Artificial intelligence is getting bigger and smarter right here in Seattle. The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a sister company to Paul Allen's Institute for Brain Science, plans to hire 25 people in the next year as it prepares to take its Aristo technology to the eighth grade, moving on from teaching it fourth-grade science. The company plans to take over about 6,000 additional square feet of space in its headquarters on North Northlake Way near Gas Works Park and grow its employee ranks, said CEO Oren Etzioni. Etzioni leads the small team of 50 with Chief Operating Officer James Allard, and the executives are preparing for a hiring binge. Artificial intelligence has been all over the news lately, and this time not solely over fears that machines may eliminate people's jobs.

A drone flies Feb. 27, 2015, over Reims, northwestern France. SAN FRANCISCO -- The national group that represents companies that make and sell drones has split, with those focused on consumers leaving to form their own organization. Four drone companies left the Small UAV Coalition on Thursday. While still tightly aligned with the coalition on big issues, the break-away companies plan to create a still-unnamed group to very specifically focus on consumer issues, said GoPro spokesman Jeff Brown. As the drone market matures, a shifting of needs was inevitable. Larger companies such as Amazon's Prime Air, Alphabet's Google X and others are looking more at drones for delivery, cargo and more commercial uses.

Those countless hours spent playing video games might actually help you become a millionaire. Alibaba says its launching a multiple eSports tournaments with a total prize pool of 5.5 million. The e-commerce giant is reviving the World Cyber Games series and will launch 1,200 events this year across 15 cities in China. Alibaba announced its launching multiple eSports tournaments with a total prize pool of 5.5 million. The e-commerce giant is reviving the World Cyber Games series and will launch 1,200 events this year across 15 cities in China.

In February, Microsoft Corp. Vice President Derrick Connell visited the Bing search team in Hyderabad, India, to oversee a Monday morning hackathon. The goal was to build bots--artificial intelligence programs that chat with users to automate things like shopping and customer service. Connell's boss, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, thinks they're the next big thing, a successor to apps. The Bing team was so excited they showed up Sunday night to throw a party and brought their spouses and kids. There was even the Indian version of a piñata.

Every day, the ProgrammableWeb team is busy, updating its three primary directories for APIs, clients (language-specific libraries or SDKs for consuming or providing APIs), and source code samples. If you have new APIs, clients, or source code examples to add to ProgrammableWeb's directories, we offer forms (APIs, Clients, Source Code) for submitting them to our API research team. If there's a listing in one of our directories that you'd like to claim as the owner, please contact us at editor@programmableweb.com. Thirteen APIs have been added to the ProgrammableWeb directory in categories such as Natural Language Processing, Security, and Demographics. One highlight today is the DeepGram API which uses artificial intelligence to recognize speech, search for keywords, and categorize audio and video.

You don't need to be a chemist to make triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the homemade explosive used in the bombs which killed 35 people and injured hundreds more last week in Brussels, according to one expert. Another calls the process "worryingly easy." The recipe can be found on the Internet, the ingredients -- hydrogen peroxide and acetone -- can be found at any drugstore, and can be mixed using regular kitchen equipment. "For the most part, IED components are commercial goods that are not subject to government export licences and whose transfer is far less scrutinised and regulated than the transfer of weapons," said a February report from the London-based Conflict Armament Research group, which traced the origins of more than 700 components recovered from ISIS bomb factories. In an attempt to head off attacks like those in Brussels, Boston, and scores of other places, the United States government has quietly asked the general public -- from credentialed professionals to "skilled hobbyists" -- to find ways of weaponizing "easily purchased, relatively benign technologies."

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.

In today's world of big data and the internet of things, it is common for a business to find itself sitting atop a mountain of data. Possessing it is one thing, but leveraging it for data driven decision making is a much different ball game. Gut-feelings and institutionalized heuristics have traditionally been used to guide development of protocol and decision making, but the world of artificial intelligence and big disparate data is changing that. Everyone is trying to make sense of, and extract value from, their data. Those that are not will be left behind. This challenge (and opportunity) is not limited to certain industries.

Artificial intelligence is on the rise in the world of machine translation. A string of recent news about tech giants bolstering machine translation engines with deep learning underscores just how central integrating deep learning into machine translation products has become for companies like Google and Microsoft. Slator reached out to a representative of Beijing-based Baidu, who is authorized to speak for the company, to get an exclusive look at what the Chinese tech leader has in store for its translation technology. Baidu began R&D on Baidu Translate in 2010, launching the product in June 2011. The company felt that translation was in line with what their search users needed.

The Bank of Russia is using machine learning technology to identify unlicensed money lenders, and the websites hosting them. The technology, developed by Yandex Data Factory, has helped to reveal 2,500 suspicious organisations. The system uses algorithms to search out websites hosting illegal cash loan providers and unregulated financial activity by indexing web pages related to microfinance and consumer loans. Yandex uses keyword analysis across a search index of some seven million web pages related to finance topics. In order to help build the specialised search model, Bank of Russia experts sorted through and categorised 8,000 web pages.