People often ask how we've been able to learn about and cover so many different and diverse topics in machine learning (using at least three different programming languages - Python, Matlab, and R) and generally achieve such prominence in the community, all this in a relatively short time. Today we finally give a definitive answer. There's no Zygmunt the Polish economist ever willing to relocate to San Francisco. And the "we" that we always use in the posts is not majestic plural. We are three Chinese PhD students: Ah, Hai and Wang.

As cloud computing continues to disrupt traditional business models and big data continues to grow exponentially, techies and investors alike are looking for the top trends that will change how we do business in 2016 and beyond. Hybrid and public cloud services continue to rise in popularity, with investors claiming their stakes. Venture capital firms are investing most heavily in SaaS companies, proving that cloud solutions will be even more lucrative in the future. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! While some have doubted Dropbox's ability to go public based on its 10 billion valuation, the fact that this leading SaaS company has raised 1.1 billion in six rounds of funding is pretty impressive.

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week, MIT researchers presented a new chip designed specifically to implement neural networks. It is 10 times as efficient as a mobile GPU, so it could enable mobile devices to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms locally, rather than uploading data to the Internet for processing. Neural nets were widely studied in the early days of artificial-intelligence research, but by the 1970s, they'd fallen out of favor. In the past decade, however, they've enjoyed a revival, under the name "deep learning." "Deep learning is useful for many applications, such as object recognition, speech, face detection," says Vivienne Sze, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT whose group developed the new chip.

The China Computer Go team could throw down the gauntlet to the Anglo-American program at the end of 2016. The news emerged on Thursday, during a Beijing event organized by the Chinese Go Association and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. Predictably, AlphaGo, which won a game against professional South Korean player Lee Sedol in March, was the main topic of discussion at the event. The victory of the computer, a brainchild of UK company DeepMind, came as a shock for many computer science experts, who thought the current state of AI technology would not be up to the task of beating a top-class Go player. Coincidentally, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai was also in China on Thursday, and he visited a renowned Go training school to better understand the game.

At the end of the fifth and final match, Lee Sedol sat back quietly in his chair in a conference room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul as the collected computer scientists celebrated around him. Lee, second only to fellow South Korean Lee Chang-Ho in international titles in the ancient Chinese board game of Go, put up a valiant fight against the machine, AlphaGo, created by Google's DeepMind division. AlphaGo had erred early on, but recovered to overpower the human and win the series four to one. Board games have been used since the early days of artificial intelligence research as ways to measure progress -- IBM's Deep Blue famously beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in New York in 1997 -- and AlphaGo's victory marks another significant milestone in the advancement of the technology. Go presents a far greater challenge to AI than chess.

Ad agency McCann Japan has appointed an artificial intelligence creative director who has the capacity to give creative direction on real client accounts. The AI, AI-CD?, will be in attendance at McCann Worldgroup's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1, along with 11 new college graduates. According to a report from The Drum, AI-CD? was crafted by the agency under its'Creative Genome Project', the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency's'McCann Millennials taskforce'. The McCann Japan creation will be the first logic-based creative assistant that's based off the historical success of TV ads, and has been built to respond to a product or message with the top commercial guidance based on previous data. The AI has also been designed so that it can analyse the results of campaigns it's directed in order to make it a more effective AI creative director. President & CEO of McCann Japan, Yasuyuki Katagi said, "Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we're very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ß for the future of ad creation.

The geographic expansion raised probably the most excitement: Google has committed to add two additional data centers this year to the current 3, following by yet another 10 new datacenters in 2017. This will be an impressive geographical coverage ramp up in two years, and will act as genuine competition against the other big providers. It looks like Google has a well cooked "recipe" for building cloud data centers, and in fact they have not kept this as a secret to themselves, but released it for public consumption with all the standard best practises, along with other papers such as its highly scalable network load balancer design. While the platform is geographically expanding, the focus is also on technology innovations and the Google team are releasing Machine Learning and Big Data offerings one after the other at a fast pace. Nowadays, Machine Learning (ML) is playing a key role in all aspects of IT, including the operating data centers (according to Google). Machine Learning services have been around for a while: Google's Prediction API is available since 2011 and was probably among the first ones to publish ML services in the cloud.

China's search engine giant Baidu launched a project to bring scientists and sci-fi writers to collaborate on imaginative research on Friday. The project, named the Verne Institute after French writer Jules Verne, aims to blend wild imagination and solid science to bring more possibilities, Zhang Yaqin, president of Baidu, told Xinhua in an email interview on Friday. Verne famously said "Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real." Baidu chose to launch the project on April Fool's Day for a sense of contrast to underline the reality of it, Liu Chun with the company's marketing department said. Bridging science and sci-fi may be new in China but is a common way of collaboration elsewhere in the world, Zhang said.

Quoc Le, a software engineer at Google Brain, is one such human. Google Brain focuses on "deep learning," a part of artificial intelligence. Think of it as a sophisticated type of machine learning, which is the science of getting computers to learn from data. Deep learning uses multiple layers of algorithms, called neural networks, to process images, text and sentiments quickly and efficiently. The idea is for machines to eventually be able to make decisions as humans do.

"Facing AlphaGo, I do not feel the same strong instinct of victory when I play a human player, but I still believe I have the advantage against it," he told state news agency Xinhua. Mr Ke has beaten 33-year-old Mr Lee eight times over ten matches between the pair, with two of his victories over the world number four coming earlier this year. Go Fans watch a TV screen showing the live broadcast of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match at Yongsan Electronic Technology Land in Seoul, South Korea, as Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo beat top-class South Korean Go player Lee Se-dol in the ancient board game Go. But another Chinese media outlet said Mr Ke had earlier said he was not interested in facing off against the programme in the complex strategy game because he did not want it to copy his own world-beating tactics. "I don't want to compete with AlphaGo because judging from its matches with Lee, AlphaGo is weaker than me," he told Shanghai-based thepaper.cn.