Of all the big firms in Silicon Valley, Amazon had the most to lose from Donald Trump's presidency. And lose it did, albeit briefly, its share price dropping 5% shortly after the election. During the campaign, Trump warned that Amazon had a "huge antitrust problem" – a reasonable stance for the populist that he once aspired to be. Most likely, though, his animosity had more to do with the fact Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post, an influential newspaper that took an early strong dislike of Trump. By the time of Amazon's massive cloud-computing conference, which kicked off in Las Vegas at the end of November, such squabbles seem to have been forgotten.

On Friday the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its November jobs report, announcing that the unemployment rate had dropped to 4.6%, the lowest it's been since August 2007. According to this measure, the U.S. economy is at or very close to full employment. The White House touted the news, highlighting that U.S. businesses created 178,000 jobs in November and 15.6 million since early 2010. To some, the economy is returning to its pre-recession strength. To others, the unemployment rate is a poor gauge of economic health.

In July 2013, an up-and-coming artist had an exhibition at the Galerie Oberkampf in Paris. It lasted for a week, was attended by the public, received press coverage, and featured works produced over a number of years, including some created on the spot in the gallery. Altogether, it was a fairly typical art-world event. The only unusual feature was that the artist in question was a computer program known as "The Painting Fool." Even that was not such a novelty.

The deep penetration of internet among users in India has paved way for digitization. Digital platforms are leveraging new age technologies such as AI to make lives easier and enriching. Parenting too has joined the digital/ AI bandwagon. Today there are several apps that have implemented AI to help parents nurture and groom their children. This was a much needed revolution in assisting parents to understand the needs and psychology of their children. It guides them throughout the parental journey and helps in develop a mutual understanding that results in healthy relationships within the family.

Up until very recently, computers needed a complicated and extremely precise set of instructions in order to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. Who among us remembers programming via punch cards? Computer programming languages have evolved over the years, but the biggest step has been moving towards the elimination of complicated programming. In other words, teaching computers to learn for themselves, dubbed machine learning. Because machine learning is such a promising leap forward in technological ability, it has the very real potential to affect every person in every field of business in the near future.

In 1994, long before the celebrated video-game designer Fumito Ueda went to work for Sony, he took part in a competition that the company sponsored for young artists. Having made it through the opening rounds, Ueda, then a recent graduate of the Osaka University of Arts, used the thousand-dollar allowance Sony gave him to create an installation in a shopping complex in Yokohama. He set up a small cage, the kind a pet owner might buy for a parakeet, and filled it with mounds of soil. Then he cut claw marks into the bars and positioned a sign in front of the cage explaining that it was home to a subterranean cat. Whenever a mall-goer approached, Ueda, observing from nearby, would push a button on a remote control, activating a pair of motors that kicked dirt into the onlooker's face.

It's generating a great deal of interest, getting substantial backing from venture capitalists and even being billed as a must-have addition to the cyber-security arsenal. The idea of machine learning has been around for many years but today's realisations differ radically from earlier technologies. In simple terms machine learning software has no programmed-in knowledge about the domain to which it is to be applied but gains that knowledge by being taught. For example if you want to develop a machine-learning based optical character recognition system you feed it with many images of letters of the alphabet and you tell it "this is an'A' this is a'B'" and so on. Given sufficient data correctly identified, it will get very good at optical character recognition.

He described what it would be like for Washington to witness the technology of our time: cars, airplanes, the international space station. You could tell him about the large hadron collider and the theory of relativity, said Urban, and play him music that was recorded 50 years ago. "And this is all before he's seen the internet," said Urban, "the magical wizard rectangle in my pocket that can do a trillion crazy levels of sorcery, like pull open a map that can show where we are on it with a paranormal blue dot." Or let you hold a conversation with someone in Japan, on the other side of the world.

MIT's machine learning system helps understand how humans recognise faces Top Go players from Japan, China, S. Korea to compete against AI Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

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