"It was magical, it was a moment in history," recalls Joseph Atick of the day in 1994 when the computer he and colleagues at Rockefeller University had built was able to recognize its masters' faces. As each of the three mathematicians introduced themselves, a metallic voice responded, "I see Joseph. Atick, who now chairs an organization that promotes identification technologies, says, "We didn't realize what we'd just done." Fast-forward two decades and picture a talking mannequin that greets a shopper by name as she enters a favorite store, informing her that pants that match the blouse she bought a week earlier have just been marked down. "It's just a matter of time until we start to see this technology reach shopping malls and beyond--it's ready right now," says Werner Goertz, a Gartner analyst who has authored a report on the adoption of facial recognition and other surveillance tools by retailers, casinos, and theme parks.

Recently, BMW mentioned that it would introduce an autonomous car by 2021, called the iNext. The automaker hasn't released much detail about the vehicle, but it will most likely resemble the similar-sounding Vision Next 100 concept vehicle, which the company showed off back in March. At BMW's annual shareholder meeting this month, the company's CEO, Harald Krueger, said, "Our goal is already clearly defined -- to be number one in autonomous driving." But BMW will find plenty of driverless-car competition among its fellow luxury automakers, most specifically from Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler. Daimler is currently a leader in driverless technology among automakers, and it's likely Krueger's mention of autonomous tech is an effort to reassure investors the German automaker isn't falling behind one of its biggest rivals. But which carmaker is leading in driverless tech?

In 2010, IFTF's Ten-Year Forecast suggested that the future is a high-resolution game: Never before has humanity been able to encounter the future in such detail, to measure the forces of change at such vast scales, and to fill in the details with such fine grain. As we play this game, we find ourselves in ever more layered and nuanced futures that often look distinctly different across geographies, across cultures, and even across the various identities each of us claims. More than a fragmented marketplace or a contentious body politic, this future looks like a massively branching game environment where you can win without ever discovering half of the possible pathways--but you can lose by mistaking a clear line of sight for the whole story. As we try to grasp the future of blockchain and other distributed computing technologies, we have to start here, with this high-resolution gamescape where there is no single blockchain future. Rather, we face an ecosystem of futures as complex as the global superorganism that we are actually becoming.

Imagine owning an Amazon Echo, only it was in robot form and could perform tasks like entertaining kids or keeping tabs on seniors. On Tuesday, tech company unveiled the Zenbo home robot, a 599 tech companion capable of roaming your home and assisting users with requests from sharing recipes by voice to controlling the lights or air conditioning. The Zenbo was revealed during the tech conference Computex in Taiwan. "Our ambition is to enable robotic computing for every household," said Asus Chairman Jonney Shih in a statement. The robot's face doubles as a touchscreen users can tap or swipe for a variety of tasks, but it can also respond to voice commands. It also plays music, respond to questions, take pictures or make video calls and even tell stories to kids.

Abstract: Spark is one of the hottest distributed computing engines out there. H2O is an open source, in-memory, scalable machine learning platform aimed at big data which primarily focuses on performance and accuracy.Sparkling Water seamlessly combines the best of those two worlds giving you the ability to munge your data with Spark and analyze it with H2O's world-class analytics.This talk will show both platforms working hand to hand and demonstrate how you can use them to solve real life problems.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is investing in Israeli startup Twiggle to tap its search technology and solidify its lead in Chinese e-commerce, according to people familiar with the matter. The Tel Aviv-based company could help Alibaba improve the quality of online-shopping searches as the e-commerce operator expands in China and abroad, people familiar with matter said, declining to be named because the matter is private. The startup will get 5 million to 10 million from Alibaba, one of the people said. Refining search technology has proven pivotal to shopping services like Amazon.com Inc. Twiggle, led by former Google Inc. executives Amir Konigsberg and Adi Avidor, uses machine learning and natural language processing to guess what shoppers are after. When users search for the "best laptop," Twiggle will try to understand what that means: such as highest screen resolution, most memory, longest battery life and so on.

The Taiwanese electronics manufacture Asus has unveiled a home robot called Zenbo that can talk, control your home and provide assistance when needed – all for the cost of a top-end smartphone. It is capable of independent movement, can respond to voice commands and has both entertainment protocols for keeping kids amused and home care systems to help look after older people. Jonney Shih, the Asus chairman, said: "For decades, humans have dreamed of owning such a companion: one that is smart, dear to our hearts, and always at our disposal. Our ambition is to enable robotic computing for every household." Zenbo will remind older people of doctor's appointments or medication schedules, and will monitor the home for emergency situations such as falls.

This report is my final project for the MIT Media Lab Class "Integrative Theories of Mind and Cognition" (also known as Future of AI, and New Destinations in Artificial Intelligence) in Spring 2016. Artificial Intelligence performs gradient descent. The AI field discovers a path of success, and then travels that path until progress stops (when a local minimum is reached). Then, the field resets and chooses a new path, thus repeating the process. If this trend continues, AI should soon reach a local minimum, causing the next AI winter. However, recent methods provide an opportunity to escape the local minimum. To continue recent success, it is necessary to compare the current progress to all prior progress in AI. I begin this paper by pointing out a concerning pattern in the field of AI and describing how it can be useful to model the field's behavior. The paper is then divided into two main sections. In the first section of this paper, I argue that the field of artificial intelligence, itself, has been performing gradient descent. I catalog a repeating trend in the field: a string of successes, followed by a sudden crash, followed by a change in direction. In the second section, I describe steps that should be taken to prevent the current trends from falling into a local minimum. I present a number of examples from the past that deep learning techniques are currently unable to accomplish. Finally, I summarize my findings and conclude by reiterating the use of the gradient descent model.

TAIPEI, TAIWAN--(Marketwired - May 31, 2016) - Computex - NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) won big at the Computex Best Choice Awards, with the NVIDIA Tesla M40 GPU and NVIDIA Jetson TX1 module hauling in Gold Awards and the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV clinching a Category Award. Garnering these three prestigious awards extends the company's winning streak -- the longest of any international Computex exhibitor -- to eight consecutive years. Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen will hand out the awards. The Best Choice Awards, established in 2002, honor innovation, functionality and market potential. The Gold Award-winning NVIDIA Tesla M40 GPU is the world's fastest deep learning training accelerator.

I've said before that Computex is ASUS' show -- and what better demonstration than having the recently-elected President of Taiwan "talk" to your newly announced home robot? Crowd noise necessitated several repeated commands to ASUS' Zenbo play some music, but if it was apparently a live demonstration (ASUS' PR affirmed to our Engadget Chinese colleagues that it was), then it's pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the Zenbo's SOS "lifesaving" feature failed in the midst of the trade show chaos. Check out the successful part of the interaction between world leader and... 600 house robot, right after the break.