May 18 (Reuters) - Salesforce.com Inc, a marketing-and-sales software provider for 17 years, may be joining the ranks of the technology old-guard, but the 27 percent first-quarter revenue growth it posted on Wednesday still showed some startup zip. The company also provided a rosy outlook, raising its full-year revenue forecast and predicting that technology like artificial intelligence would drive future growth. Shares of Salesforce, seen as a barometer for the cloud-computing sector, rose 5.9 percent in after-hours trading. Cloud-delivered software, provided online on a subscription basis, has gained popularity with businesses due to its flexibility and cost benefits. Salesforce, founded in 1999, has won market share from more traditional software providers such as Oracle Corp and SAP AG, Chief Executive Marc Benioff reminded analysts on a conference call after the company reported its earnings.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been used extensively for understanding how systems and humans interact. Such techniques can be applied in the context of cyber security to enable a better understanding of how human beings interact with cyber systems. Resilience in cyber security systems can be augmented using these techniques, including Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Game theory. AI does provide us with the tools that enable greater cyber threat intelligence, as we try to stay one step ahead of the criminals. However, AI itself poses a number of challenges not least around the ethical question of using "human-like" machines.

SoftBank Robotics Corp. said Thursday it has expanded opportunities for app developers to use Google's Android platform for its humanoid robot Pepper. It hopes to encourage more programmers to develop apps for the device. An Android-ready Pepper model will go on sale in July, though only for developers, and on Thursday an Android development toolkit was made available for download, Fumihide Tomizawa, SoftBank Robotics chief, told a news conference at the firm's headquarters in Tokyo. Previously, there was a development platform specially designed for Pepper, but it was not based on Android. Tomizawa said the number of developers could increase 100-fold, as there are only several thousand Pepper app designers but hundreds of thousands of Android coders.

If there's one thing that I've learned in the few short years that I've been a fully-fledged scientist, it's that time is one of the most valuable commodities that you can give a researcher. In all its myriad forms, time is invaluable to the scientific process – time to develop ideas, time to write grants. The time that you need to run an experiment. Critically, the time that participants are willing to give you in the pursuit of knowledge. It's a precious thing, for everyone involved.

This blog is about the peculiar nature in which software sometimes gets developed. I hope that many readers will recognize the relevance of data science in the examples taken from my own projects. I propose that development is the product of creativity more than accreditation. Creativity is something complicated that interacts with a person over his or her life circumstances. Many people know how to write . . . However, the ability to write well does not necessarily make an individual a good novelist or creative writer. Taking into account the relevance of creativity as force in the process of development, it is necessary to recognize the importance of a person's life whether or not its events are specifically related to any particular undertaking. I will be detailing the meandering way that I personally tend develop software. I don't follow a straightforward path characterized by planning, schedules, and deliverables. Development for me tends to be sporadic, meshed in the details life, and closely tied to my interests. So it is rather non-business-like. I am not a professional programmer.

'How to be good?' is the pre-eminent question for ethics, although one that philosophers and ethicists seldom address head on. It was the question Plato posed in a slightly different form in The Republic when he said, "We are discussing no trivial subject, but how a man should live." Marcus Aurelius thought he knew the answer. When he unequivocally stated in his Meditations "A King's lot: to do good and be damned." He was himself a king and ruled almost all of the world that was known to him.

CloudMinds, a cloud robotics start-up founded by the former head of the research division of China Mobile, has raised US 30 million seed financing from SB China Capital (SBCVC), Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., Walden International and Kaixuan Capital. Cloud robotics is an emerging field of robotics rooted in cloud computing and cloud storage centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services. Huang Xiaoqing left the Research Institution of China Mobile last March to launch CloudMinds, according to an article published by Caixin Media. "A robot with similar capabilities of a real human requires a computer system that may be one million times bigger in size than that of a human brain, which means the brain of a robot must be on the cloud," Huang told the Chinese media organization. CloudMinds is targeting to reveal a full-service housekeeping robot in 2025 to service individual families.

Self-driving cars are expected to usher in a new era of mobility, safety and convenience. The problem, say transportation researchers, is that people will use them too much. Experts foresee robot cars chauffeuring children to school, dance class and baseball practice. The disabled and elderly will have new mobility. Commuters will be able to work, sleep, eat or watch movies on the way to the office.

Game lovers are likely to be familiar with Nvidia's graphics processors. The US tech firm continues to derive the bulk of its revenue from gaming-related semiconductors, but there is now a new growth segment -- chips for artificial intelligence (AI). Business related to deep learning, a core part of an artificially intelligent machine, is one key factor behind Nvidia's impressive first-quarter results. The advanced machine learning function is being applied to numerous areas, including speech recognition, video search, face detection and self-driving vehicles. Nvidia is already working closely with automaker Tesla in development of driverless car technology, which deploys AI to detect pedestrians and track lanes and to recognize traffic signs.

I wanted to put some of my ideas together, so as usual I'm writing a blog post. These are all pretty basic ideas but maybe they are helpful to people who are new to thinking about machine learning! When explaining what machine learning is, I'm giving the example of predicting the country someone lives in from their first name. So John might be American and Johannes might be German. In this case, it's really easy to imagine what data you might want to do a good job at this -- just get the first names and current countries of every person in the world!