By Luis Fierro Carrión (*) In March 2016, Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence system beat Korean master Lee Sedol in the game "Go", an ancient Chinese table game. The possible moves in this game have a level of complexity much greater than those of chess. Google developed an algorithm for AlphaGo to learn recursively each time it played, through a deep neural network. AlphaGo learned to discover new strategies by itself, by playing thousands of games within its neural networks, and adjusting the connections through a process of trial and error known as "learning by reinforcement". Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been conquering more and more complex games: tic-tac-toe in 1952, checkers in 1994, chess in 1997, "Jeopardy" (a game of questions on different subjects) in 2011; and in 2014, Google's algorithms learned how to play 49 Atari video games simply by studying the inputs in the screen pixels and the scores obtained.

Artificial Intelligence is the fourth industrial revolution after the invention of steam power, electricity, electronics and software. And Bottos will be the key driving force for this revolution as the data becomes the core competitive power in AI development.

The world's top Go player will take on an artificial intelligence opponent again this spring, but this time it will not be Google's DeepMind that provides the machine rival. Ke Jie had previously vowed never to play against AI again after repeatedly losing to DeepMind's AlphaGo. But according to Chinese media reports, he will take on a range AI opponents, including one from China's Tencent. The man-versus-machine series will take place in China in April 2018. The matches will form part of the the World AI Go Tournament.

MUMBAI: Have a question for Sophia, the world's first humanoid robot who has been granted citizenship by a country? Sophia will be visiting India, her maiden trip to the country, on December 30 to attend the TechFest--the institute's annual science and technology meet. Select questions asked by Twitterati will be put in front of Sophia by a moderator when she will be on the institute's campus. "We are starting a Twitter campaign wherein users can send questions to Sophia using the hashtag #AskSophia," said Anirudh Poddar, manager, media and marketing, Techfest. In 2014, the Techfest had hosted BINA 48, the most advanced social robot to talk to in the world at that time.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics has everything to be a significant technological event. If we already had an appetizer of this during the presentation of the city as the next venue of the games during the closing of Rio 2016, little by little, more information comes to confirm this idea. The latest comes from the Japan Times website, which talks about the use of facial recognition technology during the event. Citing an anonymous source, the publication says that the organizers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games will scan the face of everyone who is working on the games. This includes not only the event organization team but also athletes and media professionals.

Before getting a second life, metals, plastics, cardboard, and other solid recyclable materials often embark on a long journey that touches two continents. Every day, about 1,500 shipping containers of recycled materials are loaded onto cargo ships in the U.S. and dispatched to China. In fact, since 2007, recyclable waste has been one of the U.S.' main exports to China, a partnership that fueled the Asian nation's manufacturing boom. As China's economy increasingly shifts to services, reducing its dependence on the polluting manufacturing industry, its government is getting more serious about environmental protection. While recycling is obviously beneficial for the environment, practically nobody is perfect at it.

Cloud kitchen startup InnerChef plans to launch more kitchens alongside fresh food brands as it looks to leverage artificial intelligence and data analytics in 2018. "We will launch additional kitchens alongside more food brands under our'multi-city and multi-brand' strategy. We will add Pune and Ahmedabad under our operations in 2018 as we start five more kitchens in addition to the existing 13 operating out of Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Bengaluru. By the end of the year, we are looking to have nearly 40 kitchens. We are also looking to leverage data analytics to improve customer experience," Rajesh Sawhney, founder and CEO of InnerChef, told VCCircle.

The IT infrastructure landscape is evolving rapidly. What will it look like in 2020? When people think of enterprise IT infrastructure, they often imagine racks of hardware locked away in data centers and basements. But it is actually a focal point of disruption and innovation in every area, from servers and storage to networking and software. What are the trends that are giving rise to such disruption and innovation?

Oracle will be opening the first artificial intelligence (AI) lab in the region at Dubai Internet City by end of January, a top executive said. Arun Khehar, senior vice-president of applications at Oracle Eastern Central Europe, Middle East, Africa, told Gulf News in an interview that the whole idea is focused on Dubai Government and Federal Government's stress on emerging technologies like AI, internet of things and blockchain. "This will be a key contribution to what the government plans to do. The lab will show the power of the technology to the customers. There will be industry solutions relevant to this part of the world," he said, adding that investments in AI will be integral to drive the future of cloud computing.

This article is part of Inc42's Startup Watchlist annual series where we list the top startups to watch for 2018 from industries like AI, Logistics, Fintech etc. Explore all the stories from'Startup Watchlist' series here. "AI will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity," says the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk has been one of the most vociferous about the impact of artificial intelligence or AI on human life, voicing both concern and hope of what it can do to the future of the human race. "I have exposure to the most cutting-edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned by it," Musk said at the National Governors Association. "AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not -- they were harmful to a set of individuals within society, of course, but they were not harmful to society as a whole." While Musk has his concerns about robots taking up human jobs and becoming far more intelligent than humans, the fact remains that AI as a technology was the most talked about in 2017 in the Indian startup ecosystem.