In 1996, Bill Gates said, "Content is king." Ten years later, Cisco's CEO, John Chambers talked about video as king. Last year, a New York Times headline read, "Where clicks reign, audience is king." I thought I'd coin a new phrase for IBM Watson, "Conversation is king". However, a Google search revealed that sci-fi novelist, Cory Doctorow, published, "Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about."

SF Bay ACM Members: We NEED you to attend! Chapter Elections will be briefly held at the beginning of this meeting. In this talk, Arno Candel presents a brief history of AI and how Deep Learning and Machine Learning techniques are transforming our everyday lives. Arno will introduce H2O, a scalable open-source machine learning platform, and show live demos on how to train sophisticated machine learning models on large distributed datasets. He will show how data scientists and application developers can use the Flow GUI, R, Python, Java, Scala, JavaScript and JSON to build smarter applications, and how to take them to production.

Machine learning and computer vision methods have recently received a lot of attention, in particular when it comes to data analytics. The success of deep neural networks that can help cars drive autonomously and make smartphones recognize speech and translate text attests to the value of using machine learning methods to tackle complex real-world problems. A further prominent example is the success of Google's AlphaGo AI that defeated the world champion Lee Sedol in playing Go. This is remarkable in particular since Go has previously been considered as one of the most complex games due to the larger number of game states. As the amount of data collected by cameras and scientific instruments continues to rise, automated analysis methods will become ever more important in the future. Reappearing workflows, such as the segmentation of structures, will likely be either fully automated or supported by computers.

Google wants to apply its machine learning technology to NHS patient data within the next five years, TechCrunch reports. The search giant's London-based artificial intelligence research lab, DeepMind, announced a partnership with the Royal Free NHS Trust in London in February but the full extent of the arrangement is only just becoming clear. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between DeepMind and the Royal Free shows that the pair envisage a "broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects." The MoU -- obtained via a Freedom of Information (FoI) request from New Scientist -- states that DeepMind hopes to gain access to "data for machine learning research under appropriate regulatory and ethical approvals" within the next five years. Machine learning -- a subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed -- has the potential to speed up patient diagnosis and optimise their treatments.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Throughout history, artists and scientists have sought to understand what it means to be human and create machines in our own image. Soon, an important member of the the remarkable 500-year history of humanoid robots could be brought back to life. London's Science Museum has launched its first Kickstarter campaign, which aims to raise funds to rebuild Eric – the UK's first robot. The Science Museum hopes a lost robot named Eric will be part of the exhibition (pictured here before it disappeared). It was the UK's first humanoid and toured the world wowing audiences The forthcoming show at London's Science Museum will include a collection of more than 100 robots from a 16th-century mechanical monk to robots from science fiction and modern-day research lab.

One of the biggest mysteries we'll need to solve for driverless cars is how to assign liability in an accident. Some experts think car manufacturers will start taking on more responsibility, but many insurance companies are still loath to touch the subject because of the various state laws that risk complicating the picture. But at least one insurer seems to sense an opportunity where others fear to tread. In what appears to be an unprecedented move, a British insurance company has begun offering a special policy designed for autonomous and partly automated vehicles. In theory, you could use this on your Google driverless car or your Tesla that's equipped with autopilot.

Pop culture wants us to fear the artificially intelligent robot: The titular "Terminator" characters goes back in time to kill a mother and her child. Cylons of "Battlestar Galactica" fame destroy Earthly civilization and, bloodthirst not slaked, pursue the remnants of humanity through space. Today's artificial intelligence researchers are not, in fact, on the cusp of creating a doomsday AI. Instead, as IBM executive Guruduth Banavar recently told The Washington Post, current AI is a "portfolio of technologies" assigned to specific tasks. Such programs include software capable of defeating the world's best Go players, yes, but also isolated mundanities like the Netflix algorithm that recommends which sitcom to watch next.

When subatomic particles smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, they create showers of new particles whose signatures are recorded by four detectors. The LHC captures 5 trillion bits of data -- more information than all of the world's libraries combined -- every second. After the judicious application of filtering algorithms, more than 99 percent of those data are discarded, but the four experiments still produce a whopping 25 petabytes (25 1015 bytes) of data per year that must be stored and analyzed. That is a scale far beyond the computing resources of any single facility, so the LHC scientists rely on a vast computing grid of 160 data centers around the world, a distributed network that is capable of transferring as much as 10 gigabytes per second at peak performance. The LHC's approach to its big data problem reflects just how dramatically the nature of computing has changed over the last decade.

Raise your glass to outstanding women in advertising, marketing, and media in the U.K. and continental Europe. Advertising Age and Women in Advertising & Communications London (WACL) recognize an inaugural class of female executives who are changing the marketing landscape. Amazon.com is testing a new service that will make it easier for businesses to run artificial intelligence software on computers rented from the company, people familiar with the situation said, stepping up competition with Alphabet unit Google, Microsoft and International Business Machines. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud business, rolled out a limited offering in this area last year. The new service will let businesses run a wider range of AI software on Amazon's computers, leading to more powerful applications capable of tasks like pattern recognition and speech transcription.