A big shakeup happening in the world of deep learning, as Salesforce announced that it has acquired startup darling MetaMind. As part of the acquisition, MetaMind will shut down on May 4 for unpaid users and June 4 for paid users. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes. We'll extend Salesforce's data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform.

Dave Perkon is technical editor for Control Design. He has engineered and managed automation projects for Fortune 500 companies in the medical, automotive, semiconductor, defense and solar industries. Put simply, the IoT provides the connection, the cloud provides online storage and convenient applications, and big data provides analysis, management and maintenance of information, which, when combined, can overwhelm the data users and decision makers. Fortunately computers and specifically machine-learning applications, although in their early stages, can help. From the industry or manufacturing side of business, machine learning can be applied to just about any control system that is smart enough to actually alter how it controls a machine in response to changing conditions, but there is much more to it than that.

Catan is a fantasy island, uninhabited except for a few scattered settlements of humans. German robot maker Kuka recently partnered with the Regensburg University of Applied Sciences to make an A.I.-controlled robotic arm to play Settlers of Catan, a widely popular modern board game. Fortunately, the world champions of Catan won't have to worry about any surprise machine upsets. The robot right now is focused on placing pieces and connected roads. In the future, it might learn AlphaGo levels of strategy, but that's not for a long time.

Consider the artificially intelligent voices you hear on a regular basis. Are any of them men? Whether it's Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, or virtually any GPS system, chances are the computerized personalities in your life are women. This gender imbalance is pervasive in fiction as well as reality. Films like "Her" and "Ex Machina" reflect our anxieties about what intelligent machines mean for humanity.

This article, 10 artificial intelligence insiders to follow on Twitter, originally appeared on TechRepublic.com. With the flood of news on self-driving cars, drones, caring robots, and more, it isn't always easy to keep up-to-date with the latest in the artificial intelligence universe. For the insiders' view on what's happening in AI, follow these 10 researchers, professors, institutions, and other great thinkers who offer human insight into the world of machines. Author of the recently released Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Ford is an important voice in conversations about the future of the workplace and the debate over whether automation will replace humans in the job market. Zhang, a leading software engineer, was a recent speaker at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2015 conference.

Bengaluru-based Bazmi Husain heads the research & development (R&D) vertical of Swiss engineering major ABB that spends 1.5 billion annually on R&D. Bazmi took charge as the chief technology officer of the group in January 2016 after being the managing director of ABB India. Bazmi, who also heads the venture capital arm of the group, talks to Jyoti Mukul about the global technology trends and how India is uniquely placed. Edited excerpts: How important is ABB's India centre in its R&D operations? India is the largest and fastest growing R&D location for ABB, with footprints across Bengaluru, Chennai, Vadodara and Nashik.

With a number of recent Hollywood films representing intelligent machines as either hero or villain, the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has attracted the imagination of the media and popular culture. On the practical engineering side, over the past decade humanity's age-old dream of developing intelligent machines has experienced rapid development. The prospect of expert systems being increasingly able to outperform humans in a growing set of disciplines has led to deep soul-searching concerning the evolving future of labor. Meanwhile, cognitive computing platforms such as IBM's Watson are demonstrating a powerful ability to support and guide humans in complex activities as diverse as oncology diagnostics, investment management, biomedical research, and even the introduction of novel culinary recipes as Chef Watson.

During the dot-com boom, online clothing sales were predicted to grow to 40% -50% of total sales. Although online sales of some other kinds of merchandise, such as books, have reached 50% of the market in the past 15 years, the percentage of online clothing sales hovers around 20%. The difficulty in finding the correct size and fit is one of the primary reasons that consumers are reluctant to buy clothes online. And their concern is not groundless; sizing varies among clothing manufacturers, and it is difficult to ascertain fit from online images. Consequently, 30%-40% of online clothing purchases are returned.

Drone delivery might be years away in the U.S., but it's becoming a reality in Rwanda this summer. A San Francisco-based drone delivery company says it'll start making its first deliveries of blood and medicine in Rwanda in July. Zipline International Inc., backed by tech heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures, demonstrated its technology for journalists last week in an open field in the San Francisco Bay area. In a demo broadcast on Periscope on Friday, a staffer launched a fixed-wing plane weighing just 22 pounds off a launcher that used compressed air. Electric-powered propellers took it the rest of the way, on a flight that could extend to 75 miles round trip, using military-grade GPS and software to navigate. As it dipped low before the drop-off area, the bottom popped open, and a cardboard box with a parachute made of butcher paper and biodegradable tape burst out, plopping to the ground a few steps away from CEO Keller Rinaudo, who walked over to retrieve it.

We are on the cusp of an exponential shift in machine learning, the ability of a computer to automatically refine its methods and improve its results as it receives more data. For the last couple of years, technology giants such as Google, IBM and Microsoft have been in an arms race to construct artificial neural networks that mimic the human brain. Increased computing power, combined with access to very large data sets and advancements in machine learning algorithms, have augured in this new era. We can expect to see a surge in deep learning startups focused on areas such as speech and object recognition, robotics and finance. In the secretive world of hedge funds a very large artificial intelligence play involved Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, which launched a six-strong AI unit led by David Ferrucci, who joined the fund at the end of 2012.