The Amazon Echo is an unlikely hit. After all, the world's largest online retailer hasn't always won its bets on hardware. And a gadget that relies solely on voice? Yet Amazon has by one estimate sold some 3 million of the squat cylinders since the Echo launched in November, 2014. The company doesn't share sales data, but it did say Alexa, the voice-activated software that powers Echo, is active in millions of places, including smartphone apps and other Amazon gadgets.

Like many autistic children, Julian Brown has trouble reading emotions in people's faces, one of the biggest challenges for people with the neurological disorder. Now the 10-year-old San Jose boy is getting help from'autism glass' -- an experimental device that records and studies faces in real-time and alerts him to the emotions they're expressing. The facial recognition software was developed at Stanford University and runs on Google Glass, a computerised headset with a front-facing camera and a tiny display just above the right eye. Julian Brown has trouble reading emotions in people's faces, one of the biggest challenges for people with the neurological disorder. Now the 10-year-old San Jose boy is getting help from'autism glass' Autism glass records and studies faces in real-time.

It was a throwaway comment that launched the developer watching over my shoulder into a lengthy explanation of licensing deals and how it would be prohibitively expensive for Ubisoft to get real brands into Watch Dogs 2. But I think he unintentionally missed my point. I wasn't saying "I'm disappointed this isn't a Hard Rock Cafe." To be honest, I'm not sure anyone has ever uttered that sequence of words. What I meant was, "I'm amazed this recreation of San Francisco is so spot-on that I can match each building to its real-world counterpart." I have little inherent faith or interest in Watch Dogs 2. After the middling mess of the first game, I find it hard to get excited about what's essentially just modern-day Assassin's Creed, with all of its banalities but without the simultaneous history lesson and ten years of sunk-cost fallacy to keep me playing.

Google's parent company Alphabet is not only heavily investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud storage services but is also improving the latter by combining it with the former. According to the Mountain View-based tech giant, AI is the future of cloud storage and its main competitor Amazon agrees. Namely, it was only last month that reports on Amazon implementing AI into its Web Services in order to combat cloud competition from Google have surfaced online, and it seems that the Seattle-based company has now made another serious statement of intent regarding the cloud storage business. As it turns out, Amazon has recruited Alex Smola, a renowned machine learning scientist from the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) who also happens to be Yahoo and Google's research alumni. Mr. Smola will now soon be running the so-called Cloud Machine Learning Platform at Amazon Web Services.

The U.S. spends 270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that's spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help. On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation's incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair and too costly -- in every sense of the word -- and we need to start to change it," Overmann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop. She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount of incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences.

Once a year, when Slava Epstein was growing up in Moscow, his mother took him to the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, a showcase for the wonders of Soviet life. The expo featured many things--from industrial harvesters to Uzbek wine--but Epstein, who began going in the nineteen-sixties, when he was eight or nine, was interested primarily in one: the Cosmos Pavilion, a building the size of a hangar, with a ceiling shaped like a giant inverted parabola. Space fever was running high in the city. Since 1961, when Yuri Gagarin orbited the globe, unmanned vessels had been launched toward Mars and Venus. Beside the expo's entrance, the towering Monument to the Conquerors of Space depicted a probe swooping up to the heavens. The Pavilion displayed futuristic technology--Vostok rockets and Soyuz orbiters--but Epstein was less interested in the glories of advanced thruster design than in the glories of space. He wanted to devote himself to astronomy. When a textbook that he found on the topic began with algebraic formulas, he prodded his older brother to explain them. During high school, he enrolled in classes in physics and math at Moscow State University. His parents disapproved of his desired career: because he is half Jewish, Epstein would face harsh Soviet quotas limiting Jews in the study of physics, a field deemed relevant to national security. But after his first lecture the professor invited him for a walk, and affirmed what they had been saying all along. "Don't do it," he warned. Soviet Russia may have been a fatalist's paradise, but from a young age Epstein felt that he was hardwired for optimism. He convinced himself that what is truly important in science is the ability to connect ideas, no matter the field, and so he took up biology. Rather than telescopes, he would use microscopes, which he began taking with him on trips to the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle, to study protozoa along the shore--research that could be conducted with minimal state interference. Over time, he grew interested in even smaller, more ancient forms of life: bacteria. Studying microbes inevitably causes a reordering of one's perceptions: for more than two billion years, they were the only life on this planet, and they remain in many ways its dominant life form. To a remarkable extent, the microbial cosmos was less explored than the actual cosmos: precisely how the organisms evolve, replicate, fight, and communicate remains unclear. Nearly all of microbiology, Epstein eventually learned, was built on the study of a tiny fraction of microbial life, perhaps less than one per cent, because most bacteria could not be grown in a laboratory culture, the primary means of analyzing them. By the time he matured as a scientist, many researchers had given up trying to cultivate new species, writing off the majority as "dark matter"--a term used in astronomy for an inscrutable substance that may make up most of the universe but cannot be seen.

Matt Krisiloff is in a small, glass-walled conference room off the lobby of Y Combinator's office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, shouting distance from some of the country's wealthiest startups, many of which Y Combinator has nurtured and helped fund. Krisiloff, who manages the operations of the tech incubator's program for very early-stage companies, is explaining why it is committed to investing an amount said to be in the tens of millions of dollars in a venture that is guaranteed never to make a penny. It's the simplest business model conceivable: hand thousands of dollars over to individuals in return for nothing, no strings attached. Krisiloff insists he and his Y Combinator colleagues can't wait to get started giving away the money. "This could be really transformative," he says. "It may help change how humans, society, and technology all operate together in the future."

Matt Krisiloff is in a small, glass-walled conference room off the lobby of Y Combinator's office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, shouting distance from some of the country's wealthiest startups, many of which Y Combinator has nurtured and helped fund. Krisiloff, who manages the operations of the tech incubator's program for very early-stage companies, is explaining why it is committed to investing an amount said to be in the tens of millions of dollars in a venture that is guaranteed never to make a penny. It's the simplest business model conceivable: hand thousands of dollars over to individuals in return for nothing, no strings attached. Krisiloff insists he and his Y Combinator colleagues can't wait to get started giving away the money. "This could be really transformative," he says. "It may help change how humans, society, and technology all operate together in the future."

Bibhrajit Halder left the Midwest and a job developing autonomous trucks for Caterpillar Inc. about a year and a half ago to join Ford Motor Co. in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the auto maker is working on self-driving vehicles. The Dearborn, Mich., auto maker, however, soon lost the software engineer to Faraday Future Inc., an electric-car startup luring auto industry veterans with Silicon Valley-like perks including stock options, free health care, catered lunches and foosball tables. "The work is exciting," Mr. Halder said in an interview about six months after joining Faraday, where he says he has more responsibility than at the blue chip companies he left. "The company is dependent on you to deliver." Ford is at the center of a ferocious hiring battle now pitting traditional car makers against startups out to force a shift to electric and autonomous-driving vehicles.

Bibhrajit Halder left the Midwest and a job developing autonomous trucks for Caterpillar Inc. CAT -1.46 % about a year and a half ago to join Ford Motor Co. F -1.21 % in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the auto maker is working on self-driving vehicles. The Dearborn, Mich., auto maker, however, soon lost the software engineer to Faraday Future Inc., an electric-car startup luring auto industry veterans with Silicon Valley-like perks including stock options, free health care, catered lunches and foosball tables. "The work is exciting," Mr. Halder said in an interview about six months after joining Faraday, where he says he has more responsibility than at the blue chip companies he left. "The company is dependent on you to deliver."