A few years ago, I started PredictionIO, an open source machine learning platform, with the mission to scale and simplify the development of machine learning technology. PredictionIO quickly grew in prominence and was even ranked on Github as the most popular Apache Spark-based machine learning product in the world. When Salesforce acquired PredictionIO in February, I was excited to have the amazing opportunity to continue to build our platform on a much larger scale. Today, I am thrilled to announce that Salesforce will donate the PredictionIO trademark to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and by unanimous vote the platform has been accepted into the ASF incubator program. This demonstrates the open source community's recognition of the importance of the PredictionIO project.

VIENTIANE – Southeast Asian nations are in unparalleled disarray over Beijing's saber-rattling in the South China Sea, analysts and insiders say, with the fractures set to deepen as staunch China ally Laos hosts top regional diplomats this weekend. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi are among the delegates due to fly in from Sunday for two days of meetings in Vientiane, the capital of the communist nation. The South China Sea is set to cast a long shadow over the summit that is hosted by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Earlier this month a U.N.-backed tribunal found there was no legal basis for China's claims to most of the strategic and resource-rich seas -- a ruling rejected as "waste paper" by Beijing. ASEAN prides itself on consensus diplomacy but divisions have never been starker with Beijing blamed for driving a wedge between members. The Philippines brought the international arbitration case, while fellow ASEAN members Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims to parts of the sea.

For Google, the massive network of data centers that powers the web giant's operations run up a similarly massive energy tab. The company has been improving server farm efficiency for years, but it recently adopted a novel technique for trimming usage: letting the robots take control. In particular, Google is giving the reins to an artificial intelligence system developed by its subsidiary DeepMind. The AI overlord succeeded in shaving several percentage points off of data center energy consumption, Bloomberg reported. This led to a 15 percent improvement in power-usage efficiency, the metric of how much power goes to the actual computing as opposed to auxiliary services at the data centers.

As a Stanford student, Zeshan Hussain found many ways to take part in public service projects near and far – on campus, at a high school on the other side of San Francisco Bay and at a tropical disease hospital in India. In January 2016, along with other members of the Muslim Student Union (MSU) and other student groups, Hussain helped organize Syrian Refugee Awareness Week, which included a teach-in about the crisis, a benefit dinner to raise funds for the charity United Muslim Relief and a clothing collection drive in student residence halls. The organization brought in Sana Khatib, a Syrian-American activist whose father is a former political prisoner and whose family fled Syria and the Assad regime when she was young. Through a clothing drive the MSU also collected 500 pounds of clothing just on campus from students and faculty, an accomplishment Hussain described as "very heartening." "We wanted to raise awareness about the crisis and its history, and about the personal struggles of students who may be refugees, or students who have families that are refugees," he said.

Tech City News held a roundtable attended by a variety of AI experts, who discussed the potential of AI and the ethical challenges posed by the technology. Yessi Bello Perez, our reporter, has more. Just last year, Stephen Hawking – arguably one of the world's brightest minds – predicted artificially intelligent computers would overtake humans at some point over the next century. Although it may have seemed like an outlandish statement at the time, the truth is that since Hawking's appearance at the Zeitgeist conference in London, artificial intelligence has reached buzzword status among the highest echelons of the global tech scene. AI-focused investors have emerged, funding in the space is soaring, tech giants are acquiring AI startups – and pouring significant resources into researching the technology – and the community is avidly discussing the technology's potential and its ethical implications.

Researchers from the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio used tissues from a sea slug and 3D-printed components to create a biohybrid robot that can crawl like sea turtles on a beach. The robot, just under two inches long, can "walk" at a pace of 0.43 centimeters a minute when an external electrical current is applied which forces the muscles to contract. The scientists behind this biohybrid robot believe that in the future, an army of such robots could be used for a variety of tasks like locating the source of a toxic leak in a pond or even searching the ocean floor for a flight data recorder. "We're building a living machine--a biohybrid robot that's not completely organic yet," lead researcher and PhD student Victoria Webster said in a statement. "We want the robots to be compliant, to interact with the environment. One of the problems with traditional robotics, especially on the small scale, is that actuators -- the units that provide movement -- tend to be rigid."

With soft, slimy bodies that come in a rainbow of colours, sea slugs are some of the weirdest looking creatures in the ocean. But now scientists have used the strange marine invertebrates to help them build a new type of flexible cyborg robot. Using tough muscles taken from the mouths of sea slugs, engineers have combined them with 3D printed components to create what they are calling'biohybrid' robots. Engineers have created a'biohybrid' robot that uses the mouth muscles from the California sea slug. The muscle is attached to 3D printed body and legs (pictured), allowing the robot to crawl like a sea turtle pulling itself up the beach.

Governor Inslee's op-ed for CNBC published July 12, 2016 America's advantage in the knowledge-based economy is our human capital. Well-educated, highly-trained, creative-thinking people are essential to the most innovative companies and successful entrepreneurs in the world today. Skilled people are the currency of economic development for states in the 21st century. Why are nearly 95 percent of all the commercial aircraft in North America built in Washington state? Why is our Puget Sound region the cloud computing capital?

Sea slugs typically slither--a perfectly respectable way to get around--but recently a team of scientists saw additional locomotive potential in the odd-looking invertebrate. Specifically, they took a tiny muscle from the sea slug's mouth and used it to make a robot crawl. "We're building a living machine--a biohybrid robot that's not completely organic--yet," Victoria Webster, the PhD student who is leading the research, said in a statement. A sea slug might seem an unlikely source for robot parts. But according to the researchers, sea slugs are exceptionally tough creatures, and that toughness extends down to the cellular level.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Google's self-driving car right now is that you can't pull up Google Maps, pick a destination and tell the car to go there. That's because to learn new routes, the car has to be "trained" by a human driver at least once or twice first. But now a number of organizations, including Ford Motor Company, Stanford University and an investment firm run by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, have invested 6.6 million into a company that promises to leapfrog that navigation issue by creating cheap, detailed maps that driverless cars will be able to read on the fly. And these maps will be created by regular drivers such as yourself, according to Civil Maps, the company behind the idea. In that respect, the concept is a bit like another Google-owned product, Waze.