When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I'm afraid." These were the words uttered by Garry Kasparov, then the world's best chess player as he lost to a computer, IBM's Deep Blue, in 1997. The dominance of intelligent machines over humans is a concept that has haunted the human psyche since the early ages of mechanisation and resulted in some of the world's best fiction. As the availability of cheap computing power grows exponentially and algorithms grow ever more able to anticipate and respond to human behaviour, artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly moving from the realms of science fiction to everyday reality. Not only do computers routinely beat the world's best human chess players, voice-powered personal assistants help us through our social lives and self-driving cars have already clocked up millions of miles around the world's busiest cities. As in previous eras of technological advance, the rise of AI today is accompanied by fears that the machines will take ...

Artificial Intelligence has become a topic of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities. Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming Cloud Expo @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York, June 6-8, will find fresh new content in a new track called Cognitive Computing Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning. We are now in the third, and most successful, generation of groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and deployments. With it comes new capabilities for Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), as organizations of all sizes work to create and use new insights from their existing operations while also seeking to develop new ways of making their systems and their organizations much smarter. Cloud Expo is still accepting submissions for this new track, so please visit www.cloudcomputingexpo.com for the latest information.

The event welcomed over 1,000 attendees, including children and their parents. This was the 2nd time Robo Done has celebrated the festival. In only one year, the number of attendees has increased threefold (350 attendees in 2016 to over 1,012 in 2017). It was celebrated in the KANDAI MeRise Campus of the Kansai University in Osaka, Japan and has become the biggest event at the campus. The main activity was the Robot Contest, using LEGO Mindstorm, with morning and afternoon leagues.

There are two main reasons for infrastructure automation. First, system administrators, IT professionals and DevOps engineers need to automate as many routine tasks as possible. That's why we build tools at Stackify to help developers automate processes like application performance management, error monitoring, and log management; automation means you have more time for mission-critical tasks. Second, automation makes the management of complex, diverse environments possible and allows rapid scaling. Whether you are using a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud, infrastructure automation tools will come in handy. The following is a look at the 50 best cloud infrastructure automation tools available today, which we've listed below in alphabetical order. Ansible is a relatively simple infrastructure automation engine that automates application deployment, configuration management, cloud provisioning and intra-service orchestration.

Imagine a surgeon asking a Siri-like digital assistant in the operations theater about the options available in a risky operation, based on the patient's medical history matched with a global database of similar cases. The "assistant" comes up with several options in a split second and, the surgeon and his team, choose one that they think is best and proceed. This could be one of the many possibilities that an Artificial Intelligence or A.I. can provide to the healthcare sector. A.I. is poised to become a game changer for the health care sector, according to Steve Leonard, chief executive of SGInnovate, the government entity that supports entrepreneurs leading Singapore's innovation efforts. But convincing doctors, clinicians, nurses, patients and other stakeholders to place their trust in self-thinking machines could be tricky.

Soon after Apple announced in May 2016 it was investing $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service, Didi Chuxing, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick called up Elon Musk and proposed a self-driving partnership between his company and Tesla. But Musk turned down the offer to team up against Apple, calling it unrealistic, according to a new book to be released May 23. The book by Adam Lashinsky, who writes for Fortune magazine, is titled "Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination." In it, Lashinsky writes about Kalanick recounting the call to Musk: "I said, 'Look man, we should partner. Elon spent the rest of the call convincing me that it's too far out, and it's not realistic, that I should just stick to what we do best and be focused, or I'm going to f--- it all up. That's when I knew Tesla was competing."

Wall Street will be one of the first and largest industries to be automated by artificial intelligence, predicts Kai-Fu Lee, China's most famous venture capitalist and former Microsoft and Google executive. Lenders, money managers, and analysts--any jobs that involve crunching numbers to estimate a return--are at risk. "Banks have the curse of the baggage they have, like Kodak letting go of film," Lee says. "Their DNA is all wrong." Lee's VC firm, Sinovation Ventures, has started to invest in this space by financing Smart Finance Group, a company which algorithmically determines eligibility for payday loans.

Artificial intelligence algorithms can now replace social media marketing agencies, paint a "new Rembrandt", project the image of a perfect mother, compose commercially viable music and even direct ads, trailers and short films. Just how worried should creatives be? According to Matt Webb, global chief technology officer at Mirum, an AI algorithm is theoretically capable of mining data from a brand and a brief and combining it with information gathered to solve problems. In that sense, AI could conceivably answer a creative brief, he concludes. The reasoning and processes used to teach AI to compose music turn out to be remarkably similar.

AI-based chatbot Niki.ai has raised funding from global leader in business management software SAP. With this the company has debuted investment in India. The investment was done via SAP's newly launched $35 Mn artificial intelligence-focussed fund SAP.iO in March 2017. Niki.ai is an AI-powered shopping assistant. It leverages the technology of natural language processing and machine learning to converse with the customers over a chat interface, and places their orders with the partner businesses. Users can search, discover, choose, make payments and complete transactions within the Niki.ai

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. We live in a world where facial recognition has become so sophisticated that we're being forced to ask very serious ethical questions about it. In China, it's being used to detect toilet paper theft. But I want to take a step back from the big hairy ethical questions and consider how we started on this road--with typography. Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a technology that came up with computing in general.