A company can have the best technology in the world. It can have the strongest talent. It can have the coolest product ideas. But to train the algorithms that will deliver the intelligence to transform our cities, it needs data. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. That's why earlier this year, after leaving Microsoft the previous fall, legendary engineer Qi Lu headed to Beijing to become Baidu's chief operating officer. At his former job, he was, among other things, CEO Satya Nadella's top deputy in helping to lead the company's AI strategy. Clearly, he saw more opportunity across the Pacific: In China, 731 million people--nearly twice the entire population of the United States--are online.

An Irish veterinarian's application for an Australian visa has been rejected after she failed to pass an automated English proficiency test, despite completing it in her native language of... English. Louise Kennedy, who has two degrees (both obtained in English), wanted to apply for permanent residency in the country on the grounds of her job, which is classed as a shortage profession. Despite acing the reading and writing parts of the test she didn't score highly enough on oral fluency, as it seems the machines couldn't understand her accent. The Pearson Test of English (PTE) Academic is an automated system that asks applicants a number of questions and records their vocal responses which are analyzed and scored. The Australian government demands a score of at least 79 points.

Could health apps and chatbots eventually replace your traditional doctor? "Let's talk about how you've been feeling over the past 30 days," says Joy. "This will help me get a sense for your current state." Joy probes a bit deeper, asking a series of questions: Do I feel hopeless? When I respond that I'm a bit stressed, Joy offers me several de-stressing techniques. Joy might appear to be my counsellor or my life coach, but the conversation I'm having is actually with a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to track emotions and provide mental health support - all through Facebook Messenger.

It was a rough weekend at Google. On Friday, a 10-page memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" started circulating on the company's internal networks, arguing that the disparities between men and women in tech and leadership roles were rooted in biology, not bias. By Saturday afternoon, the tech news site Gizmodo had obtained and published the entire thing. The author, a male software engineer, argued that women were more neurotic and less stress-tolerant than men; that they were less likely to pursue status than men; that they were less interested in the "systematizing" work of programming. "We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism," he concluded before offering recommendations.

In May last year, a stunning report claimed that a computer program used by a US court for risk assessment was biased against black prisoners. The program, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (Compas), was much more prone to mistakenly label black defendants as likely to reoffend – wrongly flagging them at almost twice the rate as white people (45% to 24%), according to the investigative journalism organisation ProPublica. Compas and programs similar to it were in use in hundreds of courts across the US, potentially informing the decisions of judges and other officials. The message seemed clear: the US justice system, reviled for its racial bias, had turned to technology for help, only to find that the algorithms had a racial bias too. How could this have happened?

Driverless buses in Estonia have had a number of close calls, including ignoring a speeding police car's emergency lights. The vehicles were introduced in the capital Tallinn in recent weeks as part of the Baltic state's presidency of the European Union. Eyewitnesses have reported a few near misses since, including ignoring a red light, but no'major incidents'. Driverless buses in Estonia (pictured) have had a number of close calls, including ignoring a speeding police car's emergency lights Tallinn is the first city in which driverless buses will come in direct contact with live traffic, according to reports from state broadcaster ERR. A number of similar trial schemes have already been tested around the world.

The volume of data being generated by a spectrum of devices continues to skyrocket. Now the question is what can be done with that data. By Cisco's estimates, traffic on the Internet will be 3.3 zetabytes per year by 2021, up from 1.2 zetabytes in 2016. Traffic on the busiest 60-minute period in a day increased 51% in 2016, compared with a 32% growth in overall traffic. Figure 1: Historical and projected growth of data.

With IBM setting new deep learning records, how long can it maintain a position of dominance within the space? IBM says it has broken new ground and achieved a new deep learning record by discovering a way to accelerate data processing, which is crucial to the technology's functionality. This breakthrough regards the time it takes to train deep learning platforms to recognise images, an ability at the core of training technology to process information like humans. The time required by IBM to train a ResNet-101 neural network was a record breaking seven hours, trumping Microsoft's ten day process taken to train the same system. In recent testing the tech giant achieved a record recognition accuracy rate of 33.8% when processing 7.5 million images, beating the previous 29.8%

The development of pilotless passenger aircraft could be worth 35 billion US dollars (£27 billion) to the aviation industry and cut fares for passengers, according to research. Analysis by investment bank UBS found that technology to enable remotely controlled planes carrying people and cargo could appear by 2025. Almost three-quarters of the economic benefit would be in airlines reducing the cost of employing pilots, the study found. Safety would also be boosted as the potential for pilot error or illness would be removed, the report said. In the US, passengers could benefit by air fares being cut by as much as 11 per cent, UBS said.

He's also the co-founder of a new festival that set the Guinness World Record for largest gathering dedicated to a single video game. Since its release in 2009, Minecraft has sold more than 121 million copies, making it the best-selling game of all time after another blocky favorite, Tetris.) Other games allow you to fight monsters, construct giant castles, build power plants, navigate mazes, chop down trees for wood, survive in the wilderness or band together into guilds. Minecraft has all of the above. It is so open-ended, in fact, that some refer to it as a platform instead of a game, or an "infinite Lego set."