Editor's note: This is one in a series of profiles of five finalists for NVIDIA's 2016 Global Impact Award, which provides 150,000 to researchers using NVIDIA technology for groundbreaking work that addresses social, humanitarian and environmental problems. Eradicating worldwide poverty by 2030 is the top goal on the United Nations' sustainable development agenda, published late last year. But a lack of data has frustrated efforts to measure progress toward the goal. Most of those living in extreme poverty are in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, where accurate poverty data is scarce. A small team at Stanford University is changing that, one satellite image at a time.

A computer program has defeated a master of the ancient Chinese game of Go, achieving one of the loftiest of the Grand Challenges of AI at least a decade earlier than anyone had thought possible. The programmers, at Google's Deep Mind laboratory, in London, write in today's issue of Nature that their program AlphaGo defeated Fan Hui, the European Go champion, 5 games to nil, in a match held last October in the company's offices. Earlier, the program had won 494 out of 495 games against the best rival Go programs. AlphaGo's creators now hope to seal their victory at a 5-game match against Lee Se-dol, the best Go player in the world. That match, for a 1 million prize fund, is scheduled to take place in March in Seoul, South Korea.

According to the United Nations (UN), more than 12 million people--including 5.6 million children--have fled Syria to escape the horrors of the country's ongoing civil war and invasion by ISIS. Worldwide, the UN reports an unprecedented 59.5 million people are displaced by crisis. The flow of refugees toward Europe from Syria and other war-torn nations has caused the continent's greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Finland-based Lucify, which creates interactive data visualizations to help organizations analyze and communicate important data, recently tackled the refugee migration to Europe. Using UN data from 2012 through December 2015, its interactive map offers a time-lapse view of refugee migration and country-by-country statistics.

Shares of International Business Machines (IBM) are up 3.50, or 2.4%, at 151.91, after Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty this morning reiterated an Overweight rating on the shares, and jacked her price target to 168 from 140, while she now thinks the most bullish scenario for the company could see the stock soar to 195. A lot of that depends on sentiment turning among skeptical investors, she notes: That upside scenario to 195 is predicated on the prospect that "investors begin to recognize IBM's competitive lead in Strategic Imperatives, particularly Watson." The main contention Huberty makes is that Watson, the company's artificial intelligence service, is going to double the number of customers it has this year, and that "after aggressive hiring and an estimated 5B in data acquisitions over just the past two quarters, IBM is beginning to show a path toward revenue monetization in Watson." Huberty doesn't project any financials for Watson, but she has been keeping a list of the customers that have signed up for the service, names such as Japan's SoftBank (9984JP) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which give her confidence the company can make real money off of many sectors of the economy such as healthcare: From a top-down perspective, we see Watson as similar (though even more disruptive) to ERP which initially helped address human inefficiencies in business much like Watson. ERP has grown into a 150B market including software, hardware, and services and we see that as a conservative estimate for cognitive computing with IBM Watson the likely share leader.

So he and his business partner, Dan Roth, decided to create a program that would help lawyers manage electronic documents for litigation. Their idea led them to purchase an e-discovery application. By 2000, Leib and his partner launched their own creation, Discovery Cracker. "We saw a gap in the marketplace," Leib says. Lawyers need tools to keep up with it." Instead of wading through piles of paper, lawyers now deal with terabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of documents. E-discovery, legal research and document review are more sophisticated due to the abundance of data. So while working as chief strategy officer at kCura in Chicago, Leib saw a need again in the market. "For years, lawyers have been stuck with antiquated tools that focus primarily … on Boolean search. Better tools are needed to truly understand data." "What is the future of the industry?

New Delhi: Accenture Operations, the 7-billion business segment of technology firm Accenture Plc, which deals with process outsourcing, infrastructure consulting and outsourcing, security and cloud services, is betting on automation platforms backed by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for its next phase of growth, said Manish Sharma, senior managing director, Accenture Operations in an interview earlier this week. "Analytics and automation are critical and are high-focus areas for us. We are using automation technologies at scale for our client base," he said. "We are investing a lot of money and time into the AI piece. In automation, there is simple automation like Mini-Bots and then there is high-end automation solutions like Virtual Assistance and artificial or cognitive solutions," he explained.

In the growing race to emerge the leader in self-driving technology, Yamaha hopes the third time is the charm as it attempts to break into the car market and to incorporate self-driving technology into motorcycles. However, the firm's CEO acknowledges that it will most likely take close to a decade to bring the autonomous technology to two-wheelers on a commercial basis. Yamaha launched these efforts with moderate investments of near 20 million in Silicon Valley, where it established a company last summer, in order to discover the latest technologies in autonomous vehicles, robotics and drones. It invested 2 million in a US startup, Veniam, back in February, attracted by the startup's connected vehicle expertise. "It's not a sense of crisis, but I want to make sure we stay ahead of the race," CEO Hiroyuki Yanagi explained.

A team from China plans to challenge Google's AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence (AI) programme that beat a world-class player in the ancient board game Go, the state-owned Shanghai Securities News reported on Thursday. Scientists from the China Computer Go team will issue a challenge to AlphaGo by the end of 2016, said attendees at an event in Beijing organised by the Chinese Go Association and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, according to the report. It did not elaborate on the nature of the challenge. Scientists from the China Computer Go team will issue a challenge to AlphaGo by the end of 2016, said attendees at an event in Beijing. Google's AlphaGo computer recently beat champion Lee Sedol (pictured right) 4-1 in a 1milllion ( 706,388) challenge. The first game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952.

Robotic systems and unmanned vehicles are playing an ever-growing role in the US military - but don't expect to see Terminator-style droids striding across the battlefield just yet. A top Pentagon official on Wednesday gave a tantalizing peek into several projects that not long ago were the stuff of science fiction, including missile-dodging satellites, self-flying F-16 fighters and robot naval fleets. Though the Pentagon is not planning to build devices that can kill without human input, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work hinted that could change if enemies with fewer qualms create such machines. 'We might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are, and as that competition unfolds we will have to make decisions on how we best can compete,' he said. Work, who helps lead Pentagon efforts to ensure the US military keeps its technological edge, described several initiatives, including one dubbed'Loyal Wingman' that would see the Air Force convert an F-16 warplane into a semi-autonomous and unmanned fighter that flies alongside a manned F-35 jet.

Child care is a hard job, but somebody, or something, has got to do it. Japanese researchers have developed androids to meet that need, which includes happily reading that fairy tale again and again and again. The androids, which were created by a team of education and robotics specialists at a research facility in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, are part of a larger system called RoHo Care. Short for Robotic Hoikujo (day care center), RoHo is being touted as a high-tech solution to the staffing crisis that forced the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry to announce emergency measures this week. "I never thought I'd see this day, but we're now confident that RoHo could blaze a trail for child care worldwide," said team leader Makoto Hara.