The British Artificial Intelligence (AI) company DeepMind Technologies, a subsidiary of Google, recently revealed it will be utilizing a blockchain technology. The firm will use a distributed ledger application to better secure patient data. DeepMind is a software firm that builds algorithms for simulations, applications, and gaming protocols. The company is well known for creating a machine learning platform that learns how to play video games. DeepMind has also built a Neural Turing Machine which mimics a human's short-term memory.

Advancement in computers and technology have been incredibly positive for music creators around the globe. You can learn how to produce music on YouTube, purchase the same sample libraries as your favorite composers and create xustpic scores from your laptop, anywhere in the world. As a result, there are more music producers than ever. Computers helping humans create original music has become today's standard, but there are several companies looking to turn the tables on this process. Computer-generated songs are a fast-growing sector of the industry, looking to disrupt creation, licensing and access for musicians and non-musicians alike.

Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank Group Corp., believes that within 30 years, artificial intelligence will be smarter than the human brain. The Wall Street Journal reports that Son made the prediction at Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry's biggest trade show, which is currently being held in Barcelona, Spain. Not only does Son think that super smart robots will outnumber humans in 30 years, but more than a trillion objects will be connected to the internet. "That is why I'm in a hurry to aggregate cash to invest," he said. SoftBank has made quite a few recent deals, including purchasing British microprocessor designer ARM Holdings PLC for $32 billion, as well as U.S. asset manager Fortress Investment Group PLC for $3.3 billion. Son plans to ramp up the research-and-development funding for ARM, which designs the basic architecture for chips in more than 95 percent of smartphones around the world.

Tim Schafer is smiling and shaking hands with a hovering crowd as I sit down next to him. A college student asks if she can talk with him later about his career. A fan thanks him for his work -- a library of iconic video games that stretches back to the early '90s. He takes the time to respond to each of them, encouraging the student and graciously accepting the fan's gratitude before sitting down to walk me through a demo of Full Throttle Remastered, an HD remake of one of his first games. I ask him if it was strange to revisit a game he created over two decades ago.

The Nintendo Switch finally hit the market today, at least for the lucky gamers that either snagged a preorder months ago or waited in line for a handful of units at select retailers. Nintendo's new console is a new idea in the world of video games: it's a portable console some of the time, with dual analog controls on the sides of a tablet device to allow gamers to play titles like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the go. But it can also be loaded into a dock and beamed to a television for a more traditional living room experience. Sellouts are pretty standard for new console launches, but Nintendo still has cause to celebrate. The Switch is earning praise for execution on its basic premise, even if some features are missing at launch.

Each Friday, I embrace the adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words" and hand-select compelling graphics to put important investment news into perspective. All it takes is a quick glance and you'll be up to speed. The company behind popular messaging app Snapchat priced its IPO on Wednesday and began trading yesterday. As Reuters reports, "Investors set aside concerns about its lack of profits and voting rights for a piece of the hottest tech IPO in years." As I previously warned, Snap is hardly a "fist-pounding buy." And let's get real, Reuters.

I once spent a week tailing the band Hanson, three teenage boys who had grown up on an island where the only pop available to them was from Time Life rock'n' roll anthologies, 1957-69. And the music they made reflected it -- their songs were the products of people who had thought deeply about Bobby Darin but had never heard Led Zeppelin or LL Cool J. And sometimes I think about Hanson when I'm sitting down to dinner at Kismet, the new quasi-Middle Eastern restaurant on Los Feliz's southern edge. It's not because the sleek dining room is old-fashioned -- the plant-filled Midcentury Modern groove could not be more present-day Los Angeles -- or because its customers, who all look like recent Wesleyan grads, are anything less than yoga-toned and chic. The menu, surpassingly light and vegetable-intensive, has the carefully layered flavors, the touches of heat, tartness and herbal intensity that we have grown to expect from the best new kitchens. The aesthetic of co-chefs Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, whom you may know from Madcapra in Grand Central Market if not from their former restaurant Glasserie out by Brooklyn's Pulaski Bridge, is up-to-date: the tahini is made with sunflower seeds, the dining room smells of za'atar, and Aleppo pepper flows like water.

Ten years on from its first 1.0 release, OpenCV (Short for Open Computer Vision) is a C library that lets you create software with real-time computer vision. Originally developed in Russia for Intel, it's fully open source and includes machine learning. It's BSD licensed so can be used freely. This is a very large library, with over 200 MB in various DLLs though you can also statically link to it if you prefer. It has several hundred algorithms in C with C, Python, Java and MATLAB interfaces and runs on Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Mac OS.

Now that the world has connected "things," we need to build these devices as truly intelligent in order to create instantaneous and precise results. This means you have to do as much of the processing at the point of entry as you can: at the edge. The killer use cases for IoT are becoming manifest through AI engines on edge devices. An autonomous car has this dual edge/cloud analytics model, producing precise, real-time results. In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Crupi, Vice President and Engineering System Architect at Greenwave Systems, will discuss how as more smart, AI-enabled "things" operate at the edges of our networks, we'll see things moving beyond being connected and into actively embodying intelligence.

Mumbai: Apple will have a 78% market share in Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered hearables, a market which itself will grow over 2500% annually in 2017, a Counterpoint AI Based Wearables Market forecast for calendar year 2017 said Thursday. "Major growth in the segment is driven by the hearable market which includes devices like Apple AirPods, Beats and Bragi Dash. It is a natural path for other competitors to integrate their AI solutions across their own as well as third party wearables," Karn Chauhan, analyst at Counterpoint said. The study added that AI-powered wearables will grow 376% annually in 2017 to reach 60 million units, with AI enabled smartwatches to contribute 42% of the market, encouraging key players in the segment to adopt AI. The report suggested that the growth in wearable and hearable market will be driven by proliferation of Amazon's Alexa into third party hardware from smartwatches such as Martian and hearables like ONvocal with hearables contributing to 50% of the AI-powered wearables in 2017. The research highlighted that activity trackers with AI will witness a growth of 545% in 2017 and will contribute to 4% of the total AI based wearable market.