Beijing, CHINA: A Chinese jobseeker walks pass a poster showing Microsoft founder Bill Gates (L) and Apple computers' Steve Jobs, at an employment fair in Beijing 27 February 2007. This week's milestones in the history of technology include the first patent for aerial photography leading eventually to Google Earth, how Popular Mechanics made Bill Gates drop out of Harvard, and Apple becoming the planet's most valuable company 22 years after going public. Cornele B. Adams is awarded the first US patent for aerial photography. His method of photogrammetry can produce a topographic map by means of photographing the same tract of land from different points from an unmanned stationary balloon on a tether. Keyhole, Inc. launched the Earth Viewer application in 2001 and was acquired by Google in 2004.

Imagine you are into the agricultural sector and want to better the prospects of your farming practices. What if an app in your smartphone could predict the future conditions of weather and market, availability of amount of irrigation water, and at the same time suggest which particular variety of crop will give maximum production in a given land or soil condition? Or let's assume the administrative managers of a city want to have an integrated view of the region's overall performance on the priority areas relevant to the city. This could be grievance management (for instance, in a crisis situation like last year's Chennai floods), operational or financial performance. What if an'intelligent operations centre' allowed them to explore key priority areas in depth and take actions from the solutions provided?

Artificial intelligence came alive in the 80s with many startups, governments, and large enterprises deploying new systems that executed tasks typically performed by human experts. These were largely rule-based systems that encoded behaviors in rules versus the strict procedural logic of traditional programming languages. Then, as memory became more affordable, systems were able to handle much more computationally-intense tasks such as machine learning, planning and scheduling, and natural language understanding. Now in the age of Big Data, many believe AI has completely changed the tech landscape, but in some ways, as the Talking Heads song goes, it's the "same as it ever was". What remains the same are the core elements of an intelligent application.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Fusion, a leading provider of integrated cloud solutions to small, medium and large businesses, is the industry's single source for the cloud. Fusion's advanced, proprietary cloud service platform enables the integration of leading edge solutions in the cloud, including cloud communications, cloud connectivity, and cloud computing. Fusion's innovative, yet proven cloud solutions lower our customers' cost of ownership, and deliver new levels of security, flexibility, scalability, and speed of deployment. For more information, please visit http://www.fusionconnect.com.

Unsecured IoT devices were used to launch crippling DDOS attacks in October 2016, targeting services such as Twitter, Spotify, and GitHub. Subsequent testimony to Congress about potential attacks on office buildings, schools, and hospitals raised the possibility for the IoT to harm and even kill people. Does the government need to intervene? In this power panel at @ThingExpo New York, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, leading IoT and security experts will discuss this very serious topic. Roger Strukhoff is Conference Chair of Cloud Expo @ThingsExpo, and Editor of SYS-CON Media's CloudComputing BigData IoT Journals.

The Internet of Things will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform and how we integrate our thinking to solve complicated problems. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, demonstrated how to move beyond today's coding paradigm and share the must-have mindsets for removing complexity from the development process, accelerate application delivery times, and ensure that developers will become heroes (not bottlenecks) in the IoT revolution. Speaker Bio Craig Sproule is the CEO of Metavine where he is responsible for the company's vision, product development and customer success.

What happens when the different parts of a vehicle become smarter than the vehicle itself? As we move toward the era of smart everything, hundreds of entities in a vehicle that communicate with each other, the vehicle and external systems create a need for identity orchestration so that all entities work as a conglomerate. Much like an orchestra without a conductor, without the ability to secure, control, and connect the link between a vehicle's head unit, devices, and systems and to manage the lifecycle of people, systems and devices, transportation and fleet services are at risk of having connected, yet disparate systems. Fortunately, there are cloud identity solutions available to help securely manage and improve transportation and fleet services. In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Miller, Chief Security Officer at Covisint, discussed five core ways to secure, control, connect, manage, and analyze data, and build applications to integrate the interactions between people, data, systems and things.

An artificial intelligence program has written a Christmas carol. Researchers at the University of Toronto used their "" program to write a Christmas carol based off of a "Christmassy photograph," The Guardian reports. The scientists simply uploaded the photograph into a computer hosting the program and then "let it do its thing." The artificial intelligence program then wrote several lines of lyrics and sang them to music it Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Computer Software Artificial intelligence Google's DeepMind'Lab' opens up source code, joins race to develop artificial general intelligence Following right on its heels came Google's that, its machine learning platform, has created a "lab." The DeepMind Lab offers a 3D training environment, and its entire code library is now available on the open source hosting service GitHub. With Universe, OpenAI aimed to address a primary challenge for AI research, which is a lack of "a large variety of realistic environments [for AI agents to] learn progressively more Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Artificial general intelligence Places: Americas North America United States Microsoft's digital assistant, Cortana, could be getting an upgrade--and Intel may be helping.

Job Title: Senior Software Engineer - NLP & Machine Learning Artigen Corporation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer/Team Lead NOTE: This is a Hands on position, Software Development, Design, Framework, Programming etc. NO OPT, NO Sponsorship, No relocation assistance, Local applicants ONLY, Face-to-face interview required. Artigen is a software development company that intends to specialize in enabling Artificial Intelligence software integration with e-commerce site and back end network operations. We are looking for Senior Team Lead/Software Engineer specifically in the development of software encompassing Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing to develop a virtual agent for Artigen's platform of software and services for Global B2B/B2C clients/customers. The role will develop and mentor a software team dedicated to Ai and cognitive technologies, utilizing existing technologies (such as IBM Watson API, Google's Nuance, Apple's Siri, other open source upcoming platforms such as Viv) and platforms to develop and customize a platform for Artigen's own Ai platform. This role will also require hands-on complex programming in various languages, platforms and must understand and develop machine learning algorithms, data integration and manipulation.

In the west, AI and machine learning startups and tech giants of all stripes have been doing the M&A dance. Google, Apple and the like have been busy snapping up AI/ML startups and according to CB Insights, 30 companies in the space have been acquired since 2011 (five in this year alone). Activity in Asia has been decidedly quieter, with AI research and development mostly happening at the institutional and corporate level. In the region, it seems that Japan, South Korea and China are front runners in terms of AI activity. While Japan's Toyota is putting in $1 billion to ramp up AI research, mainly into autonomous vehicles, the South Korean government is also reportedly injecting $860 million into an AI research institute.