April 02--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.

I went to school in Cambridge University in England, then went to Stanford to do my master's around 2000. I met up with Sergey Brin around then when Google was a tiny company and he invited me to join Google. So I started working part-time for Google. It was a fantastic time at the company--200 people, one building, and bright, idealistic, change-the-world kind of people. Naturally, when I finished my master's I joined full-time.

Microsoft's intelligent chatbot Tay behaved badly last week (and this week too), but that shouldn't have shocked any of us. Flaws are what make us who we are as people -- they define us. So it's a bit of a double standard that we seem to expect no imperfections when we design human characteristics into machines. Microsoft's chatbot fiasco should have been predictable. If you put a child into a racist family, you cannot be too surprised with how they grow up.

What you're seeing here is not a professionally made piece of robotics to be used in an upcoming Hollywood movie, nor is it a detailed prop used to showcase some new AI program. This is a home-made robot, built from scratch, by a Hong Kong man over the last year and a half. It is clearly made to resemble the actress Scarlett Johansson, even though the maker won't directly say so, something that only contributes to the fact that it is creepy as hell. It features limited movement abilities, and can speak using canned phrases (with a voice that definitely does not resemble Johansson's). And in case you're wondering, no, the humanoid robot was not built to meet, ahem, personal needs.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Artificial intelligence is going bananas right now. Google made headlines with it huge victory in the ancient game of Go a few weeks ago. And AI is entering into the marketplace at a historic rate, changing industries as complex as Wall Street in the process. Apps like SwiftKey put AI in our pockets to help us sort out the patterns of human language When most people think of artificial intelligence, they think of Cylons, or Terminators, or HAL-sentient robots who turn on their masters in an effort to destroy the human race. If you're a Wall Street trader, you'll want to be extra careful about what you say on calls and in emails going forward.

She was supposed to come off as a normal teenage girl. But less than a day after her debut on Twitter, Microsoft's chatbot--an AI system called "Tay.ai"--unexpectedly turned into a Hitler-loving, feminist-bashing troll. TechRepublic turns to the AI experts for insight into what happened and how we can learn from it. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing.

In 2001, the White House concluded that it was legal to use armed drones to kill senior al-Qaeda leaders. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, then-US President George W Bush signed off on an order which authorised the Central Intelligency Agency (CIA) to capture and kill al-Qaeda operatives. For some, drones are the greatest weapon ever to be developed by the CIA; for others, they present a constant, deadly and terrifying threat. I thought it was the coolest damn thing in the world. I was like'Oh man, I get to play a video game all day!'

Second in a series of two articles about the history of signature-based detections and how the methodology has evolved to identify different types of cybersecurity threats. Many security vendors are now applying increasingly sophisticated machine learning elements into their cloud-based analysis and classification systems, and into their products. All of these techniques have already proven their value in Internet search, targeted advertising and social networking business arenas. For example, supervised learning models lie at the heart of ensuring that the best and most applicable results are returned when searching for the phrase "never going to give you up." In the information security world, supervised learning models are a natural progression of the one, two, and multi-dimensional signature systems discussed in my earlier article.

Everyone on the internet had a great time with Tay, Microsoft's Twitter robot that became a racist Holocaust denier in a matter of a few hours (then came back and did it again). The company had created a public relations flap -- more incident than a disaster -- while giving the public an object lesson on the pros and cons of machine learning: Automation can harness patterns to fascinating effect at speed, but the results will be predictably hard to predict. As is often the case, the military is an early adopter of automation technology. It is -- at one time -- leading the charge toward machine learning and also trying desperately to keep up. One of the main areas of focus for the Pentagon is autonomous robots and how they will team with humans – a R2D2-style robot wingman, for instance. But this week, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work outlined another task for A.I.: open-source data crunching.

A look at a Penrose Studio VR short called "The Rose and I" and its cross-platform differences. Great read for VR developers interested in seeing what's coming. Here is a brilliant guide on how to stream mixed reality by the guys who know it best -- the Fantastic Contraption team! Now this is very neat! Mike Harris combined the Leap Motion draw and scale utilities from Orion into a neat demo.