The ancient strategy game of Go may have met its ultimate match. The brain-taxing board game is a little like an Eastern version of chess, except many times more complex. It has millions of devotees in China, Korea and Japan. Many of them tuned in today to watch an artificial intelligence computer built by Google's DeepMind beat the world champion, Lee Sedol, in the first of a five-game contest. Duels like these don't come often.

The number of sophisticated cognitive technologies that might be capable of cutting into the need for human labor is expanding rapidly. But linking these offerings to an organization's business needs requires a deep understanding of their capabilities. If popular culture is an accurate gauge of what's on the public's mind, it seems everyone has suddenly awakened to the threat of smart machines. Several recent films have featured robots with scary abilities to outthink and manipulate humans. In the economics literature, too, there has been a surge of concern about the potential for soaring unemployment as software becomes increasingly capable of decision making. Yet managers we talk to don't expect to see machines displacing knowledge workers anytime soon -- they expect computing technology to augment rather than replace the work of humans.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 appears to be a much-needed success for the Korean tech giant, and according to estimates, shipments of the said flagship will exceed the company's expectations for the first quarter of 2016, reaching 9 million units up from Samsung's earlier 5.5 million prediction. However, while Samsung appears to have stabilized its smartphone business, market analysts predict that by the end of Q1 2016, the company will register lower operating profits year-on-year in a number of niches, including its semiconductor and consumer electronics sectors. Amid this decline, fresh reports suggest that Samsung intends to expand its product portfolio and focus on new business ventures, including virtual reality, automotive, and artificial intelligence. According to DRAM eXchange research, global LCD TV shipments will show zero increase in 2016 compared to last year. In addition, laptop, PC, and tablet shipments are estimated to decline by 3%, 4%, and 7% respectively, and, in turn, this could mean that Samsung's operating profits for Q1 2016 might decline by 13% in the semiconductor business, and by 63% in the consumer electronics department. Interestingly enough, while Samsung Electronics is expected to register lower operating profits in Q1 2016, the South Korean company is apparently planning to increase its market presence in other segments, including the automotive market and the virtual reality niche.

Rakuten, just like Amazon, is experimenting with drones that can quickly deliver goods to its customers. Unlike Jeff Bezos' company, however, the e-commerce giant is starting small with a service designed for golfers. From May, players at a specific course in Japan's Chiba prefecture will be able to take out their phone and request some new golf balls or refreshments. A Mini Surveyor drone developed by the Autonomous Control Systems Laboratory -- a company from Chiba which Rakuten has now invested in -- will then fly them over from a base station near the course's clubhouse.

Microsoft is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched last week, a company official wrote on Friday, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent Web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

Dell Inc. is selling its Dell Services information technology unit to NTT Data Inc. for just over 3 billion as part of its ongoing reorganization plan. Dell had purchased the business for 3.9 billion in 2009 when it was Perot Systems, founded by billionaire and onetime presidential candidate Ross Perot. The sale comes as privately-held Dell prepares to buy data storage provider EMC for 67 billion and tries to reinvent itself as more than just a personal computer company. That deal was announced in October and was initially targeted to close in the second or third quarter of Dell's fiscal year ending Feb. 3, 2017. Japan-based NTT Data focuses on information technology in the medical field, including medical records and billing.

The network which recently partnered with Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Plug and Play, eyes big growth potential in this space and has already made investments in startups like vPhrase and ConfirmTkt. It is set to announce one more investment in this vertical in the next one month, reports ET. Commenting on the investment plans, Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, President, Venture Catalyst, said, "We believe AI is going to hugely impact all verticals of business and will be critical for those like ecommerce since the algorithms developed by such companies have the power to read data in a much faster and efficient way, impacting business decisions and saving both time and costs." Sharma has already invested in couple of AI startups for example ConfirmTkt which has developed an algorithm to predict whether a ticket booked is likely to be confirmed or not. "Currently all online ticket-booking platforms allow ticket bookings but there is no mechanism to predict whether it will be confirmed or not," Sharma adds further.

This article is a part of an evolving theme. Here, I explain the basics of Deep Learning and how Deep learning algorithms could apply to IoT and Smart city domains. Specifically, as I discuss below, I am interested in complementing Deep learning algorithms using IoT datasets. I elaborate these ideas in the Data Science for Internet of Things program which enables you to work towards being a Data Scientist for the Internet of Things (modelled on the course I teach at Oxford University and UPM – Madrid). Deep learning is often thought of as a set of algorithms that'mimics the brain'. A more accurate description would be an algorithm that'learns in layers'.

On Wednesday afternoon in the South Korean capital, Seoul, Lee Se-dol, the 33-year-old master of the ancient Asian board game Go, will sit down to defend humanity. On the other side of the table will be his opponent: Alphago, a programme built by Google subsidiary DeepMind which became, in October, the first machine to beat a professional human Go player, the European champion Fan Hui. That match proved that Alphago could hold its own against the best; this one will demonstrate whether "the best" have to relinquish that title entirely. Related: Google throws down the gauntlet. But can anyone beat its computer at Go? Lee, who is regularly ranked among the top three players alive, has been a Go professional for 21 years; Alphago won its first such match less than 21 weeks ago.

DEDHAM, MA--(Marketwired - Jan 28, 2016) - Rage Frameworks, a provider of knowledge-based automation technology and services, today announced major additions to its pioneering RAGE AI platform, adding two new powerful frameworks to its suite. RAGE AI significantly extends the frontier of deep learning and machine intelligence technology from "natural language processing" to "natural language understanding." RAGE AI incorporates deep linguistic parsing and proprietary innovations to understand meaning in context, which makes its solutions completely transparent, auditable and flexible. The platform facilitates unsupervised to supervised learning and contains several innovations to support automated knowledge acquisition including pragmatic knowledge. RAGE AI is not a black box and does not rely on statistical patterns present in training data.