For more than a decade the company formerly known as Google, latterly rebranded Alphabet to illustrate the full breadth of its A to Z business ambitions, has engineered an annually increasing revenue generating empire which last year pulled in 75 billion. And it's done this mostly by mining user data for ad targeting intel. Slice it and dice it how you like but Google's business engine needs data like the human body needs oxygen. Most of its products are thus designed to remove friction to accessing more user data; whether it's free search, free email, free cloud storage, free document editing tools, free messaging apps, a fuzzy social network that no one loves but which is somehow still hanging around, free maps, a mobile OS platform that OEMs can load onto smartphone hardware without paying a license fee… Most of what Google builds it opens to all comers to keep the data pouring in. The bits and bytes must flow.

"We are hurting," David Brown, the chief of the Dallas Police Department, said at the beginning of a press conference on Friday morning. The Dallas officers are hurting. There are no words to describe the atrocity that occurred to our city. All I know is that this must stop--this divisiveness between our police and our citizens." Brown is an African-American in his mid-fifties. He was born and raised in Dallas, which, like many American cities, is highly segregated along racial and income lines. Brown joined the department and made his way up the ranks. According to a profile that appeared in the Dallas Morning News in 2010, when he was appointed a chief of the department, Brown had a reputation as a "tough and demanding leader." In his nearly six years running the department, which had a reputation for overly aggressive, and sometimes deadly, policing, Brown has proved to be a reformer, firing rogue cops for poor behavior, and making sure all officers got extra training in when to use lethal force. In a 2014 article about Brown's reform efforts, Radley Balko, a Washington Post blogger who has written a book about the militarization of America's police forces, commented, "One could quibble with the battles Brown has chosen, but he at least seems to be fighting on the right side." In the past few years, the number of shootings involving the Dallas police has fallen significantly. After making his opening appeal for unity and reconciliation, Brown delivered an update on the investigation into the sniper attack on Thursday evening, which took place during a protest against police violence, leaving five police officers dead and seven wounded. Brown said the alleged shooter, whom he didn't name, had told officers who cornered him, in a parking garage, that he wanted to kill white police officers, that he acted alone and wasn't affiliated with any groups, and that, after negotiations for a peaceful surrender broke down, the police killed him by using a robot to place a bomb in his vicinity and detonating it. Inevitably, these details dominated the headlines. But, at a time of heightened tension and widespread fear of further violence, some other things Brown said deserved noting. After saluting the actions of the Dallas police officers who rushed toward the gunfire, which appeared to come from a rooftop, he addressed the public, saying, "We don't feel much support most days.

Deftr, legal tech company, and Y Combinator Fellowship recipient, today announced the launch of the first AI-powered tool that helps professionals diagram intricate corporate structures. The new product reads text as it is typed in real time, then automatically turns that text into a shareable, interactive graphic illustrating a corporate structure or transaction. Named for the dynamic tax ledger used by the Ottoman Empire, Deftr helps legal and professional service firms focus on high-level, strategic work by leveraging artificial intelligence to automate manual work. From tax law and IRS guidance to corporate structuring and financial regulations, we enable users to navigate legal complexity and understand its practical consequences intuitively, simply, and cheaply. For hundreds of years the Swiss watch had been considered to be the most accurate, trust-worthy and well-designed way of telling the time – the best way to convey that crucial information to a wearer.

The world's first beer brewed with the help of artificial intelligence is now on sale. Four beers have been created, with each recipe altered based on customer feedback received by an algorithm. The system is hidden behind a Facebook Messenger bot, which takes feedback from customers and sends it onto human brewers who change recipes accordingly. IntelligentX, the company behind the beers, said the use of AI would help brewers receive and test customer feedback "more quickly than ever before". Codes printed on the bottles direct people towards the bot, which then asks a series of questions.

Your smartphone is about to get even smarter. As artificial intelligence and machine learning become all the more influential across the tech industry, tech giant Google has just made moves to improve its own AI capabilities by purchasing Moodstocks, a French startup that is particularly adept at helping phones recognize objects. Soon, you may be able to simply point your mobile device at whatever strikes your fancy, and have your phone tell you what it is (and perhaps tell you a bit about it). In a blog post announcement on Wednesday morning, Vincent Simonet, the head of Google France's R&D Center noted that a number of Google services already employ machine learning "to make them simpler and more useful in everyday life," including Smart Reply Inbox and Google Translate. And while Google has already "made great strides in terms of visual recognition," Simonet writes, as you can currently search for a term in Google Images and be presented with pretty decent image results, Simonet notes "there is still much to do in this area."

IntelligentX Brewing Co. has introduced what it calls "the world's first beer brewed by artificial intelligence." The London-based microbrewery is putting a new twist on an old tradition, using machine learning and a Facebook Messenger bot to spot trends and improve its product. "We currently live in a world where companies are using our data to target more advertising at us. We believe we can do something more useful with data," IntelligentX co-founder Hew Leith said in a statement to PCMag. "We can use data to create better products that improve over time. "In this example we [are] combining customer feedback data and a machine-learning algorithm to determine what consumers like about our beers, then brew new versions which are more finely tuned to people's tastes," he continued. "This is the future of data.

Scientists are closer to creating a computer with emotions. Researchers in Russia are expected to reveal an emotional computer within a year and a half, which will be able to think like a person and build up trust, its creators say. The system, called'Virtual Actor', is being created by the National Research Nuclear University in Moscow. Computers are machines used for practical reasons, without any emotion involved. The AI, called'Virtual Actor', is expected to be online within the next year and a half.

New research from Adobe and Goldsmiths University of London has looked at the future of customer experience, with some surprising findings on machine-learning, IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR). 'The Future of Experience' report was published yesterday, with its findings revealed at Adobe's Cross-Channel Marketing Forum in London. IoB attended the event to learn more about the report. The report reveals new rules of engagement when it comes to brands creating great experiences using a range of emerging technologies, such as VR, AR, AI, wearables and the IoT. Goldsmiths University of London worked with Adobe on qualitative online research with over 2,000 adults in the UK, as well as workshops with technology experts, and the resulting report identifies five new dimensions for brands to think about when creating experiences for the future.

A high British entrepreneur thinks he is solved the issue of our over-stretched NHS – a private robotic physician you'll be able to entry with the press of a button. Babylon is being hailed because the world's first synthetic intelligence triage nurse and may be accessed on a smartphone at any time. On the app's launch in London yesterday, Ali stated his machine outperforms the well being service and is a "phenomenal step" in the way forward for each the NHS and world healthcare. "Within the final three weeks, 20,000 folks used our symptom checker and in the identical time interval 600,000 folks used the 111 helpline – that is three% of individuals already," he mentioned at Babylon's HQ in West London. In response to Babylon's calculations, in 102 medical eventualities the well being app outperforms medical doctors by 21.5% and nurses by 23.5%.

In March, Microsoft revealed that it was using the open-world game Minecraft to train AI agents to learn how to do things like climbing a hill. The company also promised to make it available to the public so they could work on their own artificial intelligence projects and research, and it's finally available today. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) is a Minecraft mod that works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and supports just about any programming language you might want to use. So yes, that means you will need to know how to code – but Microsoft says that even novice programmers can get in on the action. You can learn more about Project Malmo here and grab the mod from this GitHub repository to try it for yourself.