Mark Gurman, who seems to have quite a few reliable contacts around the Valley, reports in Bloomberg that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is working on a hardware acceleration chip for artificial intelligence (AI) processing. The chip is known internally as the Apple Neural Engine. The chip could be incorporated into Apple mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad either as a discrete chip or integrated with Apple's custom systems on chip (SOCs). Although Gurman only cites anonymous sources familiar with the matter, I consider the report very credible. Apple has for some time been seeking ways to build more AI functionality into the individual mobile device.

Big data, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence have quickly become the cornerstones that define and uphold our interconnected, internet-driven reality. It's no surprise, then, that the three subjects continue to dominate the tech news reel in 2017 as their tendrils of connectivity permeate in the deeper recess of our lives. What are the new trends guiding these three technologies in the current year? Big data The key to understanding big data is in the use of the word "big" -- the set of data is so large that traditional methods of dealing with it are inadequate. According to The Next Web, smart contracts represent the future of big data.

Are the humans of finance an endangered species? People are still the lubricant that oils the wheels of finance, toiling at innumerable tasks--executing and settling trades, writing analysis, monitoring risk. Squeezed by low interest rates, shrinking trading revenue, and nimbler technology-based competitors, banks are racing to remake themselves as digital companies to cut costs and better serve clients. In other words, they're preparing for the day that machines made by men and women take over more of what used to be the sole province of humans: knowledge work. Consider venerable State Street, a 224-year-old custody bank that predates the steam locomotive and caters to institutional investors such as pensions and mutual funds.

Human champion Ke Jie competes against AlphaGo at the Future of Go Summit. Two days ago in the Zhejiang Province of China, Google's Go-playing artificial intelligence AlphaGo bested current world Go champion Ke Jie in the first game of a three-part match, sliding by on a half-point victory. Now the second game has taken place -- and once again, AlphaGo has emerged the winner. The human gave it his all. "Incredible," wrote DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis on Twitter while the match was underway.

Modeling causal dependencies often demands cycles at a coarse-grained temporal scale. If Bayesian networks are to be used for modeling uncertainties, cycles are eliminated with dynamic Bayesian networks, spreading indirect dependencies over time and enforcing an infinitesimal resolution of time. Without a ``causal design,'' i.e., without anticipating indirect influences appropriately in time, we argue that such networks return spurious results. By identifying activator random variables, we propose activator dynamic Bayesian networks (ADBNs) which are able to rapidly adapt to contexts under a causal use of time, anticipating indirect influences on a solid mathematical basis using familiar Bayesian network semantics. ADBNs are well-defined dynamic probabilistic graphical models allowing one to model cyclic dependencies from local and causal perspectives while preserving a classical, familiar calculus and classically known algorithms, without introducing any overhead in modeling or inference.

We're pretty much half way through the year, which means it's Computex time. As usual, you'll find a handful of us running around the Taipei show floors next week, where we'll be getting our hands dirty with the latest PC products and components. Last year was relatively fruitful thanks to the VR explosion. Several PC brands rolled out high-end GPUs or affordable ones capable of running VR. Even Intel surprised its hardcore users with its first-ever 10-core desktop CPU.

The day Thore Graepel joined Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence lab in the spring of 2015, his new colleagues sat him down for a game of Go. Over the previous year, they'd trained a neural network to play the ancient game. Graepel happened to be a player himself, holding a one dan rank, the Go equivalent of a black belt. As the game began with DeepMind researchers circled around him, Graepel was confident he would win. After all, he never had trouble playing other Go programs.

Cloud Computing: Is Your Cloud Getting Smarter? Automation is enabling enterprises to design, deploy, and manage more complex, hybrid cloud environments. Yet the people who manage these environments must be trained in and understanding these environments better than ever before. A new era of analytics and cognitive computing is adding intelligence, but also more complexity, to these cloud environments. How smart is your cloud?

To change your world, AI does not need to replace humans – it just needs to displace you. So stop saying that AI can't replace humans, and start asking, "Can AI displace me?" You Don't Need to Be Totally Replaced by a Sentient AI System to Lose Your Job We are not close enough to general-knowledge artificial intelligence to consider a world where such a system could completely replace a cognitive nonrepetitive (white-collar) worker. And while Hollywood and sensationalist reporting would have you believe otherwise, malevolent AI systems and sentient cyborgs should not be the subject of any serious discussion about job loss. The most probable future is far scarier.

The silence was shredded by the rat-tat-tat eruptions of a single gun. More soldiers fired, their volleys coalescing into the grim music of war -- a sustained snare drum roll soon interrupted by the bass thumps of the 50-caliber machine gun. All the barrels pointed at a speck tracing a line in the sky over west Mosul. Their target was yet another drone dispatched by Islamic State. In the seven months of the Iraqi government's drive to recapture Mosul from the jihadists, small drones have become a signature tactic of the group: Their appearance on the horizon, loaded with a camera, signals that punishing mortar barrages will soon be on the way.