Devin Butts walked the tiled halls of the Pueblo Mall early one Friday morning in April, amazed at what he saw. The mall, the main shopping center for the city of Pueblo in southern Colorado, was larger than anything the 25-year-old was used to while living on the streets of quiet prairie towns in north central Texas. He wandered through T-shirt stores and schlocky gift shops, past American flag-adorned beer bongs and marijuana-emblazoned "Rocky Mountain High" shirts, not noticing how employees warily eyed his baggy jeans and the tattoos peeking out from the sleeves and collar of his Bob Marley T-shirt. Or maybe he'd learned from experience to ignore the looks. Butts inquired at shop after shop. Often he received an apologetic shake of the head. Sometimes he was told to fill out an application online, no easy feat for someone who didn't own a computer.

There may have been question marks surrounding last week's annual video games expo – E3 in Los Angeles – with some publishers not hosting booths, but gamers need not fear: it was as bombastic as ever and promised much for the year ahead. EA and Activision did not have huge stands, for once, while Nintendo – usually one of the show's biggest exhibitors – had just one game to unveil, but the show was still filled with new hardware, blockbuster sequels and inventive IP. EA held a press conference across two continents, releasing details of Battlefield and Titanfall updates; Activision, too, used E3 to announce the return of the popular platform game Crash Bandicoot; Nintendo's lone project was the enchanting and ambitious open-world game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There were original games on display, too. Microsoft announced two new Xbox One machines.

In this Friday, June 17, 2016 photo, Gill Pratt, chief executive of Toyota Research Institute, speaks to reporters at Toyota Motor Corp.'s Tokyo office. The U.S. robotics expert tapped to head Toyota's Silicon Valley research company says the 1 billion investment by the giant Japanese automaker will start showing results within five years.

With much current discussion of AI fixating on ethical implications--whether AI may eventually "outsmart" or harm us; how we can ensure that AI acts in our best interests--it's worth considering a new approach to AI that keeps humans in the loop: swarm intelligence. UNU, a software platform run by Unanimous A.I., brings groups of people together online to arrive at all kinds of real-time decisions and predictions, ranging from who will win March Madness to the top four horses at the Kentucky Derby. The system has proven remarkably effective at coming up with accurate answers. In fact, it has outperformed experts in a variety of contests--in the 2015 Oscar predictions, for instance, the swarm had a higher than 70% accuracy--New York Times critics, it should be noted, were right 55% of the time. SEE: How'artificial swarm intelligence' uses people to make better predictions than experts But, beyond accuracy, there is another advantage to using the swarm: according to new research, it makes more ethical decisions.

The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning announced on June 19 that Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology professor Choi Jae-shik recently developed an artificial intelligence system and is going to unveil it at an academic seminar this month. According to the professor, the system is capable of predicting the future prices of houses, future stock prices, foreign exchange rate movements and the like after reading newspaper articles, business reports and so on and then automatically drawing up reports in English. "The system will become capable of drawing up the same reports in Korean at some point in time next year and writing news articles in the near future," the professor remarked. Earlier, an AI system capable of stock price prediction has been developed by the MIT and the University of Cambridge. This system, however, is limited in accuracy because it predicts future prices by analyzing correlations between the prices of stocks owned by someone and the others based on numerical data such as past prices.

The latest entrant into the new space race has a wingspan longer than the distance traveled by the Wright Brothers in their earliest flights. Its landing gear has a total of 28 wheels. And the local county had to issue special construction permits for the scaffolding needed to build what would be the world's largest airplane. Only someone like Paul Allen -- the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, owner of the Seattle Seahawks, dreamer and space enthusiast -- might attempt to build something like this: a twin-fuselage behemoth as wide as a football field that, fully loaded, would weigh 1.3 million pounds, be powered by six 737 engines and have 60 miles of wiring coursing through it. Called Stratolaunch, the plane would be bigger than Howard Hughes' famed Spruce Goose, which flew once, in 1947. But Allen's creation comes as the space industry is being disrupted by entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who like him, aim to revolutionize space travel.

The architecture includes maths capabilities that could be used by other software as part of a heterogeneous system architecture. That could include neural network software but ARM executives stressed that Bifrost is first and foremost an architecture for raster, tile-based graphics processing units (GPUs). The previous architecture – Midgard – is the one that underlies ARM's T-series Mali GPUs and has up to 16 unified shader cores and SIMD [single-instruction multiple data] instruction set architecture. Bifrost supports up to 32 unified shader cores with a scalar ISA, full hardware cache coherency and something called clause execution. The primary goal, according to Sean Ellis, GPU architect with ARM, was to achieve more performance per square millimeter of silicon and per line of "real-world" shader code. Whereas Midgard GPUs use SIMD vectorization Bifrost GPUs will use quad vectorization in which four scalar threads from a 2 by 2 pixel are executed in lock step.

ROOBO, a fast-growing hardware and AI startup headquartered in Beijing, today unveiled a prototype of its newest product, a "pet robot" called Domgy. For the unfamiliar, ROOBO is the company behind Pudding, a voice-controlled, educational robot for kids. Pudding is used to teach kids vocabulary, geography, jokes and more. The company also makes the Idealens virtual reality headset, Skyseries drone and Runbone earbuds. Since its founding in 2014, ROOBO has grown to 300 employees, with 7 worldwide offices, including one in Seattle.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates recently called artificial intelligence "the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about" during Vox Media's Code Conference. Gates discussed the rapid progress of speech recognition and computer vision technologies over the past five years, and noted that "the dream is finally arriving." If that dream arrives, tech investors should recognize the major trends and players in this market. To get started, let's examine 10 fascinating facts about the AI industry. Research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the AI market will grow from 420 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, thanks to the rising adoption of machine learning and natural language processing technologies in the media, advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare industries.

The New York City taxi dataset is one of the largest publicly available datasets. It has about 1.1 billion taxi rides in New York City. Previously this dataset was explored and visualized in a number of blog posts, where the authors used various technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL and Apache Elastic Search). Moreoever, in a recent blog post our colleagues showed how to build machine learning models over one year of this dataset using Microsoft R Server (MRS) running in a 4-node Hadoop cluster. In this blog post we will use a single commodity machine to show an end-to-end process of downloading and cleaning 4 years of data, as well building and evaluating a machine learning model.