U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a conference at Buenos Aires' Town Hall, March 23, 2016. WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that "civilians were killed that shouldn't have been" in past U.S. drone strikes, but said the administration is now "very cautious" about striking where women or children are present. Obama was asked at a news conference about an increase in the number of people targeted in drone strikes against extremists in Libya, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere. "In the past, there was legitimate criticism that the legal architecture around the use of drone strikes wasn't as precise as it should have been," Obama said. "There's no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn't have been."

"Nothing can have value without being an object of utility." Karl Marx Marx's words have unexpected application in the world of commercial technology – essentially the takeaway is that the success of any technology trend or movement can only be proven by how "useful" it proves over time. Let's examine one of the technology trends dominating the airwaves today, Machine Learning, through the lens of "utility". BCC research has predicted that the market for Machine Learning will grow at a compounded annual rate of close to 20% and cross 15 Billion by 2019. Presumably with numbers like that, there's no denying the prevalence of the technology trend – just what kind of utility is it really delivering, though?

Watch DeepMind's program AlphaGo take on the legendary Lee Sedol (9-dan pro), the top Go player of the past decade, in a 1M 5-game challenge match in Seoul. This is the livestream for Match 3 to be played on: 12th March 13:00 KST (local), 04:00 GMT; note for US viewers this is the day before on: 11th March 20:00 PT, 23:00 ET. In October 2015, AlphaGo became the first computer program ever to beat a professional Go player by winning 5-0 against the reigning 3-times European Champion Fan Hui (2-dan pro). That work was featured in a front cover article in the science journal Nature in January 2016.

Artificial intelligence* is developing much faster than we thought. Just last month, Google's DeepMind AI beat Lee Sedol, a legendary Go player, at his own game in a defining moment for the industry. What enabled this win is a relatively new AI technique called deep learning, which is transforming AI. Until deep learning was introduced, even the best AI systems were always highly tuned for specific problems and required many rules to operate successfully. But deep learning has changed that, causing many researchers to abandon classical AI approaches.

A conference dedicated to a versatile computer chip is expected to draw thousands of researchers and hundreds of tech companies to San Jose next week for a look at advances in some of Silicon Valley's hottest technologies. Now in its seventh year, the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference opening Tuesday at the San Jose Convention Center celebrates the graphics processing unit, or GPU, a chip that has become the Swiss Army knife of computing. Some industry observers credit the annual conference for helping spark the research that has led to recent leaps forward in artificial intelligence. Patrick Moorhead, a semiconductor analyst with Moor Insight and Solutions, said that the San Jose Convention Center conference -- now in its seventh year -- became a meeting ground for scientists, academics and developers. "What happened is that once you bring these researchers together in one place and get them focused on this whole notion of using graphics to do a compute engine, they find these new ways to use it. That's exactly what happened," Moorhead said.

Next time you ask Google for directions or run an image search, thank Le Viet Quoc. The 34-year-old Vietnamese engineer is part of the team behind Google Brain, an artificial intelligence (AI) research project whose technology is responsible for such features, reports VnExpress. Part of Google's not-so-secret research outfit X, which pioneers cutting-edge technology like self-driving cars and delivery drones, Quoc works in a field known as "deep learning" which uses the human brain as a model to create "neural networks" for computers. Though deep learning's development has been slow, engineers like Quoc are making progress: in 2012, Google Brain made headlines when its network of 16,000 computer processors successfully learned how to search for cat videos on YouTube, despite being given no information prior to the test on how to identify such animals. The Stanford grad, who holds a doctorate in computer science and was named one of MIT's Innovators Under 35, is still working toward the creation of better, more intelligent machines.

McCann has appointed an artificial intelligence creative director AI-CD?, who will be attending McCann Worldgroup's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1, along with 11 new college graduates. AI-CD? was actually created by the agency under its'Creative Genome Project', the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency's'McCann Millenials taskforce'. The artificial intelligence can give creative direction on commercials because the data that forms the basis of the algorithm includes deconstructed, tagged and analysed TV shows, as well as data on the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commersion Confederation's CM Festival. 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 whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our A.I. employee."

Hyderabad: Computer science focused educational research institute International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Hyderabad is starting a new accelerator focused on technologies such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, augmented reality and virtual reality. These technologies, incidentally, are focused around research areas of the premier educational institute. "The ecosystem around IIIT-Hyderabad should be able to leverage the goldmine of the institute," said Vasudev Varma, dean (research and development) at IIIT-Hyderabad. The model is similar to one in the US where research universities spawn startups centered around technologies they develop. IIIT's accelerator, named Avishkar, will be a six-month program.

In Seoul, South Korea, a Google-created artificial intelligence has been squaring off against a mortal man in the 2,500-year-old strategy game, called Go, that's several orders of magnitude more complicated than chess. When it was finally over, Google's AlphaGo won four out of five matchups, making AlphaGo a role model for young artificial intelligences everywhere. Wired reported that "AlphaGo relies on deep neural networks--networks of hardware and software that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain. With these neural nets, it can learn tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data." That's bad news for SEOs the world over, because Google isn't just using neural nets to beat Koreans at board games, it's also using these advanced networks to make their search results more efficient.

Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have something in common, and it's not wealth or intelligence. They' re all terrified of the AI takeover. Also called the AI apocalypse, the AI takeover is a hypothetical scenario where artificially intelligent machines become the dominant life-form on Earth. It could be that robots rise and become our overlords, or worse, they exterminate mankind and claim Earth as their own. But can the AI Apocalypse really happen?