Smack in the center of Palo Alto, Calif., sits a huge warehouse featuring three-story ceilings and at least 15,000 square feet of open space. Standing as it does in the very zip code that gave birth to Google, Facebook, and HP, this building represents some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. Inside, a platoon of workers bend metal and install soundproof glass, readying the structure for its rebirth. If Andy Rubin and his backers have their way, this former apricot canning facility will become ground zero for a massive shift in how society and business understand not just data, computing, and the Internet, but the very workings of the world around us. Back in 2016, we'll tell our kids, we didn't have the actual Internet. Call it the actuated Internet -- a virtuous circle of real world objects, at-scale artificial intelligence, and command and control that animates everything of value in our lives.

Artificial intelligence has had its share of ups and downs recently. In what was widely seen as a key milestone for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, one system beat a former world champion at a mind-bendingly intricate board game. But then, just a week later, a "chatbot" that was designed to learn from its interactions with humans on Twitter had a highly public racist meltdown on the social networking site. How did this happen, and what does it mean for the dynamic field of AI? In early March, a Google-made artificial intelligence system beat former world champ Lee Sedol four matches to one at an ancient Chinese game, called Go, that is considered more complex than chess, which was previously used as a benchmark to assess progress in machine intelligence.

The Power9 processor that IBM is working on in conjunction with hyperscale and HPC customers could be the most important chip that Big Blue has brought to market since the Power4 processor back in 2001. That was another world, back then, with the dot-com boom having gone bust and enterprises looking for a less expensive but beefy NUMA server on which to run big databases and transaction processing systems. The world that the Power9 processor will enter in 2017 is radically changed. A two-socket system has more compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth than those behemoths from a decade and a half ago delivered, and while NUMA systems are still important, distributed architectures now rule the datacenter for most workloads, and fat nodes comprised of a mix of processors and accelerators, rather than big CPU-only NUMA clusters, are becoming more common as companies try to create flexible and yet powerful compute complexes to address a wide variety of workloads. As the variety and complexity of Intel's own processor roadmap attests, the age of general purpose computing, where a few CPU SKUs covered the bases, is pretty much over.

I've been interested in artificial intelligence (AI) – the concept that humans can design a machine that thinks for itself without explicitly provide instructions (or a "program") -- since the early 1970s. As an undergraduate math major, I wrote a program designed to learn to play the game of Monopoly (checkers was too easy, chess was too hard). The program "knew" the objective, the layout of the board, the rules of play, and the content of the three stacks of cards that drive the game. It could handle up to 8 players. It wasn't very smart, but it had one great advantage -- it could play thousands of games against itself, remember the outcomes, and analyze why it had won (someone always wins) or lost using some simple algorithms. After a few weeks it was virtually unbeatable against one or more humans.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a concept already embedded in our day-to-day lives. When we speak about AI, it's easy to jump to thoughts of the Terminator movies or i-Robot, but is this really a vision of where technology is heading? AI is an extremely broad subject, but there are some fundamentals that will become common terms as the AI revolution gathers pace, and they're relevant to EHS. We've already achieved ANI – that's a program that can beat the most intelligent human at one thing, like a chess game or the board game "Go," as recently was achieved. What lies ahead is AGI, and it might be approaching us much quicker than we think.

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

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

Your math teacher lied to you. Sometimes getting your sums wrong is a good thing. So says Joseph Bates, cofounder and CEO of Singular Computing, a company whose computer chips are hardwired to be incapable of performing mathematical calculations correctly. Ask it to add 1 and 1 and you will get answers like 2.01 or 1.98. The Pentagon research agency DARPA funded the creation of Singular's chip because that fuzziness can be an asset when it comes to some of the hardest problems for computers, such as making sense of video or other messy real-world data. "Just because the hardware is sucky doesn't mean the software's result has to be," says Bates.

As we recently mentioned, a team of BigMLers are on their way Prague this week. Even tough our main motivation has been to participate in this weekend's Machine Learning Prague 2016 Conference, we will also be taking part in other events sprinkled during our time in this jewel of Europe: We hope that you can catch one or more of the above activities, so we get to find out what you have been working on and how we can collaborate going forward.

Israeli online contract review platform LawGeex announced today 2.5 million in funding from Lool Ventures and LionBird and angel investors Eilon Tirosh and Rami Lipman. The startup has also launched its online contract review solution free of charge for consumers. LawGeex allows consumers to upload any type of contract to its platform and receive, within 24 hours, an in-depth report of what's good, bad and even missing from their contract. Currently reviewing over 20 types of contracts, the free solution begins with employment agreements, with more contract types to be offered for free in the near future. LawGeex cofounder and CEO Noory Bechor said, "The driving force behind LawGeex is the belief that no one should sign a contract that they don't fully understand. An astounding 33% of Americans need a lawyer every year but do not hire one, either because they can't afford to or did not know where to turn. This ultimately leads to one-sided negotiations and unfair results. LawGeex has already earned the trust of thousands of users while ensuring quality and transparency, leveling the playing field when it comes to contract negotiations. Our machine learning platform has already reviewed over tens of thousands of contracts, many of which are employment contracts from some of the world's largest tech companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. We make sure all employees get a fair deal."