Each year a crazy thing happens. From around the country, and now increasingly around the world, a strange band of adventurers travels to Austin, Texas. It's hard to describe them, a mix of content creators, technologists, game designers, and consumer brands. They come to participate in South By South West (SXSW) Interactive. Don't be confused if you arrive and find yourself hanging out with filmmakers or musicians, as there are separate content tracks for film and music.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Nearly a decade after the iPhone broke the mould for mobile phones the question is now being asked whether the evolution of the smartphone has finally come to an end as even Apple now treats older, smaller 4-inch screens as something new. Industry experts believe innovation in smartphones is giving way to phone functions popping up as software or services in all manner of new devices from cars to fridges to watches and jewellery rather than remaining with handheld devices. And analysts and product designers said fresh breakthroughs are running up against the practical limits of what's possible in current smartphone hardware in terms of screen size, battery life and network capacity. "Everything in the phone industry now is incremental: slightly faster, slightly bigger, slightly more storage or better resolution," said Christian Lindholm, inventor of the easy text-messaging keyboards in old Nokia phones that made them the best-selling mobile devices of all time. The financial stakes are high as the futures of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, the world's three biggest listed companies at the end of last year, may turn on who gets the jump on making handsets redundant.

The ability to access and use financial services is critical to managing day-to-day life, weathering unexpected events, and capturing opportunities. Yet, some 46 percent of working-age adults in developing countries remain excluded from the formal financial system. It means they use the age-old informal mechanisms such as the moneylender, the pawnbroker, or the rotating savings club that can be unreliable and very expensive. In developed countries, working families are more likely to be under- or badly served rather than outright excluded. In the US, for example, every year some 25 million households use alternative services such as payday lenders or check cashers.

Every day new travel sites and apps are launched that promise to make trip planning easier. Some do and some don't. Here are two free tools optimized for smartphones that I tested and really liked: Lonely Planet's free Guides app for iOS and Android, and Destinations on Google, which makes it easy to aggregate information for your next travel adventure. The app includes more than 35 free importable guides to international and U.S. destinations, from Bangkok to London and Boston to San Francisco. I tested New York, Kyoto and Vancouver.

Boiteux, an assistant fire chief from Los Angeles, is helping train Greek first responders to use Emily. Boiteux, an assistant fire chief from Los Angeles, is helping train Greek first responders to use Emily. On a cold, rainy morning a few weeks ago, eight black inflatable rafts, loaded with migrants, bob in the waters off the northern shore of the Greek island of Lesbos. "This boat up there?" he says. So they ask for help from the coast guard." A Norwegian rescue boat with the European Union's border agency, Frontex, heads toward the distressed raft. Hantzopoulos walks along the rocky shore with John Sims, a fire captain from Sahuarita, Ariz. He's teaching members of the Hellenic Red Cross how to use a remote-controlled rescue device called Emily -- which stands for Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard. You might call Emily a buoy. You might call her a boat. She's about 4 feet long, weighs 25 pounds and looks like a cylinder wrapped in an orange-red life jacket. Sims steers Emily in the water with a remote control. She speeds toward the migrant rafts. "I'll keep her about 20-30 meters behind [them]," he says. The only thing that affects her sometimes over a wave is a little bit of wind. In a high wind situation we would actually fill the hull with some water to be able to weight her down some so, so, she wouldn't fly so bad off the top of the waves."

These questions originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. Q: How should one start a career in machine learning? A: There is not just one way. You can start at any age. Some math background (in linear algebra, statistics, and calculus) is recommended, so take classes on these topics, if possible.

Under the slogan "Be the First Mover in the Era of Knowledge and Information," South Korea has emerged as one of the world's IT powerhouses in just six years. Incheon International Airport, the epitome of IT convergence, has been named the world's best airport for 11th consecutive years. The S. Korean financial industry, which had finished 86th behind Uganda, has risen to the world's 7th largest, easing regulations on the separation of industrial and financial capital and granting Kakao and KT preliminary licenses to run the nation's first online-only banks. The Go-playing AI AlphaGo had the brand value of Google leapfrogging over that of Samsung Electronics instantly. It was all the work of software.

Former top executives from IBM Watson, GE Digital, Infosys and MicroStrategy announced last week that they have joined forces with TPG Growth to launch Noodle Analytics, Inc., the Enterprise Artificial Intelligence company. Enterprise AI represents a major step forward in merging human learning and machine learning, all fueled by big data. Enterprise AI solutions combine expertise in human-centered design, business process engineering and artificial intelligence technologies. Today's artificial intelligence technologies include machine learning, predictive data analytics and data science. "Over the next three to five years, artificial intelligence technologies and big data will be the most significant competitive differentiators in business. We are excited to be a pioneer in Enterprise Artificial Intelligence, offering timely, valuable, and affordable solutions to clients. We have the right team, an optimized business model, and the right partners to create extraordinary value," says Stephen Pratt, CEO of Noodle.ai.

This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. In November 2013, more than 100 patients with cancer - including pancreatic, breast, liver and brain tumours - embarked on clinical trials involving BPM 31510, a drug discovered by an algorithm. The story of BPM 31510 begins with the extraction of biological data from healthy and cancerous tissue samples from over 1,000 patients. This data was then processed by artificial intelligence algorithms, which analysed it and suggested possible drug treatments. "We've essentially reversed the scientific method," says Niven R Narain, the 38-year-old president and co-founder of Berg, the Boston pharma startup which makes BPM 31510. "Instead of a preconceived hypothesis that leads us to do experiments and generate a particular type of data, we allowed the biological data from the patients to lead us to the hypotheses." Making an effective cancer-fighting drug is a notoriously difficult process: according to Narain, development and production can cost pharmaceutical companies up to 2.6 billion ( 1.8bn) and take 12 to 14 years to complete. "Only one per cent of the cancer drugs that make it to clinical trials prove to be effective. It's expensive and the development process is inexcusably long," Narain says.

Deep learning is a new buzzword among machine learning researchers, both in academia and industry. It deals with making machines learn to solve complex real world tasks using approaches similar to the ones adopted by their human counterparts. Computers are good at following instructions without even a single bit of deviation. The programs we write are simply a collection of instructions, which need to be executed in a pre-determined order. Is that good or bad?