It was a dark, overcast day, with clouds hovering low. The room was kept at the most appropriate temperatures and humidity, as usual. Yoko sat on a couch in an untidy manner, killing time with a silly game. But she would not talk to me. So begins a short story titled "A day when a computer writes fiction."

If you follow me on Snapchat (msuster) you might already know that I've been looking at and investing in a number of companies in the computer vision space. My thesis is that it will become a major I/O computing metaphor or as this field is sometimes referred to HCI (human-computer interaction). Today I am so excited to announce our latest investment in the category -- Nanit -- which is a smart baby monitor. The objective behind Nanit is to help parent "sleep more and monitor less." By using computer vision Nanit is able to better help parents understand how well a child is sleeping and if they're having difficulties what the causes may be (sound, ambient light, temperature or even, gasp, too much parental interference).

The 22nd annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, or "E3" – the world's largest video gaming convention held each June in Los Angeles – once again served as a glimpse into the future of the multibillion dollar interactive entertainment industry. An estimated 50,000 industry-only attendees from more than 100 countries swarmed the Los Angeles Convention Center and surrounding areas to play games not yet commercially available. Another 20,000 fans showed up. While some of the buzz at the show surrounded new hardware, such as Microsoft's surprise announcement of a new console available in 18 months (codenamed "Project Scorpio"), it was the many hundreds of upcoming games that dominated the discussion. Yours truly spent three thumb-numbing days playing tomorrow's titles, and the following are some highlights from my vantage point. Feel free to share the games you're most excited about in the Comments section.

GE unveiled a machine data system for power plants it claims can increase a facility's efficiency of operation by 1.5%, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 3%, and reduce coal consumption by 67,000 tons for each megawatt of electricity produced. GE's Digital Power Plant for Steam suite was introduced at the Minds Machines conference in Paris June 14, where GE executives also revealed the results of a hardware and software upgrade using the technology at the Chivasso power plant in Northern Italy. The plant, run by A2A Group, was restarted in November 2015 after a three-year shutdown. Digital Power Plant for Steam is one of the first application suites to sit atop GE's Predix machine data analytics platform and yield practical, industrial results. The reference to "steam" in the product's name reflects the fact that gas and coal-fired power plants produce steam to drive the turbines that generate electricity used in households and industry in most societies.

As technology advances, we will begin to see huge changes in how our world operates. While all the technologies on this list are already being applied all over the world, many of them are still in their infancy. We stand on the precipice of a new technological age in human history, and while it may not yet be The Jetsons, many of these technologies are even more fantastic than anything we could have predicted. By chemically treating ordinary balsa wood and strengthening it with epoxy, scientists have created a clear, biodegradable material that is 4–6 times stronger than its counterpart that is not chemically treated. Scientists even think that it could be used to make renewable solar cells because the material partially traps light, allowing only about 85–90 percent of light to pass through it.

Web browsers might soon use fuzzy logic to spot redirection spam and save users from being scammed, phished or opening malicious sites unwittingly, according to researchers in India writing in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics. Redirection spam occurs when a user opens a link in an email that leads to an unexpected and often malicious page, or when they open a page that has been hacked or injected with malware, which then redirects to a malicious page. Often the redirection occurs instantaneously and transparently without the user being aware until it is too late and login details or credit card number have been divulged to the criminal third party. Frequently, there will be a malware payload that infects the user's computer at the same time. According to Kanchan Hans of Amity University, in Noida, India, and colleagues, legitimate web page redirections are a ubiquitous part of the web used for server load balancing, link logging and URL rewriting and shortening.

New Delhi: With its new research lab,based outside United States (US), Google is all set to focus on machine learning as a part of its artificial intelligence. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that provides computer with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the new unit called Google Research, Europe is one of largest Google's engineering office outside US. It will be a part of the wider Google Research operation, which includes thousands of people worldwide. The search engine giant made this announcement in its official blogpost where it mentioned that the new group, led by Emmanuel Mogenet will mainly focus on three areas- machine intelligence, natural language processing (NPL) and machine perception.

Honda Motor Co. will open a new artificial intelligence (AI) research center in Tokyo to commercialize self-driving cars in the future. Honda R&D Co., Honda's research and development subsidiary, announced on June 2 that it will establish Honda R&D Innovation Lab Tokyo by around September in Tokyo's Akasaka district. The move came as Japanese auto companies are desperately seeking personnel who specialize in the cutting-edge area. AI is viewed as the core technology to develop futuristic driverless vehicles. Honda already has a research center in the northern Kanto region, but it will set up a new facility in the capital to hire more skilled information technology engineers.

Just as ATMs changed banking and computers took over the home and workplace, robots and artificial intelligence are going to transform a bunch of industries over the next decade. By 2025, a machine may be putting together your driverless car in a factory with no human oversight. A robot maid could be cleaning up after you at home, and your financial advisor might be a computer investing for you automatically. And with at least 90 countries operating unmanned aerial vehicles, the wars of the future may increasingly be fought with "drone" aircraft. These are just some of the interesting -- and sometimes scary -- predictions to come from a 300-page report released by Merrill Lynch in November, which estimates the global market for robots and AI will grow from 28 billion to more than 150 billion just five years from now.

Various land-use configurations are known to have wide-ranging effects on the dynamics of and within other city components including the transportation system. In this work, we particularly focus on the complex relationship between land-use and transport offering an innovative approach to the problem by using land-use features at two differing levels of granularity (the more general land-use sector types and the more granular amenity structures) to evaluate their impact on public transit ridership in both time and space. To quantify the interdependencies, we explored three machine learning models and demonstrate that the decision tree model performs best in terms of overall performance--good predictive accuracy, generality, computational efficiency, and "interpretability". Results also reveal that amenity-related features are better predictors than the more general ones, which suggests that high-resolution geo-information can provide more insights into the dependence of transit ridership on land-use. We then demonstrate how the developed framework can be applied to urban planning for transit-oriented development by exploring practicable scenarios based on Singapore's urban plan toward 2030, which includes the development of "regional centers" (RCs) across the city-state.