The project, which is being done with Sweetwater Tech Resources, utilizes Water Planet's IMS-5000 Integrated Produced Water Treatment Solution powered by IntelliFlux. The IMS-5000 technology used in the pilot is an integrated mechanical and membrane filtration system that incorporates ceramic membranes to filter the water. It was developed to perform in oil & gas produced water treatment, one of the most challenging water treatment applications on the planet. As part of the project, Water Planet is also running a standard reverse osmosis unit to desalt the brackish water that is left after treatment by the ceramic ultrafiltration membranes. "We are currently running a series of demonstrations using a range of waters provided by a consortium of California oil producers to evaluate treating produced water for potential use in agricultural irrigation.

Aliyun, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, on Wednesday officially introduced an artificial intelligence (AI) robot named Ai that's meant to compete with overseas AI players. The Ai system was developed on the basis of neural networks and social computing, according to a press release Alibaba sent to the Global Times on Wednesday. The Ai system is good at predicting and understanding human emotions, the company said. Neural networks are based on animals' central nervous systems, and they are used to mimic functions involving many inputs. Social computing can be defined as the intersection of social behavior and computing systems.

Apple co-founder and PC revolutionary, Steve "the Woz" Wozniak thinks there may be no need to own a car in future, thanks to developments in self-driving vehicles and Uber. Discussing artificial intelligence at the Future Transport Summit 2016 in Sydney, Wozniak said the implications of AI on transportation were bound to be huge, with a subsequent decline in ownership of cars, especially in cities where public transportation was more sophisticated. Wozniak said he anticipated a gradual shift towards private ownership of vehicles as they start to be seen less as a crucial part of our lives and more as means of getting from A to B. "Uber is a good example of [why drivers aren't needed] - if you just order it and a car comes, why does there need a driver? Without a driver we get all the benefits of lower cost and more safety," he said. "How long would it take before all the cars were not owned, or self-driving if they are owned? "Self-driving Ubers are the future, and we can use money we had set aside for a car to pay off student loans or buy new computers." Wozniak suggested that despite the dwindling necessity to own a car, some people will still hope to have one due to our human desire to own things. "I still think people will want to own a beautiful car even if you never see it… Look at the music industry, you used to buy your own CDs and vinyl, and I still have problems giving that up.

The threat from such machines is real enough for 100 states to come together and debate the matter of their ban for three consecutive years now. The use of autonomous machines could potentially change the vocabulary of warfare, just like gun powder and nuclear arsenal upon their entry into the battlefield. In April 2013, NGOs associated with successful efforts to ban landmines and cluster munitions got together in London and issued a call to governments urging the negotiation of a treaty preventing the development, deployment and use of what are known as'Killer Robots' in popular parlance. In July 2015, some of the world's leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientists including Apple co-founder Steven Wozniak, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallin and Professor Stephen Hawking signed a letter with nearly 21,000 signatures asking for an outright ban on these autonomous weapons systems (AWS). "Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow," states the letter.

The initiative should take delivery drones one step closer to legitimacy, but it'll also underscore the limits of current technology. Australia's vast size makes it unlikely that drones will provide anything approaching coast-to-coast coverage. They just don't have the range to deliver to a village hundreds of miles away from the nearest large town, unfortunately. Even if drone service takes off, rural dwellers will likely have to make do with old-school airmail and delivery trucks.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. Expect financial markets to face headwinds today after the Federal Reserve reported Friday that U.S. industrial production fell more than expected in March. This is the latest sign that economic growth slowed significantly in the first quarter. On the plus side, though, many economists still forecast a rebound in growth as the year plods ahead. Tax deadline: Monday is the deadline for most Americans to submit their tax returns.

Janicza Bravo makes short films about loneliness. In one, Michael Cera plays an abrasive paraplegic who can't get lucky. In another, Gaby Hoffmann plays a phone stalker for whom the description "comes on too strong" is not strong enough. Bravo's shorts employ the visual grammar of art-house cinema: over-the-shoulder shots representing a character's point of view, handheld tracking shots depicting urgent movement, lingering closeups to heighten intimacy or unease, carefully composed establishing shots with an actor in the center of the frame. In March, 2015, Bravo went to Venice, on the western edge of Los Angeles, to meet with a production company called Wevr. The name is pronounced "weaver," but it can also be thought of as a sentence, with "We" as the subject and "V.R." as the verb. As anyone who has read a tech blog within the past five years, or a sci-fi novel within the past five decades, knows, "V.R." stands for virtual reality--a loosely defined phrase that is now being applied to several related forms of visual media. You put your smartphone into a portable device like a Google Cardboard or a Samsung Gear--or you use a more powerful computer-based setup, such as the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive--and the device engulfs your field of vision and tracks your head movement. The filmic world is no longer flat. Wherever you look, there's something to see. The producers at Wevr invited Bravo to write and direct a V.R. project. "I said no," she told me. "It sounded like a technical thing, and I'm not into technical. But then I talked to my husband, and he said, 'How often do people just hand you money in this business?' So I changed my mind." She thought about what kind of story might be told most effectively in the new medium. "The two words I kept hearing about V.R. were'empathy' and'immersion,' and I wasn't sure that being immersed in one of my dark comedies would be all that useful."

Oracle Corp. has acquired Israeli machine-learning Big Data startup Crosswise, Inc. The price of the acquisition was not officially disclosed but is believed to be 50 million according to local media. Founded in 2013, Crosswise provides an authoritative consumer device map to ad tech vendors, consumer brands, and premium publishers. The company's platform combines data science, Big Data and machine learning, to identify which PCs, phones, tablets, digital TVs and other connected devices are being used by individual consumers; by applying advanced data science and proprietary machine-learning techniques to this data, Crosswise constructs a new probabilistic Device Map matching multiple devices to individual users in an accurate, scalable and high-quality manner. According to Crosswise, the benefits in being able to provide this data is that it allows marketers and premium publishers to deliver advertising, personalization and analytics across different sorts of devices.

David Ledbetter, data scientist at the Children's Hospital Los Angeles, shares how his team is using TITAN X GPUs and deep learning to help provide better recommendations of drug treatments for children in their pediatric intensive care unit. To train their models, 13,000 patient snapshots were created from ten years of electronic health records at the hospital to understand the interactions between a patient's vital state, heart rate, blood pressure and the treatments they were given. By understanding the most important relationships in the data, they are then able to generate the probability of survival predictions for the patients moving forward as well as physiology predictions in order to simulate augmented treatments. David presented his research poster "Dr. Watch more scientists and researchers share how accelerated computing is benefiting their work at http://nvda.ly/X7WpH

While the technology to simulate conversation with a computer has been around for decades, bots -- or "chatbots" -- are an increasingly trendy model for software. This new obsession came on fast. Where did these bots come from? Is a fake conversation better than just clicking buttons? You'll be hearing a lot more about bots soon, so here's an overview.