China is emerging as the biggest market for video games. It is, therefore, great news to investors of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) that its subsidiary Mojang has stuck a deal with NetEase (NASDAQ:NTES). Mojang granted a 5-year exclusive license to NetEase to distribute the mobile and PC versions of its cult hit game, Minecraft. Mojang will create a China-specific version of Minecraft for NetEase. Microsoft paid 2.5 billion to acquire Mojang in 2014.

Martha Kim is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a bachelors in Computer Science from Harvard University. Martha's research interests are in computer architecture, parallel programming, compilers, and low-power computing. Her current research focuses on hardware and software techniques to improve the usability of hardware accelerators, data-centric accelerator design, and application-level power management. This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Center for Future Architectures Research (C-FAR), and Intel Corporation.

I have spent a lot of time working with spreadsheets, databases, and data more generally. This work has led to me having a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you.

Something strange happened in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) on Wednesday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook profile that his company has created an AI system that is "getting close" to beating the best humans at Chinese board game Go. Hours later, DeepMind -- a startup based in London that was bought by Google for 400 million in 2014 -- said it had already developed an AI named AlphaGo that had just beaten the best Go player in Europe. DeepMind's breakthrough was splashed across the front cover of science journal Nature yesterday evening and covered by over 200 media titles. "This is the first time that a computer Go program has defeated a human professional player, without handicap, in the full game of Go - a feat that was previously believed to be at least a decade away," explained the DeepMind research paper -- Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search.

Now there's a better way to cheat at crossword puzzles--with artificial intelligence. Researchers from three universities designed a system that uses a type of AI known as deep learning to help computers understand language more quickly and effectively. As a bonus, the researchers built a web-based tool that's handy when a particularly baffling crossword clue comes around. The crossword assistant is just a demo of how deep learning is improving machines' ability to understand language, said Felix Hill, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge and lead author of a paper describing the research. Learning language is challenging for computers because it's difficult to recreate the rich and diverse information sources available to humans when they learn to speak and read, he said. Researchers focused on helping computers understand phrases.

Most autonomous vehicle control software is deliberately designed for well-constrained driving that's nice, calm, and under control. Not only is this a little bit boring, it's also potentially less safe: If your car autonomous vehicle has no experience driving aggressively, it won't know how to manage itself if something goes wrong. At Georgia Tech, researchers are developing control algorithms that allow small-scale autonomous cars to power around dirt tracks at ludicrous speeds. They presented some this week at the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Stockholm, Sweden. Using real-time onboard sensing and processing, the little cars maximize their speed while keeping themselves stable and under control.

It was big week for solar power as well. For starters, scientists developed a breakthrough photovoltaic cell that set a new world record for efficiency. Portugal made headlines by running on 100-percent renewable energy for more than four days. The Mistbox is a new device that uses solar energy to cut down on summer cooling costs. And scientists discovered a new form of spiralized light that flies in the face of everything quantum physics says about photons.

The movie's opening may as well arrive with an on-screen statement. Loud shrieking lends the impression a couple is having sex, but the first sight is a close-up of a cat. Then the camera cuts to the source of the shrieks, and it turns out what sounded like love was actually an assault. Needling, absurd, sexual, kinetic -- all those adjectives apply to Verhoeven. The Dutch-born director has followed one of the more improbable career arcs in modern cinema -- from European obscurity to Hollywood heights to industry punch-line ("Showgirls," anyone?), back to European acclaim.

Criteo is the world leader in performance Internet advertising. The Recommender System is at the core of its Engine. Real-time prediction: Everybody predicts clicks. But how do you accurately predict if the userâ s click on a product will generate a sale? Thankfully, you have billions of data points to help you.

Our Digital & Social Media Coordinator Lucy Woods speaks with Neil MacDonald who recently joined Speechmatics as Chief Revenue Officer. Having recently announced Speechmatics to feature as a finalist in the Fast and Furious Pitch Off (press release here) at Venturefest East, we wanted to find out more about this rising start-up. Speechmatics is the culmination of 3 decades of advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence research conducted by our founder Dr Tony Robinson. We apply the latest research in Neural Networks to the task of understanding speech. We provide an automatic speech recognition technology that unlocks the data contained within what we say to each other verbally.