Reading comic books on a smartphone is a bit of a bummer. Comic books are designed to be read on a 7 10.5" page, which doesn't translate very well to a 5-inch screen. It's usually pretty hard to see the entire page and read the text, which leads to lots of zooming and panning. Google is tackling this problem the way it seems to be tackling every problem lately: with machine learning. Google has taught its army of computers to detect the speech bubbles in comic books, allowing you to zoom in on them with just a tap.

There is no denying 2015 was Fintech's year. Every start startup or VC conference had at least one panel dedicated to the subject. It is usually defined as subset of the tech universe which is focused on disrupting debt and equity transactions, payments, transfers, as well as asset management – basically applying disruptive technology to the financial services sector. According to Accenture investment in fintech reached more than 12Bn by the end of 2014 and the hottest fintech market in 2015 was Europe, where investments grew by more than 200% compared to a year earlier. In a strange twist, banks, and other financial institutions are already calling for more regulations to protect their industry from further disruption.

As you're choking down your latest serving of Trump Clinton Brexit Racism Terrorism Wealth Gap Climate Change Casserole, you could use some good news. Let's start with The Inevitable, the new best-seller by Kevin Kelly, one of our wisest technological prognosticators. "This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and say, 'Oh to have been alive and well back then!'" Kelly writes. "There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now. In the mid-2010s, we're getting the first sneak peeks at a bouquet of technologies that can vastly improve the lives of most people on the planet and solve some of our hardest problems--even climate change. Just consider for a moment how much everyday life has been transformed since 2007, when smartphones, social networks and cloud computing took off at about the same time.

Men are from Mars, algorithms are from...JL Jamie Condliffe reports in MIT Technology Review: Humans have a large pool of common-sense knowledge to draw on, which means they don't get caught out by such tricks. That's something researchers are trying to incorporate into a new breed of intelligent software that understands the semantic visual world. But just because computers don't use the same approach doesn't necessarily mean they're inferior. In fact, they may be better off ignoring the human approach altogether. Computer vision has been having a moment.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting and transformative opportunities of our time, argues Nathan Benaich, an investor at London-based investment firm Playfair Capital. While the field has gone through two cycles of bull ('50s-'70s and '80s) and bear ('70s and '97-'93) markets, where expectations were hyped up only to eventually fall short of their promises, I think this time is different. From my vantage point as a venture investor at Playfair Capital, where I focus on investing and building a community around AI, I think it's a fantastic time to build and invest into companies creating or leveraging AI for their products and services. There are three key reasons. First, our addictive usage of the internet, software products and smartphones – all two billion of them – has created data assets that describe our behaviours, interests, knowledge, connections (and more) at a scale and granularity that has never existed before.

I was electrified by Jonathan Berger's music before I knew he wrote about music. His chamber works arise out of a lightning storm of modernist angles, dramatic and startling, though anchored to melodies that sail like a swallow, as one of his string quartets is called. His one-act operas Theotokia and The War Reporter, performed together in concert, match taut musical brocades to the hallucinations of, respectively, a schizophrenic, hearing voices of various mothers, and a photojournalist, based on Paul Watson, who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his image of the corpse of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. A few years ago, I read some of Jonathan's academic writing about music, which had a sharp focus on neurology and acoustics. He is a professor of music at Stanford, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. On a hunch that he could connect with a popular audience, I asked him to write an essay for Nautilus about how composers upend expectations to keep listeners off guard and engaged. That article, "Composing Your Thoughts," and his next one for Nautilus, "How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time," which contain musical clips to illustrate his points, have been among our most popular articles. There's a certain amount of problem solving that happens in the context of a band of noise. For this month's issue I called Jonathan and was delighted to learn he had thought a lot about noise.

A shake-up of Japanese-language schools is in the cards as the government tries to lure more foreign students but faces up to the fact that many facilities are poorly run or even corrupt. According to education ministry officials, most of the problems stem from the fact that oversight of language schools has been handed over to the Justice Ministry, whose primary concern is not learning but immigration administration. Although the education ministry still has some say, oversight of school quality ends up falling between the cracks. "Increasing the quality of Japanese-language schools is practically a national policy but bureaucracy is getting in the way," an education ministry official said. "It's going to be difficult to improve the situation unless some serious wrongdoing surfaces."

One of the hottest topics today revolves around chat bots, "computer programs that mimic conversations with people using artificial intelligence [AI]" … to "transform the way you interact with the internet from a series of self-initiated tasks to quasi-conversation"1. What's all the fuss? And will these chat bots be a boon, or a bust, for customer experience? Tell me what you're experiencing with chat bots as a customer, and from your company's point of view. Let's first look at a handful of chat bots, and then see how they could help improve customer service and customer experience, finishing with some warnings and suggested steps. How can these and other chat bots help improve customer service and customer experience?

AlphaGo, Googles artificial intelligence (AI), has trounced the current world champion Lee Se-dol at the game of Go, four matches to one. Despite having very simple rules, this ancientgame has trillions upon trillions of possible moves and permutations, so AlphaGos victory is seen as a landmark in the evolution of AI. The tournament which took place in Seoul, South Korea showcased the AIs formidable calculating power, which is part of Googles overarching DeepMind program. Back in October of last year, AlphaGo defeated the reigning European Go champion five games to zero, and it has now risen to the very top of the field. Mr Lee said after that, although the defeat had "challenged" his ideas about the game Go, he did not necessarily think AlphaGo was superior to humans, reportedthe BBC.After the comprehensive win,Google said it would donate the 1 million prize to various organizations, including UNICEF, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) charities and a few Go groups.

Google has finally revealed a commercial use for DeepMind -- a British artificial intelligence company it acquired for over 600 million in 2014. DeepMind made headlines for beating the best human in the world at the notoriously complex board game Go and it's recently started working with hospitals in the UK on a number of healthcare projects but the startup is yet to make any money for Google, until now. Google announced on Wednesday that it has been using a DeepMind-built AI system to control certain parts of its power-hungry data centres over the last few months as it looks to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly. Last year, a Greenpeace report predicted that the electricity consumption of data centres is set to account for 12% of global electricity consumption by 2017 and companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have some of the biggest data centres in the world. Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data centre cooling units -- used to stop Google's self-built servers from overheating -- by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system.