As of February 1st, Nvidia has announced five finalists to compete for its 2016 Global Impact Award, a yearly 150,000 research grant that goes to any researcher or institution that has used Nvidia GPU technology to make a positive social or humanitarian impact. This year's finalist teams come from Stanford University, Imperial College London, George Mason University, Duke University and Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology. Stanford finalist: "GPUs Help Map Worldwide Poverty" One of the five selected finalists this year is machine learning expert Stefano Ermon, who partnered with food security specialists David Lobell, Marshall Burke and some Stanford engineering students for their work in using GPU-accelerated deep learning to turn regular Google Earth images into statistical poverty models. The team trained a neural network to accurately predict poverty levels in sub-Saharan Africa from satellite image features like roads, farmlands and homes. "There are countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which the most recent data we have is 20 years old, so we're still extrapolating from early '90s estimates," says Ermon.

Instead, it is doing just the opposite: the Windows maker announced the Bot Framework, a tool to assist developers in creating their own chat bots, at its Build developer conference in San Francisco. Microsoft has released its BotBuilder software development kit (SDK) on GitHub under an open source MIT licence. The kit will enable developers to add chat bots to different applications, including widely used communication apps like Slack. Microsoft's own developers are using the tool to integrate its virtual assistant Cortana with Skype, as well as launching a dedicated bot platform for the video calling service. Cortana will reportedly be able to actively search for relevant words and phrases and draw more detail from Bing, help users manage their calendar and make suggestions for people Skype users should get in touch with.

" A revolution will happen when tools like Siri can truly serve as your personal assistant and you start relying on such an assistant throughout your day. To get there, these systems need more knowledge about your life and preferences, more knowledge about the world, better conversational interfaces and at least basic commonsense reasoning capabilities. I have interviewed Alon Halevy, Executive Director at Recruit Institute of Technology. What is the mission of the Recruit Institute of Technology? Alon Halevy: Before I describe the mission, I should introduce our parent company Recruit Holdings to those who may not be familiar with it.

One of the striking things about Blizzard, the superstar developer behind some of gaming's biggest hits, including World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft, is how little it actually does. That's not to say the company's employees aren't constantly at work, although the Kendo lessons taking place on the lawn outside its headquarters in Irvine, California, on the sunny spring day I visit could give that impression. The HQ is a hive of industry, even if most of that industry is hidden behind doors marked Secret: No Visitors. But that list of smash hits above constitutes fully half of the franchises Blizzard is developing. Those three are stalwarts at the company: World of Warcraft is celebrating its 10th anniversary, Starcraft II is six years old and two expansion packs into its life, and Diablo III is enjoying a second wind as an acclaimed couch co-op game four years after it first launched.

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

If you use Google Photos regularly, you're probably already aware of its impressive machine-learning skills. Searching for keywords such as "cactus," "Golden Gate Bridge," or "baseball" in your photo roll will bring up eerily appropriate images. It doesn't matter if you don't tag your shots; the results are driven by machine learning, not by metadata. The same search functionality exists in Google Drive. If you store or share images with Drive, the same text-based searches will bring up results there, too.

A government-sponsored committee is recommending standards that could clear the way for commercial drone flights over populated areas and help speed the introduction of package delivery drones and other uses not yet possible, The Associated Press has learned. The Federal Aviation Administration currently prohibits most commercial drone flights over populated areas, especially crowds. That ban frustrates a host of industries that want to take advantage of the technology. "Every TV station in the country wants one, but they can't be limited to flying in the middle of nowhere because there's no news in the middle of nowhere," said Jim Williams, a former head of FAA's drone office who now advises the industry for Dentons, an international law firm. Cellular network providers also want to loosen restrictions so drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, can inspect cell towers, which often are in urban areas.

GCP (Google Cloud Platform) Next 2016 conference was held in San Francisco, which gave some insights into the upcoming GCP roadmap, and acted as a reminder that Google needs to be taken seriously in the Public Cloud Provider space. The geographic expansion raised probably the most excitement: Google has committed to add two additional data centers this year to the current 3, following by yet another 10 new datacenters in 2017. This will be an impressive geographical coverage ramp up in two years, and will act as genuine competition against the other big providers. It looks like Google has a well cooked "recipe" for building cloud data centers, and in fact they have not kept this as a secret to themselves, but released it for public consumption with all the standard best practises, along with other papers such as its highly scalable network load balancer design. While the platform is geographically expanding, the focus is also on technology innovations and the Google team are releasing Machine Learning and Big Data offerings one after the other at a fast pace. Nowadays, Machine Learning (ML) is playing a key role in all aspects of IT, including the operating data centers (according to Google).

Have you tried talking to anyone about Artificial Intelligence? Those words instantly conjure up images of killer robots, Jarvis and superhero movies for most people. Artificial Intelligence has gone through several decades of ups and downs. Investors and founders have gained and lost billions through these cycles, while tech leaders like Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and a long history of neuroscientists from Hubel and Weisel, to Sejnowski and Olshausen continued to push the boundaries on brain research, Neuromorphic Engineering, Robotics and Machine Learning, breaking new grounds, cycle after cycle. Much of the technology industry waited for a big bang event to announce the big arrival of AI.

In the first years of her career in brain research, Beth Stevens thought of microglia with annoyance if she thought of them at all. When she gazed into a microscope and saw these ubiquitous cells with their spidery tentacles, she did what most neuroscientists had been doing for generations: she looked right past them and focused on the rest of the brain tissue, just as you might look through specks of dirt on a windshield. "What are they doing there?" she thought. Stevens never would have guessed that just a few years later, she would be running a laboratory at Harvard and Boston's Children's Hospital devoted to the study of these obscure little clumps. Or that she would be arguing in the world's top scientific journals that microglia might hold the key to understanding not just normal brain development but also what causes Alzheimer's, Huntington's, autism, schizophrenia, and other intractable brain disorders. Microglia are part of a larger class of cells--known collectively as glia--that carry out an array of functions in the brain, guiding its development and serving as its immune system by gobbling up diseased or damaged cells and carting away debris. Along with her frequent collaborator and mentor, Stanford biologist Ben Barres, and a growing cadre of other scientists, Stevens, 45, is showing that these long-overlooked cells are more than mere support workers for the neurons they surround.