnessing a computer thrash the Kasparovs and Jenningses of competitive debating at their own craft would be an epoch-shifting moment, but "our goal is not to develop yet another system that is better than humans in doing something," stresses Aharonov. Instead, IBM wants to create debating software that can spar with "a reasonably competent human, but not necessarily a world champion, and come across holding its own," says IBM director of research Arvind Krishna. Still, even if the company is keeping its aspirations in check, its latest adventure in AI involves challenges unlike any it's tackled before. Soon after Watson bested Jennings and Rutter in a tournament taped at IBM's Yorktown, N.Y. research center in January 2011, the company began to think about how to top that memorable feat of artificial intelligence. "All of the thousands of researchers … got the same email asking what should be the next AI grand challenge that IBM Research should pursue," remembers Slonim. The goal, he explains, was to come up with a project that was "scientifically interesting and challenging and would have some business value.

For the past five years, the hottest thing in artificial intelligence has been a branch known as deep learning. The grandly named statistical technique, put simply, gives computers a way to learn by processing massive amounts of data. Thanks to deep learning, computers can easily identify faces and recognize spoken words, making other forms of humanlike intelligence suddenly seem within reach. Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have poured money into deep learning. And the technology's perception and pattern-matching abilities are being applied to improve progress in fields such as drug discovery and self-driving cars.

Malicious, fake versions of Fortnite for Android are spreading through the internet, despite the game not actually being released. The game has now been launched on just about every platform, having come to the Switch this month. But Android phones are still lacking – they won't be getting the game until later this year. That has meant that a rush of apps have been put onto the internet to try and make the most of that demand. Many of them are being advertised on YouTube, to try and trick people who are searching to find out how they can get hold of the game.

Israeli website navigation and digital adaptation platform company WalkMe today announced that it has acquired Israeli startup DeepUI, a company in stealth mode that has developed a patented machine learning technology to understand any business software at the graphical user interface (GUI) level, without the need for an application programming interface (API). No financial details were disclosed. The company has 600 employees with over 300 in Israel. DeepUI is WalkMe's third acquisition since the company was founded in 2011. WalkMe acquired native mobile AI startup Abbi in January 2017, and visual analytics startup Jaco in April 2017.

Silicon Valley is in the middle of an awakening, the dawning but selective realization that their products can be used to achieve terrible ends. In the past few months, this growing unease has bubbled up into outright rebellion from within the rank and file of some of the largest companies in the Valley, beginning in April when Google employees balked at the company's involvement with a Pentagon artificial intelligence program called Project Maven. On Monday, Amazon shareholders sent an open letter asking CEO Jeff Bezos to halt a program developing facial recognition software for governments pending a review by the board of directors. Also this week, as general horror built up over the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which has led to the separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents, Microsoft employees objected to their company's contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use Microsoft's Azure cloud services. "We are part of a growing movement, comprised of many across the industry who recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm," reads an open letter posted to the company's internal message board Tuesday.

Dana Bowman, 56, expresses gratitude for fresh produce at least 10 times in the hour and a half we're having coffee on a frigid spring day in Lindsay, Ontario. Over the many years she scraped by on government disability payments, she tended to stick to frozen vegetables. She'd also save by visiting a food bank or buying marked-down items near or past their sell-by date. But since December, Bowman has felt secure enough to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. She's freer, she says, to "do what nanas do" for her grandchildren, like having all four of them over for turkey on Easter.