Steve Jurvetson has been referred to as "the smartest guy in the room," "the smartest person in Silicon Valley" and a "brainiac," among other laudatory monikers attesting to his prodigious intellect. The Internet is chock full of videos of lectures by and interviews with the venture capitalist, a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They span such topics as rockets and space, Moore's Law, machine learning, synthetic biology, technological innovation, the rich-poor gap and "the democratization of matter." That begins to reflect the breadth of Jurvetson's interests, and also his investments. Over the years, they have included companies that became transformational, from Hotmail (the Web as a platform) to Tesla (automaker as energy company).

With Congress revisiting how Pentagon units share authority under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, the intelligence agencies under the next presidential administration should likewise review their own unity of effort to become more agile and able to integrate, the top Defense intelligence official said Thursday. "The integration of intelligence of the past 15 years is a journey that is not finished," said Marcel Lettre, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, at a banquet for agency and industry professionals in the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance. "I hope the new administration finds clear progress from the last 15 years and takes it on with a mantle of seriousness, or even sees an opportunity to redouble the effort." Lettre, who was sworn in in December to preside over a 17 billion budget, eight components and 110,000 employees, said he also hopes the next administration will "institutionalize and make irreversible" the intelligence community's digital data sharing modernization effort known as the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (pronounced "eyesight"). "Key critical data sets are the coin of the realm for the intel community," he said.

Today on In Case You Missed It: The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot performed surgery on its own (with a human standing by) and turns out, makes such fine, consistent stitches that it actually beats those done by real counterparts. Carnegie Mellon created a wristwatch display and ring system that makes the skin of your forearm a touch pad to interact with the screen. And McDonald's made something called the McTrax placemat in the Netherland's and music folk everywhere want one, asap. We also rounded up the week's big headlines in TL;DR and hope your weekend conversations touch on whether the UAE should build an artificial mountain to get more rain. As always, please share any great tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

Convolutional Neural Networks are great: they recognize things, places and people in your personal photos, signs, people and lights in self-driving cars, crops, forests and traffic in aerial imagery, various anomalies in medical images and all kinds of other useful things. But once in a while these powerful visual recognition models can also be warped for distraction, fun and amusement. In this fun experiment we're going to do just that: We'll take a powerful, 140-million-parameter state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network, feed it 2 million selfies from the internet, and train it to classify good selfies from bad ones. Yeah, I'll do real work. But first, let me tag a #selfie.

The big news on March 12 of this year was of the Go-playing AI-system AlphaGo securing victory against 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol by winning the third straight game of a five-game match in Seoul, Korea. After Deep Blue's victory against chess world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, the game of Go was the next grand challenge for game-playing artificial intelligence. Go has defied the brute-force methods in game-tree search that worked so successfully in chess. In 2012, Communications published a Research Highlight article by Sylvain Gelly et al. on computer Go, which reported that "Programs based on Monte-Carlo tree search now play at human-master levels and are beginning to challenge top professional players." AlphaGo combines tree-search techniques with search-space reduction techniques that use deep learning.

Microsoft has published its latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR), which it does twice a year, covering security issues for the prior six months. This latest edition covers the second half of 2015, analyzing the threat landscape of exploits, vulnerabilities and malware using data from Internet services and over 600 million computers worldwide. It is a massive effort, with dozens of Microsoft staff from different groups contributing. For the first time, they looked at not only PC malware but threats to its Azure cloud service as well, which the company says "reveals how we are leveraging an intelligent security graph to inform how we protect endpoints, better detect attacks and accelerate our response, to help protect our customers." Every day, Microsoft's machine learning systems process more than 10 terabytes of data, including information on over 13 billion logins from hundreds of millions of Microsoft Account users and Azure Active Directory accounts, according to the company.

How close are technologies to simulating or overtaking human intelligence and what are the implications for industry and society?

Over 21 million adults in the United States suffer from impaired vision. Several companies are have been racing to develop wearables and implants that can improve or restore eyesight in these patients. One such wearable vision device, made by Israeli startup OrCam, just got an enthusiastic thumbs up from eye doctors who tested the gadget on 12 legally blind patients. OrCam's little camera device, which clips on to eyeglasses, reads aloud words on labels and signs, and names objects and faces for the wearer. Opthalmologists at the University of California Davis Eye Center published results of their study in the journal JAMA Opthalmology.

I wasn't planning to chip in this time, but I stumbled upon an article so compelling I felt I ought to. Uncanny Valley, published by Anna Weiner on N 1 Magazine, is a short literary piece which lives up to its title. Weiner's nameless narrator is going through most commonplaces of the Valley, both physically and mentally, without really being a part of it. "I learn the bare minimum, code-wise, to be able to do my job well -- to ask questions only when I'm truly in over my head," she confesses. She is going from being the start-up's inaugural customer support rep to become a "success manger", a title so corny for her she can't stand having it on her email signature.

In a blitzkrieg attack that took place over 12 hours in late 2012 and early 2013, criminals stole 45-million (U.S.) from two banks by hacking into credit card processing firms in India and the United States, then withdrawing money from ATMs in 27 countries. "In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and the Internet," New York attorney Loretta Lynch said at a news conference. "Moving as swiftly as data over the Internet … they became a virtual criminal flash mob, going from machine to machine, drawing as much money as they could, before these accounts were shut down." The mob infiltrated credit card processing firms, stole prepaid Visa and MasterCard debit card account numbers issued by the banks in the Middle-East and programmed them with extreme balances. The account numbers were emailed or texted to cohorts on the ground, who used a device to encode the account numbers onto the magnetic stripes of dummy cards.