In recent times, computation has become both pervasive and less constrained by Moore's Law. This is due in large part to the emergence of cloud computing and the rise of massive parallelism. The former has benefited from network improvements and ever increasing connectedness, the latter from the appropriation of hardware like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for general purpose computing. This computational leap, coupled with the process of disintermediation [1] taking place around the globe will continue to support revolutions like artificial intelligence (AI), as many have remarked. AI has a long and interesting history.

Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has plans to colonize Mars, and thinks AI may turn humans into its pets. But beyond the hype and his enormous net worth and Twitter presence, here's how Musk's companies are actually taking on ... virtually every industry. Elon Musk thinks and acts on a larger, more cosmic scale than we're accustomed to from entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has become a household name synonymous with the future. Whether he's working on electric vehicles (Tesla) or sending rockets into space (SpaceX), his larger-than-life reputation attracts its fair share of hero-worship. Musk can get a hundred breathless reporters to write about him and his companies with little more than a concept drawing and a tweet. His main projects take on almost every major industry and global problem conceivable, and imagine a disruptive fundamental rewiring of that space or sector. Whether he can deliver on his vast promises is often beside the point. And Musk himself is more than happy to feed into this hype machine. We've decided to take a different kind of look into the Musk ecosystem. Rather than assess Elon Musk and his companies on promises and hype, we wanted to look at the ways in which his companies are or are not transforming the industries in which they live -- with numbers, hard evidence, and concrete demonstrations of disruption. Read on for a deep dive into just how the money, invention, and ingenuity of Elon Musk and his companies are transforming these vital industries. First with SolarCity and now with Tesla, eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels and instead drawing energy from the "giant fusion reactor in the sky" aka the sun has been one of Musk's priorities for more than a decade. SolarCity, his first attempt to make solar power mainstream and ubiquitous, was at the forefront of the early 2000s "solar gold rush." In some ways it was a failure, but it remains important to understand its trajectory to understand how Musk and Tesla plan to take on the problem of renewable energy. SolarCity grew to become the country's largest provider of residential solar, then suffered some very public financial problems before being purchased by Musk's other company, Tesla, for $2 billion. That 2016 acquisition was controversial, with many observers calling it a "thinly veiled bailout." And yet Tesla's continuation of SolarCity's work has helped make a stronger case for solar than SolarCity was ever able to make on its own. Elon Musk originally suggested the concept for the company that became SolarCity to his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, in 2004. The concept for SolarCity emerged out of a simple realization: the clock was running low on fossil fuels. The need for a replacement was emerging fast. "If they started now," as Men's Journal reports Musk telling Lyndon in 2004, "They might rule the market."

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- An artificial intelligence (AI) robot made by a British university has become a big hero after it helped scientists find a malaria killer in a common toothpaste ingredient, a new study revealed Thursday. Scientists at the university of Cambridge in Britain used the "Robot Scientist," Eve, in a high-throughput screen and discovered that triclosan, an ingredient found in many toothpastes, may help fight against strains of a malaria parasite that have grown resistant to one of the currently-used drugs to treat the disease. The findings of the study by the Cambridge researchers were published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday. With the help of the AI-powered Eve, the researchers discovered that triclosan inhibits the spread of a kind of enzyme of the malaria parasite, called DHFR, thus stopping the growth of the parasite in the blood. The discovery challenged a previous assumption that triclosan inhibits the growth in culture of the malaria parasite Plasmodium during the blood-stage, because it is targeting an enzyme known as enoyl reductase (ENR) found in the liver.

The discussion of sexual assault and harassment are all the more paramount in an era dominated by the #MeToo and Times Up movement, but now there is a mobile dating application that is working towards making such complaints a thing of the past. Enter "Yes to Sex," a dating app created in 2016 that requests for an explicit sexual consent agreement to be made between both parties. The app, which is available for download through Apple's App Store and Google Play, requires users to verbalize the words "yes" or "no" before engaging in sexual relations with another user. The entire process is expected to take no more than 25 seconds, Yes to Sex's website claimed. "The media talking about consent is the first step in the right direction of making it the norm to verbally ask a potential partner straight-up every time, if they are interested," Wendy Geller, the app's president, CEO and inventor, told International Business Times.

Spark lets you apply machine learning techniques to data in real time, giving users immediate machine-learning based insights based on what's happening right now. Using Spark, we can create machine learning models and programs that are distributed and much faster compared to standard machine learning toolkits such as R or Python. In this course, you'll learn how to use the Spark MLlib. You'll find out about the supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms. You'll build classifications models, extracting proper futures from text using Word2Vect to achieve this.

The government wants to establish a leading position in Europe as a tech finance and AI leader, with the news that it will strengthen links with France in the tech and artificial intelligence sectors. The cross channel collaboration has seen both countries agree to a digital conference later this year to promote deeper integration in the digital economy. It comes as the UK undertakes a charm offensive with the French in an effort to gain its support for a positive Brexit deal. For many years now the United Kingdom has been the top country in Europe for global tech investors. Indeed, its tech firms have attracted more venture capital funding than any other European country in 2017.

Flying a drone isn't as easy as it looks, as any beginner who has ever purchased one of the pricey things and then immediately crashed it can attest. A startup called MotionPilot wants to help beginners and pros alike with a joystick that makes it more intuitive and tactile at the same time. The device, still in a prototype stage, has motion sensors that let you maneuver a drone just by rotating and tilting your hand, while haptics let you feel it turn and accelerate. MotionPilot, founded by four grad students from France's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL), says the joystick's hand gesture control are so intuitive that beginning pilots can learn to fly "in a few seconds." To maneuver, you just lean the device forward or sideways, while using a trigger to change altitude.

By December, more than 6,985 stores closed across the US, according to retail think-tank Fung Global Retail & Technology. It also beats the previous all-time high of 6,163 store closings that took place during the 2008 financial crisis, according to estimates by Credit Suisse. The reality is that many stores are closing for the same reason they've always closed -- they simply don't meet the needs and demands of customers. But at a time when consumers are empowered with choice and market conditions are increasingly volatile, new technologies can help brands and retailers drive valuable business efficiencies, and improve the overall customer experience and value proposition. "The biggest upside to technology in fashion will be the ability to offer consistency, and being able to personalise the customer's shopping patterns," said Robert Burke, chief executive of retail consultancy firm Robert Burke Associates.

At less than 10 days old, Blizzard Entertainment's "Overwatch League" (OWL) is already making an impact on online entertainment. According to statistics shared Thursday by YouPorn, one of the biggest porn sites in the world, the inaugural day of "OWL" on Jan. 11 saw the website experiencing a rather sudden 9 percent dip in its traffic from around the world, just about the time the eSports league began. The 9 percent drop in the portal's traffic sustained till the end of the third OWL game; the porn site experienced lower traffic levels than normal for the entire first week of the league's broadcasts. OWL, on the other hand, experienced 415,000 concurrent viewers on the opening night on its English, Korean and French streams combined. It managed over 10 million viewers in its opening week.

The rapidly advancing area of artificial intelligence will require a new field of law and new regulations governing a growing pool of businesses involved, according to Microsoft Corp., a 25-year participant in AI research. Companies making and selling AI software will need to be held responsible for potential harm caused by "unreasonable practices" – if a self-driving car program is set up in an unsafe manner that causes injury or death, for example, Microsoft said. And as AI and automation boost the number of laborers in the gig-economy or on-demand jobs, Microsoft said technology companies need to take responsibility and advocate for protections and benefits for workers, rather than passing the buck by claiming to be just the technology platform'' enabling all this change. Microsoft broaches these ideas in a 149-page book entitled "The Future Computed," which will also be the subject of a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, next week. As Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft seeks to be a leader in AI and automating work tasks, it's also trying to get out in front of the challenges expected to arise from promising new technologies, such as job losses and everyday citizens who may be hurt or disadvantaged by malfunctioning or biased algorithms.