The CEO of Baltimore-based nonprofit Digit All Systems Inc., Lance Lucas described a real-world approach to using coding to create opportunity. His company has trained more than 10,000 students in cybersecurity certifications and computer programming through partnerships with 60 schools in the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area, and has donated more than 3,500 computers to churches, schools, community groups and other organizations in need. He organized the first guns-for-computers trade-in program in the U.S. in 2013 and, after the rioting in Baltimore in 2015, offered people in affected areas a chance to reboot their lives.

Google announced a bunch of new products today at the I/O 2016 conference in Mountain View, California. Some, like Google Home and Android N, were expected while others, such as the VR standard Daydream, weren't. Here's the best of what they announced: The search company announced an always-listening virtual assistant for the home at today's Google I/O 2016. Similar to Amazon's Echo, Google Home will allow users to discover movie times, answer a question, or carry out a task using a vocal command from anywhere in the room. In addition, Google Home can control your TV, presumably if it has a Chromecast attached.

Google is catching up to competitors Facebook, Apple and Amazon in messaging, video calling and home speaker-embedded digital assistants. But it's taking the lead in virtual reality and may have changed mobile phones forever with a new twist on mobile apps that allows them to play without being installed. That's the conclusion of Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research, who was at the Google I/O annual developers conference Wednesday in Mountain View, California. Dawson said Google's new Allo app focuses on the search giant's strengths in search and natural language recognition, but may have come too late behind bigger rivals to gain much use. In a research note he praised Google's new Daydream virtual reality platform, but noted it'll take time to become popular because the high bar for specifications means no devices can support it yet.

Google wants to play an even bigger role in managing people's daily lives, while also nudging them into an alternate reality, as the Internet company responds to competitive threats posed by Facebook, Amazon and Apple. As part of an onslaught of upcoming products, Google will implant a more personable form of artificial intelligence into an Internet-connected device called Home, which echoes the Echo, Amazon.com's Meanwhile, Google will also delve deeper into the still-nascent realm of virtual reality with a system called Daydream that's meant to challenge Facebook-owned Oculus's early lead in fabricating artificial worlds. In an attempt to outshine Apple, Google is also adding features to its Android operating system, including the ability to run apps without actually installing them on a device. That feature, called Instant Apps, might have been the biggest breakthrough that Google announced Wednesday at its annual developers conference held in an amphitheater located a few blocks from its Mountain View, California, headquarters.

Defense and aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin today announced a proposal to establish a science laboratory that will orbit Mars starting in 2028. It will house six astronauts who will spend 10 to 11 months onboard, remotely driving robots, flying drones, and studying samples from the Red Planet in real time in anticipation of landing humans on its surface in the following decade. "We will be able to accomplish more science in just a few months from Mars's orbit than we have in the previous 40 years," Tony Antonelli, former astronaut and now Lockheed's chief technologist for civil space exploration, told The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview. Though the company hasn't released technical details about its Mars Base Camp, or an estimate of how much it would cost, Mr. Antonelli said most of it would be assembled in cislunar space – between the Earth and moon – over a series of missions in the 2020s. It will rely on technologies that Lockheed is developing with NASA now, which should keep the project affordable says Antonelli.

Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.

The message from Google's developers' conference is clear: The company is prepared to take on competitors as well as regulators. CEO Sundar Pichai and his team were flexing. We can do chatbots better than Facebook. We can be smarter at home than Amazon Echo. Our personal assistant gets trained on Google search, which is more widely used than Microsoft's Bing.

Google has begun to build its own custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip called tensor processing units (TPUs), Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said today at the Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California. The name is inspired by Google's TensorFlow open source deep learning framework. But the technology is one of a kind -- something that makes sense only at Google scale. These TPUs were used in the AlphaGo artificial intelligence (AI) powered Go player that beat top-ranked Go player Lee Sedol, Pichai said. It also works inside Google search and Google Street View.

From virtual reality to a new smart-home speaker, Google is showing off just how pervasive it has become even as it's squeezed by its biggest competitors--Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Google showed off a VR system called Daydream, along with plans for headsets that will compete with Facebook's Oculus Rift. In a jab at Amazon, the company announced Google Home, an Internet-connected speaker that listens for your voice commands to play music or control lights and thermostats in the home. It is reminiscent of Amazon's Echo and will be available later this year for a yet-unannounced price. In an attempt to outshine Apple, Google is also adding features to its Android operating system, including the ability to run apps without actually installing apps.

Google I/O was full of announcements about upcoming products and enhancements. We're in a seminal moment, said Google chief executive (CEO) Sundar Pichai kicking off the company's annual I/O Conference in San Francisco. Looking back at the past 17(?!) years, Pichai discussed Google's evolution to the live audience of 7,000. As technology gets more sophisticated, he sees artificial intelligence (AI) playing a huge role in the company's next 17 years. "Leveraging our state-of-the-art capabilities in machine learning and AI, we truly want to take the next step in being more assistive to our user. Today, we are announcing the Google Assistant," said Pichai, one of the only people in the world who's allowed to use the "L" word on Search Engine Watch.