Convolutional Neural Networks are great: they recognize things, places and people in your personal photos, signs, people and lights in self-driving cars, crops, forests and traffic in aerial imagery, various anomalies in medical images and all kinds of other useful things. But once in a while these powerful visual recognition models can also be warped for distraction, fun and amusement. In this fun experiment we're going to do just that: We'll take a powerful, 140-million-parameter state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network, feed it 2 million selfies from the internet, and train it to classify good selfies from bad ones. Yeah, I'll do real work. But first, let me tag a #selfie.

So I've arrived late at the office of Viv, an artificial intelligence company based in San Jose, California. I missed my train from San Francisco after dawdling leaving my apartment and then finding the taxi service app on my phone wouldn't work. Dag Kittlaus, who I've kept waiting, looks on the bright side. "Your trials of getting here are a perfect illustration of how Viv will be helpful," he says. "Wouldn't it be nice to say'I need to get to San Jose, give me my options' and Viv would know how close you are to the train station, when the next train is coming, where the nearest cars, how much it was going to cost…" Kittlaus is the co-founder and CEO of Viv, a three-year-old AI startup backed by 30m, including funds from Iconiq Capital, which helps manage the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy tech executives. In a blocky office building in San Jose's downtown, the company is working on what Kittlaus describes as a "global brain" – a new form of voice-controlled virtual personal assistant.

Big data may hold a world of untapped potential, but what happens when your data set is bigger than your processing power can handle? A new algorithm that taps quantum computing may be able to help. That's according to researchers from MIT, the University of Waterloo and the University of Southern California who published a paper Monday describing a new approach to handling massively complex problems. By combining quantum computing and topology -- a branch of geometry -- the new machine-learning algorithm can streamline highly complex problems and put solutions within closer reach. Topology focuses on properties that stay the same even when something is bent and stretched, and it's particularly useful for analyzing the connections in complex networks such as the U.S. power grid or the global interconnections of the Internet.

The big news on March 12 of this year was of the Go-playing AI-system AlphaGo securing victory against 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol by winning the third straight game of a five-game match in Seoul, Korea. After Deep Blue's victory against chess world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, the game of Go was the next grand challenge for game-playing artificial intelligence. Go has defied the brute-force methods in game-tree search that worked so successfully in chess. In 2012, Communications published a Research Highlight article by Sylvain Gelly et al. on computer Go, which reported that "Programs based on Monte-Carlo tree search now play at human-master levels and are beginning to challenge top professional players." AlphaGo combines tree-search techniques with search-space reduction techniques that use deep learning.

Microsoft has published its latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR), which it does twice a year, covering security issues for the prior six months. This latest edition covers the second half of 2015, analyzing the threat landscape of exploits, vulnerabilities and malware using data from Internet services and over 600 million computers worldwide. It is a massive effort, with dozens of Microsoft staff from different groups contributing. For the first time, they looked at not only PC malware but threats to its Azure cloud service as well, which the company says "reveals how we are leveraging an intelligent security graph to inform how we protect endpoints, better detect attacks and accelerate our response, to help protect our customers." Every day, Microsoft's machine learning systems process more than 10 terabytes of data, including information on over 13 billion logins from hundreds of millions of Microsoft Account users and Azure Active Directory accounts, according to the company.

London AI is a community that brings startups, corporates and academics in the AI sphere together to understand the current state of the technology and what is in store for the near future . While some of our talks will take a technical deep dive, the forum is open to all those with a strong interest in the field. All proceeds go to Code Club, a nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11. There are over 3000 clubs in the UK, teaching over 44,000 kids! Click here to learn more about their philosophy and how you can get involved.

The number of sophisticated cognitive technologies that might be capable of cutting into the need for human labor is expanding rapidly. But linking these offerings to an organization's business needs requires a deep understanding of their capabilities. If popular culture is an accurate gauge of what's on the public's mind, it seems everyone has suddenly awakened to the threat of smart machines. Several recent films have featured robots with scary abilities to outthink and manipulate humans. In the economics literature, too, there has been a surge of concern about the potential for soaring unemployment as software becomes increasingly capable of decision making.

How close are technologies to simulating or overtaking human intelligence and what are the implications for industry and society?

Will the'rise of the machines' wipe out humanity – as portrayed in the Terminator movies? Will robots free us from the drudgery of work and enable us to enjoy endless leisure time? Or will Artificial Intelligence simply make us all redundant, creating mass unemployment, poverty, and economic meltdown? The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been in the news a lot recently. Everyone seems to be talking about it but few seem to know what it really means for business and society. To shed some light on the subject, the Norfolk Network invited AI technology expert Dom Davis to share his views and then asked four local business people to discuss what AI might mean for their industry.

Over 21 million adults in the United States suffer from impaired vision. Several companies are have been racing to develop wearables and implants that can improve or restore eyesight in these patients. One such wearable vision device, made by Israeli startup OrCam, just got an enthusiastic thumbs up from eye doctors who tested the gadget on 12 legally blind patients. OrCam's little camera device, which clips on to eyeglasses, reads aloud words on labels and signs, and names objects and faces for the wearer. Opthalmologists at the University of California Davis Eye Center published results of their study in the journal JAMA Opthalmology.