New Delhi: With its new research lab,based outside United States (US), Google is all set to focus on machine learning as a part of its artificial intelligence. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that provides computer with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the new unit called Google Research, Europe is one of largest Google's engineering office outside US. It will be a part of the wider Google Research operation, which includes thousands of people worldwide. The search engine giant made this announcement in its official blogpost where it mentioned that the new group, led by Emmanuel Mogenet will mainly focus on three areas- machine intelligence, natural language processing (NPL) and machine perception.

The new machine-learning research center will focus on turning Google's ambitions in this space to reality, the company says.

At lunch last week, I learned that a couple colleagues were engaged in a little duel--trying to out-walk each other, as tracked by their new Fitbits. Self-improvement was definitely the goal, but seeing peer performance and benchmarks provided the required motivation to achieve that goal. If you're a data science or analytics leader, your job is to manage analysts who produce insights. So, if you want to drive your business through these insights, you have two options. You can either hire more analysts or you can increase the productivity of your existing analysts.

Respondents were asked what they saw as the biggest area of opportunity for Big Data in comparison to traditional systems, with 62% agreeing that they consider real time analysis as the biggest area of opportunity today. "It's not long ago we were visiting enterprises and having to explain why they should look at big data. Today in 2016, Big Data Analytics is already considered a necessity to remain competitive by 63% of organizations," explains Serge Haziyev, VP Technology Services, SoftServe. "It's very encouraging that machine learning has featured so prominently in this survey. I find that businesses that take the plunge and implement machine learning techniques realize the benefits early on – it's a big step forward because it delivers prescriptive insights enabling businesses to not only understand what customers are doing, but why."

The new team has a distinct goal: to invent the future of Search, a voice-activated, human-like entity that can answer any query intelligently. "We are building the ultimate assistant. In two years, you can expect Google to become a personal life assistant across multiple surfaces, including your phone, Google Home, even cars," Mogenet said. Some of Google's best-known products are already shaped by machine learning, the ability of computers to spot patterns in large datasets and learn by example. For instance, Google Photos uses it to understand the content of an image.

In his quest to transform the way the Pentagon wages war, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has turned to Silicon Valley, hoping its experimental culture, innovation and sense of urgency would rub off on the rigid bureaucracy he runs. Carter has made several trips to the Valley and appointed Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google's parent company to an advisory board. And recently he sat down at the Pentagon with Elon Musk to see what suggestions the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX might have to make the nation's military more efficient and daring. "Having an incentive structure that rewards innovation is extremely important," he said in an interview after the meeting. Whatever you reward will happen." The Pentagon finds itself in a new arms race, struggling to keep pace with forms of combat that are fought with bytes as well as bullets. The technological advancements disrupting established business sectors are now shaking up the world of war -- where robots, swarming drones ...

Pinchas Gutter goes out of his way to find me biscuits. In a sun-baked living room in his north London home, he opens a packet of Rich Tea, sits down and tells me about the Holocaust. Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps – including the Majdanek extermination camp – and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia. "Remembrance is the secret of redemption, while forgetting leads to exile," he says, quoting Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism.

The 8 Ball supercomputer, a spherical monolith that can harness the rules of quantum mechanics to solve vastly complex problems, is not real. It's actually a quantum computer that appeared in a short story written by science fiction novelist Gregory Dale Bear last year. Such computers have yet to escape the realm of science fiction, but recent advances have moved the prospect of a working quantum computer closer to reality. Scientists from Google and the University of Basque Country in Spain believe they have cleared some of the barriers to more complex and useful quantum computers. The technology is based on the idea of quantum bits, or qubits, which loosely correspond to the classic bits stored inside the transistors etched onto silicon. The qubits are capable of encoding more data than the 1's and 0's that form the basis of modern computing.

There's no mistaking the fact that Google is one of many companies that consider machine learning to be the future of technology. Now, the firm has announced the formation of a Zurich-based research group dedicated to the field. The Swiss city is already home to Google's largest engineering office outside of the US. The engine that powers Knowledge Graph and the conversation engine powering the Google Assistant in Allo messenger were developed by the teams located here. According to a blog post by Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research for Europe, the new group will be focusing on the key areas of machine learning, natural language processing and understanding, and machine perception.

Industrial companies are confronted with several new trends that will fundamentally change production and logistics processes. For example, the term "Industry 4.0," which was coined in Germany, stands for the digital networking of people, objects, and systems to create integrated production processes. In international jargon, it is referred to as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). All technologies, systems, and components that are involved in the industrial value creation process are connected to each other as well as to company networks and the internet. Smart factory is another trend that forms a part of the IIoT development.