On Dec. 6, 2016, thousands of translators filed into office buildings across mainland China to pore over brochures, letters, and technical manuals, all in foreign languages, painstakingly rendering their texts in Chinese characters. This marathon carried on for 15 hours a day for an entire month. Clients that supplied the material received professional-grade Chinese versions of the originals at a bargain price. But Baidu Inc., the Beijing-based company that organized the mass translation, got something potentially more valuable: millions of English-Mandarin word pairs with which to train its online translation engine. China is infamous for its knockoffs, whether luxury handbags or web startups.

Google Home users got a surprise on Thursday when their virtual assistants cheerily mentioned that the live-action remake of "Beauty and the Beast" is opening in theaters this weekend. The ad seems to pop up when users ask for a rundown of their day, which kicks off the Home's "My Day" feature. That feature is supposed to offer users information about the weather, their calendars and relevant news. "By the way, Disney's live action'Beauty and The Beast' opens today," it says. "In this version of the story, Belle is the inventor instead of Maurice. That rings truer, if you ask me. For some more movie fun, ask me something about Belle."

A common problem in large-scale data analysis is to approximate a matrix using a combination of specifically sampled rows and columns, known as CUR decomposition. Unfortunately, in many real-world environments, the ability to sample specific individual rows or columns of the matrix is limited by either system constraints or cost. In this paper, we consider matrix approximation by sampling predefined blocks of columns (or rows) from the matrix. This regime is commonly found when data is distributed across multiple nodes in a compute cluster, where such blocks correspond to columns (or rows) of the matrix stored on the same node, which can be retrieved with much less overhead than retrieving individual columns stored across different nodes. We propose a novel algorithm for sampling useful column blocks and provide guarantees for the quality of the approximation. We demonstrate the practical utility of this algorithm for computing the block CUR decomposition of large matrices in a distributed setting using Apache Spark. Using our proposed block CUR algorithms, we can achieve a significant speed-up compared to a regular CUR decomposition with the same quality of approximation.

The e-commerce giant is introducing the virtual assistant to its shopping app iOS app, letting users converse with the AI on the go. However, the setup is less convenient than Apple's system, as users must to first open the app and then press the microphone icon before chatting – user simply say'Hey Siri' to activate the AI. The update will let iOS users ask Alexa questions, shop, play music and more – just by tapping the microphone icon in the search bar. Users will have the ability to control the slew of smart-home products that Amazon has to offer using Alexa. And iOS users who already use the app to control the smart speaker that houses Alexa, can now do so on the go.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a mind-blowingly good videogame. That omnipresent quest of defeating the primal evil Ganon, rendezvousing with the eponymous princess, and saving all of Hyrule from destruction has been given an open world twist, and it's utterly compelling and endlessly thrilling. Aside from the general plot and Link, the protagonist, the series has also featured a few other constants too – puzzles, dungeons, the Master Sword, the Triforce, bombs, boomerangs and scary big bosses, just to name a few. A quixotic, towering volcano named Death Mountain is also a fixture of the series, and, during a recent stint on Breath of the Wild, it suddenly occurred to me that it's a pretty unusual volcano. Death Mountain can be seen lingering towards the center of Hyrule's horizon.

When the robots rise up, they won't take your life. They'll take your job, particularly those in fields primed for automation, like manufacturing, trucking, and customer service. Technologists, economists, and policymakers believe this future is all but inevitable, and say it's time to begin thinking seriously about how to ensure artificial intelligence advances humanity--and improves the economy, without leaving the middle class behind. Two economists who recently left Washington say the answer lies in ensuring the government provides enough of a safety net to help middle class Americans navigate the coming transition. Jason Furman and Gene Sperling--former chief economic advisors to President Obama--prefer to think of it as a bridge, not a net, that will help people reach the future.

Both the Tokyo police and the Human-Interactive Robotics Lab at Michigan Tech are using nets to catch smaller hostile drones. The idea is very simple: shoot a net or lure a drone into a net, entangling it. This electromagnetic field gun can safely bring drones down to the ground. However, it's not commercially available yet, and radio jammers are illegal in the US. DroneShield's Omnidirectional Sensor and Long-Range Sensor can remotely detect drones that are undetectable by radar.

What we can learn from WeChat's domination in China as we push out more virtual assistants and transition into an AI-first society. In the past, we've featured several a16z summit series presentations in Last Week in the Future (see 16 Questions About Self-Driving Cars by Frank Chen or Mobile is Eating the World by Benedict Evans). This week we analyze connie chan's presentation, "Trends in China", which explores parallels in the US and what WeChat's success can teach us in virtual assistant design. Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have all played huge roles in pushing the mobile S-curve from creation to deployment stage. Some may argue that in China, the mobile S-curve is already passing the scaling stage into the maturity phase.

On Dec. 6, 2016, thousands of translators filed into office buildings across mainland China to pore over brochures, letters, and technical manuals, all in foreign languages, painstakingly rendering their texts in Chinese characters. This marathon carried on for 15 hours a day for an entire month. Clients that supplied the material received professional-grade Chinese versions of the originals at a bargain price. But Baidu Inc., the Beijing-based company that organized the mass translation, got something potentially more valuable: millions of English-Mandarin word pairs with which to train its online translation engine. China is infamous for its knockoffs, whether luxury handbags or web startups.

Megh Gupta is a member of the investment team at OMERS Ventures. Qasim Mohammad is a Toronto-based venture capitalist and a member of the investment team at OMERS Ventures. The healthcare technology sector has given rise to some of the most innovative startups in the world, which are poised to help people live longer, better lives. The innovations have primarily been driven by the advent of software and mobility, allowing the health sector to digitize many of the pen and paper-based operations and processes that currently slow down service delivery. More recently, we're seeing software become far more intelligent and independent.