In the background, a few pedestrians are looking warily at a strange new contraption barely visible behind the crowds of equine transport. Imagine the same street, just 13 years later. To the right of the frame is a cart pulled by a single, perplexed-looking horse. The street--and the world--has changed forever. Anders Hjælmsø Svennesen, CIO at the DKK 327 billion ( 50 billion) Danica Pension in Denmark, uses these images in presentations to illustrate the speed at which technology can fundamentally change the way we live.

Over the past few years the field of Machine Learning has entered the general parlance. From free massive open online courses to image recognition benchmarks being broken and decades of Atari games being mastered. During the same period developers have witnessed the release of several popular open source frameworks and libraries. The chart below shows different open source machine learning projects by initial commit date and programming language. The size represents the popularity of a project based on number of Github stargazers.

RE•WORK will host its annual East Coast events on Deep Learning and the Internet of Things in Boston on 12 & 13 May. Over 300 machine learning and IoT enthusiasts and experts will come together to hear keynote presentations, panel discussions, fireside chats and to explore the startup showcase area. The Deep Learning Summit brings together leaders from industry, academia and startups to explore advances in deep learning methods and techniques, as well as their business applications in areas including finance, manufacturing, healthcare & transportation. Confirmed speakers and presentations include: -Keynote presentation from deep learning expert Yoshua Bengio, Full Professor at Université de Montréal Professor Bengio is also Head of the Machine Learning Laboratory, Co-director of the CIFAR Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception program, and editor of many prestigious machine learning publications. Daniel is also a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab.

Chatbots are big news in Silicon Valley right now. "Bots are the new apps!" said Microsoft chief Satya Nadella recently, Facebook's just announced a large collection, while Wired's latest article on the subject puts the phrase "post-app internet" right up in the headline. In the short term, many chatbots are basically glorified search boxes. It's very early days, judging by the first wave of Facebook Messenger bots, which launched its chatbot platform this week. I've been chatting to six of them, and most provide information and links in response to keywords and/or selections from multiple-choice menus.

The match sent a shock wave around the world. AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program developed by Britain-based Google DeepMind, defeated a top Go player. The Go board is larger than those used for chess and shogi, and many believed AI programs would defeat humans 10 years from now at the earliest. Remarkable technological development demonstrated ability in a field requiring a "wide perspective" to read situations every time a move was made. This is the third AI boom since the end of World War II. In the last two, AI programs could not do anything unless they were taught "knowledge" and "ways of thinking" by humans.

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

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

Love them or hate them, drones are increasing in popularity and there have already been incidents of propellers cutting and even blinding people. As a result, we are only just learning the true damage the propellers can cause. To study how the blades can tear through flesh, researchers have attached a drone to a catapult and fired it at a slab of pork in a bizarre slow-motion video. Researchers at a Danish University have rigged a purpose-built catapult to launch a hobby drone into the pork at high speed, recording the impact with a high-speed camera capturing 3,000 frames per second (pictured). Researchers at Aalborg University's Drone Research Lab rigged a purpose-built catapult to launch a hobby drone into the meat at high speed.

If you're planning on working in artificial intelligence (AI), you have to have a certain amount of bravery. Not the creeper-smashing, rose-toting iron golem sort of bravery one may encounter in Minecraft, but bravery nevertheless. As Katja Hoffmann, a researcher in the Machine Intelligence and Perception group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, notes, being part of the machine intelligence field means you have to develop an understanding of how learning works – and a big part of that is finding out what doesn't work. In other words, it requires a certain kind of bravery to accept that failure is an important step in the learning process. I had a chance to sit down with Katja to ask her what motivates her to do what she does, and also what advice she'd give to girls considering a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths).

A Swiss data analytics and cybersecurity company is beefing up its Boston-area presence after grabbing 40 million in venture capital, led by Highland Europe. Nexthink established a U.S. presence three weeks ago with the opening of a sales office in Cambridge, MA. The company employs about 10 people there to start, but it plans to grow to 120 local employees over the next 18 months, a spokeswoman says. Nexthink helps IT departments analyze and monitor their businesses' applications, devices, and other network activity in real time. The goal is to sniff out cyber attacks and minimize software disruptions for end users.