Companies taking advantage of amazing new digital technologies dominate our list of 50 Smartest Companies. But despite impressive advances in artificial intelligence and automation, the economy remains in a troubling slowdown.

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.

Mason Halton, 10, put together a drone during Drone Camp on Tuesday, June 14, 2016. INDIANAPOLIS -- Ten-year-old Jade Bacon probably knows more about drones than most people do. She knows what stabilizers and a gimbal do and can point them out. She can tell you to what altitude someone can legally fly a drone (500 feet, if you didn't know), and where you can't fly drones (stay away from prisons and airports). Most of her knowledge about drones came from attending a two-day drone camp in Fishers, Ind., that taught kids about drones, then let them fly.

Wealth management firms, among the least tech-literate sectors of the financial services industry, might become obsolete with high net-worth individuals (HNIs) increasingly adopting digital technologies that provide algorithm-based portfolio management advice. A new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that surveyed 1,000 HNIs in Europe, North America and Asia, found only 25 per cent of wealth management firms globally offering digital channels beyond emails. The Tokyo office of McCann has created what it is claiming to be the first ad to be made by artificial intelligence. An ad for mint candy brand Clorets Mint Tab has been creative directed by AI-CD ß, which became the first machine member of McCann Japan's creative department at the beginning of April. "If we have been living in rigid ice, this is liquid-a new phase state.

ISC (RotM) Artificial intelligence is about to transform society in the same way electricity did 100 years ago, but researchers are nowhere near producing the sort of self-aware sociopathic systems beloved of sci-fi writers. At least that's what Andrew Ng, Silicon Valley-based chief scientist at Chinese Web giant Baidu, when he kicked off the International Supercomputing Conference, by sketching the progress of neural networks, or deep learning platforms over the last decade. Ng said that in 2007, researchers were working on the CPU level, and were making networks with one million connections. As technology has progressed through the use of GPUs, and onto the cloud, and into the realms of HPC technology, networks were being constructed with 100 million connections. At the same time, he said, researchers were able to use much larger data sets. Whereas academic research projects on speech recognition had worked with data sets of 2000 hours of speech, Baidu's own speech recognition project was using 40,000 hours, he said, resulting in something close to a game-changing 99 per cent accuracy.

The company's UAVs sound like they have what it takes to be effective inspectors: they can can roam plants for 10 minutes at a time, were designed to withstand collisions and can capture 1280x1080p resolution videos. However, human personnel still play a part by analyzing footage and images to figure out what the company needs to repair. Margarett Jolly, Con Edison director of Research and Development, said using drones can help them "speed up the process while still upholding and perhaps improving quality and safety." The energy company has uploaded videos of the inspection below, if you're interested in seeing what a steam plant looks like from the inside.

That dream of universal expertise is what IBM says its Watson question-answering, machine-learning system makes possible. Watson can be trained to answer questions on any subject you choose. The system uses natural language processing to read huge numbers of documents, extracts and organises information about a particular topic and then refines its understanding of that subject based on human feedback. But how useful are the answers given by Watson and how difficult is it to train? One person who's well-placed to talk about using the Jeopardy!-winning

Note: This article originally appeared in our sister publication, HPCwire. Greg Diamos, senior researcher, Silicon Valley AI Lab, Baidu (the China-based web services and search engine company), is on the front lines of the reinvigorated frontier of machine learning. Before joining Baidu, Diamos was in the employ of NVIDIA, first as a research scientist and then an architect (for the GPU streaming multiprocessor and the CUDA software). Given this background, it's natural that Diamos' research is focused on advancing breakthroughs in GPU-based machine learning. He answered questions about his research and his machine learning vision.

Olli, created by Arizona-based Local Motors, officially hit the streets of the nation's capital Thursday. Using an app similar to Uber or Lyft, ride-seekers can order the bus to pick them up and drop them off at their destinations of choice. Olli is electric-powered and 3D-printed, reducing the vehicles footprint before and after it hits the road, Local Motors wrote in a release. The bus can even talk to riders. "Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue," John B. Rogers Jr., Local Motors CEO and co-founder, said.

In the land rush to digitize the world, the home is the new frontier. Over the past few years, practically every household item within reach has been technologically upgraded and rendered "smart": toothbrushes, cutlery, baby monitors, refrigerators, thermostats, slow cookers, sprinkler systems, sex toys, even the locks in doors. Before they achieved enlightenment, they could perform only their rote, mechanical duties; now they can do so while connected to the internet. In the case of the telephone, this has been nothing short of revolutionary, but no other "smart" object has managed to replicate its success. The absurdity of the phenomenon was made unavoidably apparent in May, when a start-up unveiled a "smart tampon," called my.Flow.