Teams representing the University of California, Berkeley and Arizona State compete in the Grand Final of last year's Heroes of the Dorm tournament at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles. By the end of this week, four teams will advance to determine a champion after an intense multi-week competition. Their names will look familiar -- UConn, Miami and Oregon -- and monetary stakes are high, to the tune of 500,000. They're battling with video game controllers in the growing arena of competitive video gaming, whose increasing popularity has attracted the attention of big names in tech and media, from Electronic Arts to ESPN to Yahoo'We have the early markers of what will ultimately make eSports mainstream," says Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research, which gathers data on the global games market. But it could require a generational shift before competitive video gaming -- known to many as "eSports" -- formally becomes mainstream entertainment. On April 3, the "Heroic Four" will be determined in Heroes of the Dorm, a competitive video game tournament hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, based on its action game Heroes of the Storm. For the second year, teams representing colleges from across the U.S., including the University of Connecticut and Arizona State University, are playing for glory and more than 500,000 in scholarships and prizes, including a free ride through school for the winning team. Fans watch the action online on ESPN, Twitch and YouTube, and they can even join tournament pools, where the winner with the most accurate bracket snags 10,000. It's the latest example of competitive video gaming's increased following, as younger fans gravitate towardeSports. The market is valued at 747 million, according to SuperData, and is expected to more than double to 1.9 billion in three years. The rising audience -- SuperData estimates it at 134 million as of last year -- is pushing video game publishers and cable networks to create competitive video game experiences and explore broadcasting options. The eSports market is young. Whalen Rozelle, Director of eSports at Riot Games -- makers of the hit competitive game League of Legends -- says it's still in "our pre-teen phase," with plenty of room to grow. "The industry still hasn't really figured out'is every game an eSport?

"Cognitive conversations" with artificial intelligence are "the future" of customer care, IBM's CTO of Watson Europe reckons. Speaking at Computing's Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016 last week, Duncan Anderson explained how AI like IBM Watson is "not Ex Machina" - referring to the 2015 film in which human-like AIs become self-aware - but is now at the point where it can soon make considerable changes to the daily lives of people. "The practical reality of where we are is not Ex Machina - we're not building beautiful computers and spoofing humans, [but] we're solving practical problems today," he said. Anderson said Watson's growing ability to process unstructured data - "text documents, images, voice - the novel data types" - is now bringing to an end the traditional approach of putting such data "in a database clock and [doing] nothing with it". While this is nothing new, Watson's improving effectiveness at communicating what it's learning back to a user in the form of "chat" is now becoming an increasingly viable frontline tool. "If you're five years old and go into a hospital it's a scary place - it's all white and doctors are big scary old people," said Anderson.

The consequences of Korean player Lee Se-dol's historic defeat against a computer program in March 2016 will be both global and political. One reason is that the ancient and revered board-game Go (some claim it was invented by a Chinese emperor around 2300 BC) -- in its very essence, is a profound meditation on the art of war. There are only two types of stones in Go, black or white -- reminiscent of zeroes and ones in digital computers. Contrary to the hierarchical pawns, bishops and kings in chess, the pieces in Go are identical and theoretically equal in value, somewhat analogous to people in a communist regime. The aim is to capture territory and annihilate the enemy stones by surrounding them.

The World Economic Forum kicks off today, and the theme of this year's gathering of the world's leaders, celebrities, billionaires and the merely wealthy will be what it calls the "Fourth Industrial Revolution." That's its term for the accelerating pace of technological changes, especially those that are "blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres" -- the combination of things like artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and 3-D printing. To go with that theme, the WEF has released research looking at the effect all that change will have on jobs. It projects that by 2020, 7.1 million jobs are expected to be lost, and two million gained, with a net impact of five million jobs lost in the next half decade. "Davos Robot Eclipses Davos Man as Gloom Descends on World Elite," Bloomberg wrote in covering the news of this year's theme, which will be the topic of 20 sessions over the four-day conference.

The robots haven't just landed in the workplace--they're expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts. One multi-tasker bot, from Momentum Machines, can make (and flip) a gourmet hamburger in 10 seconds and could soon replace an entire McDonalds crew. A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn't just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp--it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust. And just this week, Google won a patent to start building worker robots with personalities. As intelligent machines begin their march on labor and become more sophisticated and specialized than first-generation cousins like Roomba or Siri, they have an outspoken champion in their corner: author and entrepreneur Martin Ford.

Just months after announcing a pizza delivery truck with built-in heaters, the pizza purveyor is upping the ante with the world's first pizza delivery robot. The company's Australian arm announced plans to deploy a Domino Robotic Unit (DRU). Essentially an autonomous vehicle, DRU can, according to Domino's, follow a map, navigate sidewalks, avoid obstacles and keep your pizza hot and fresh while delivering it to your front door. While this sounds like an elaborate marketing stunt, a Domino's spokesperson confirmed to Mashable that the robot is real. "DRU is cheeky and endearing and we are confident that one day he will become an integral part of the Domino's family. He's a road to the future and one that we are very excited about exploring further," said Domino's Group CEO and Managing Director Don Meij in a release.

TECH ENTREPRENEUR Elon Musk has been warning that the Age of the Robots is coming soon -- and it might not be pleasant for us. He may be right and he may be wrong on that, but one thing is sure: One robot certainly gave the anti-Whites a headache just this week. On Wednesday, tech giant Microsoft, the third largest corporation on Earth in terms of market value, launched and then immediately withdrew an Artificial Intelligence robot in the persona of a 19-year-old American girl called "Tay." Tay was a "chatbot," which interacted with real humans on the social media platform Twitter and was designed to learn from its interactions. Tay learned so fast that Microsoft pulled her offline in less than a single day.

My (expanded) talking points from a presentation I gave at the Re.Work Investing in Deep Learning dinner in London on 1st December 2015. Keep up to date with AI news through my newsletter on tech, research and venture. It's my belief that artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting and transformative opportunities of our time. Consumers worldwide carry 2 billion smartphones, they're increasingly addicted to these devices and 40% of the world is online (KPCB). This means we're creating new data assets that never existed before (user behavior, preferences, interests, knowledge, connections).

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments. The visual speech recognition technology, created by Dr Helen L. Bear and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Dr Bear said. Dr Bear, whose findings will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai on March 25, said unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available – such as on CCTV footage – or if the audio is inadequate and there aren't clues to give the context of a conversation. The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation. Dr Bear said: "We are still learning the science of visual speech and what it is people need to know to create a fool-proof recognition model for lip-reading, but this classification system improves upon previous lip-reading methods by using a novel training method for the classifiers. "Potentially, a robust lip-reading system could be applied in a number of situations, from criminal investigations to entertainment.

By now, the fact that transatlantic democratic capitalism, once the engine of postwar prosperity, has run into trouble can hardly be denied by anyone with the courage to browse a daily newspaper. Hunger, homelessness, toxic chemicals in the water supply, the lack of affordable housing: all these issues are back on the agenda, even in the most prosperous of countries. This appalling decline in living standards was some time in the making – 40 years of neoliberal policies are finally taking their toll – so it shouldn't come as a shock. However, coupled with the spillover effects of wars in the Middle East – first the refugees, now the increasingly regular terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe – our economic and political malaise looks much more ominous. It's hardly surprising that the insurgent populist forces, on both left and right, have such an easy time bashing the elites.