Sports, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, food and music; Collision 2017 has a diverse mix of speakers on day one. Tuesday highlights include Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics talking about the challenges of robot ethics at 9.35am CT (BST -6 hours) and Donisha Prendergast, activist and granddaughter of Bob and Rita Marley, talking about the developing legal cannabis industry (10.30am CT). Security expert Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure explains who hackers are and what motivates them at 12.10pm (CT) and Stephen Wolfram talks about the future of computing at 12.30pm (CT). Check out the full agenda for Collision on Tuesday 26 April. Collision runs until Thursday 28 April and we will run the live stream for each day on this page.

This post is authored by Ted Way, Program Manager, Data Group, Microsoft. We are excited to announce the private preview of Azure Machine Learning as part of the IOT Suite launch at Hannover Messe, the world's leading trade fair for industrial technology, in Microsoft Azure Germany. Customers interested in participating in the preview can email AzureGermany@microsoft.com. A core set of Azure ML features are available in Germany, with more in the process of being added. The German datacenter is a physically and logically separate allocation of Azure, one in which all customer data and required support systems reside in German datacenters.

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In the new digital era, a business needs a store of data to help inform its decisions and interactions, but data is useless unless someone acts upon it. Unfortunately, it's very easy to collect more data than any human team could possibly sort through, let alone put into practice. That's where machine learning comes in. These systems learn from information stores to locate patterns and create rules with computer speed. Machine learning is becoming a valuable, perhaps even necessary, part of business infrastructure.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

In financial terms, Tom Clancy's The Division is a hugely successful video game. Released in March by French publisher Ubisoft, this New York-set third-person shooter quickly became the best selling new franchise of all time, generating more than 330m in sales in its first five days. But, just over a month after release, the best selling game in Ubisoft's 30-year history looks to be heading for catastrophe. The Division has a cheating problem. Not just one, either, but a critical mass of glitches, exploits, and hacks that – in the eyes of the playerbase at least – threaten the game's immediate and long-term future on the PC.

Soon, software will know how you feel--and will use that data to sell you things. The gig economy will go global (but it's not Uber-take-all). The tech industry will finally be inclusive. AI will achieve something like common sense, and it will be open source too. But that future won't build itself. Actual people (at least for now) have to make these things happen, and they aren't the C-suite hotshots you always hear about. The 25 people in these pages are the unsung creative, technical, and social visionaries working to bring the incredible world of tomorrow to you today. Get to know them now. Welcome to our second annual Next List. Surveillance is about to get much harder for overly snoopy governments. In November 2014 the Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp made a big change to its Android app: It encrypted messages so that even Facebook can't descramble them, no matter how many court orders the company receives. But the crypto software wasn't written by a Facebook employee.

Online shopping giant Rakuten Inc. is venturing into the uncharted territory of drone delivery, enabling golfers to order snacks, beverages and golf equipment while playing a round. Rakuten on Monday announced the nation's first drone delivery service, a monthlong experiment from May 9 at Camel Golf Resort in Chiba Prefecture. Rakuten will then consider whether to continue and expand the service based on the results. "We decided to provide a delivery service in golf parks, since there are regulations that restrict drones from flying over crowded areas such as (urban) yards and verandas," said a Rakuten spokeswoman. A smartphone Android application will be used by golfers to have food, drink and equipment delivered to fixed pickup points.

For anyone that hasn't yet joined the Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Data Science Learning Club, I thought I'd write up a summary of what we've been doing! The first activity involved setting up a development environment. Some people are using R, some using python, and there are several different development tools represented. In this thread, several people posted what setup they were using. I posted a "hello world" program and the code to output the package versions.

Diffbot, an artificial intelligence company that helps clients extract and combine data from multiple Web sources, announced today it raised 10 million from investors including Tencent and Felicis Ventures to expand its "knowledge-as-a-service" offerings to businesses and consumer apps. The Palo Alto, CA-based startup, founded in 2009, still has a tiny staff of 14. But Diffbot's ambition is huge: to catalog trillions of facts across the Web--many of them drawn from page elements such as comment forums, which can't be mined by traditional search engines. The startup says it has made a significant start on that goal, having indexed 1.2 billion entities such as people, products, and places since the middle of last year. Its Global Index also encompasses 10 to 20 times that number of facts, says Diffbot founder and CEO Mike Tung.