Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang said that deep-learning artificial intelligence has become a new computing platform, and the company is dealing with hundreds of startups in the space that plan to take advantage of the platform. Speaking at the GPUTech conference in San Jose, California, Huang noted that 5 billion was invested last year in A.I. startups, and there are probably a thousand companies working on the technology for applications ranging from face recognition to self-driving cars. "Deep learning is not an industry," he said. "Deep learning is going to be in every industry. Deep learning is going to be in every application."

Learning machines are capable of working ever more autonomously on ever more complex tasks. In this article, I explore whether it would it be smart for humankind to develop an'intelligent gun'. There are an estimated 875 million civilian, law-enforcement, and military firearms in the world, of which 650 million are in the hands of civilians, either legally or illegally[1]. Given the plethora of high-profile gun attacks in recent months and years – particularly in the US but also in France, Norway, Pakistan and Tunisia to name but a few – it is disturbingly easy to imagine gunmen on the loose in a school or at a public event, shooting indiscriminately and leaving casualties in their wake. Imagine how different things could be if a gun had artificial intelligence built in to it, turning it into an intelligent gun.

The banking world, and now Goldman Sachs in particular, is getting on board with artificial intelligence. The investment bank has put millions into a US startup which uses machine learning for marketing.

In a breakthrough that wouldn't look out of place in a science fiction film, researchers said they have been able to control the minds of living animals by tweaking the activity of their brain cells. Using a specialised microscope to tweak activity of brain circuits, they were able to control the behaviour of mice, leading to hopes that we could one day selectively stimulate cells in the brain, like hitting keys on a piano. While mind control may seem like the stuff of dystopian sci-fi nightmares, the team said the findings could provide insight how the different regions of the brain communicate with one another and even shed new light on brain disorders. The brain is an incredibly complex organ, made up of interconnected clusters of cells which form neural circuits for different functions. Cells within circuits may fire in response to a given task, but deciphering which combination of on-off signals within the circuits achieves the desired effect has remained unclear.

Everything around us seems real enough, but recently a growing number of scientists have started to wonder whether life is all just an incredibly sophisticated simulation. Although the debate has been raging for years, Neil deGrasse Tyson recently gathered a group of eminent scientists in an attempt to put the theory to bed - or at least discuss ways to test it. And the mathematical evidence seemingly points to the fact that our lives could be nothing more than an elaborate computer game-style existence. In recent years a growing number of scientists have started to wonder whether it the entire universe is just an incredibly sophisticated simulation. DeGrasse Tyson gathered a group of scientists at the New York City's American Museum of Natural History on Tuesday night for the debate.

IBM wants to combine blockchain's distributed ledger technology with its artificial intelligence arm to make the billions of smart devices connected to the internet safer, and by doing so it would allow virtual time travel by letting regulators rewind to the point when the problem occurred and see just what happened. According to a report by CoinDesk, IBM is still in the very early stages of developing this project that brings together the company's Internet of Things Foundation and Watson divisions to create the Watson Internet of Things group, which is attempting to marry those technologies with the emerging blockchain technology that underpins the bitcoin network. "What we're doing with blockchain and devices is enabling the information those devices supply to effect the blockchain. You begin to approach the kind of things we see in movies." One of the potential applications of the technology would be to create a register of IoT devices based on the blockchain, with artificial intelligence programs then used to perform automated self-diagnoses and more advanced functions, which could eventually lead to the ability of engineers and regulators to virtually rewind the clock to go back in time and see at what point a smart device failed and see exactly what went wrong.

When self-driving cars get here, they'll make our commutes more efficient and allow us to get the kids to soccer practice without disrupting mom and dad's work days. They'll conserve resources, boost mobility for seniors and others who can't, and make deadly traffic accidents all but disappear. But the impact of self-driving cars will go deeper than even that, according to researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology, who've begun to study the potential ultra-long-range impacts of self-driving cars on urban environments. Everything from sidewalks and curbs to streets, building designs, urban layouts, and living patterns will change as computers take the wheel. "We're looking at the broader urban effects--and urban opportunities--of this technology," says Illinois Tech architect Marshall Brown, one of the team members in the Chicago school's Driverless Cities Project.

Now, a source claims the Small UAV Coalition is recommending the ban be relaxed to encourage commercial development in the area. The recommendations call for creating four categories of small drones that commercial operators can fly over people, including crowds in some cases. The first category of drones would weigh no more than about a half-pound (230 grams). They essentially could fly unrestricted over people, including crowds. Drone makers would have to certify that if the drone hit someone, there would be no more than a 1 percent chance that the maximum force of the impact would cause a serious injury.

Ruth Toner Data Scientist Twitch Insight Fellow 2016 Physics Postdoc Harvard University Ruth Toner was a Fellow in our most recent Data Science session in Silicon Valley. She's since joined the Community team at Twitch as a Data Scientist. In this post she describes Fanguard, the tool she built at Insight to protect Tumblr readers from spoilers for blockbuster movies and popular TV shows. Before attending Insight Data Science, I spent eight years of my life in the field of particle physics. Like many postdocs and grad students, when I wasn't trying to discover the basic laws of matter (i.e., debugging my code), I spent a lot of time surfing the Internet.

The system uses an optical camera for detection, as well as "passive ranging features" to predict whether any nearby aircraft will cross its flight path. If there's a potential collision, it'll recommend the best evasive action that complies with air safety regulations. "This SAA system has the potential to enable a wide range of manned and unmanned systems to safely integrate into an increasingly populated and complex airspace," Dan Patt, a Program Manager at DARPA said. "What pilot wouldn't want to set a box on their dashboard that would provide an additional pair of eyes?" DARPA has been working on the project for two years now. Its next step is to shrink the hardware -- a shoebox is still a little large, especially for commercial drones -- continue testing and develop some "mature" features, such as the ability to detect aircraft below the horizon line.