Doha, Qatar - Faced with shrinking budgets, greater competition and increasingly selective audiences, leaders of international media organisations gathering vowed to share ideas about how best to gather and present news. "We are 20 years into the digital revolution of the media," Gary Pruitt, president of the Associated Press news agency, told a gathering in Doha of around 300 journalists from across the world. "Demand for news will only grow from here, but the supply of news will also grow. Much of it will not be of very high quality." He said that "a key component to innovation at AP is to increase work and investment into media and technology startups", adding that the agency has tested drones for news gathering purposes, and has used "robot journalism" to produce reports without human intervention.

I grew up in a family of builders. My father is still in the construction business, and my mother is a practicing designer. We tore old walls down, built new walls, and shaped our environment. I started applying those skills after buying my first home -- a 105-year-old federal style row house in Washington, D.C. that was barely standing. After 543 days, 212 tools, three trips to the doctor, thousands of feet of lumber and drywall, and miles of wire and pipe, we had a new home.

Tweeting under the influence may not get you in as much trouble as drunk driving does, but it can still mean a whole lot of hot water. Now there's an algorithm that can tell when you're drinking while tweeting -- and also figure out where you're imbibing. Using machine learning, researchers at the University of Rochester have created a system that can find alcohol-related tweets and determine whether they were made by someone who was actually drinking at the time. It can also pick out whether those tweeters were drinking at home or somewhere else. Equipped with that knowledge, the researchers compared the results for different locations in New York State. Eventually, they hope to use the technology to study the health implications of alcohol.

By now, we've all heard of the addictive tile-mashing game called 2048. Last week, I picked up 2048 for the first time and -- true to my nature -- I started designing an AI to beat the game for me the following day. It didn't take me long to find out that there's already some pretty good AIs out there, so I picked up the best 2048 AI I could find and fired several instances of it to see what it could do. Much to my surprise, it not only beat 2048… it crushed every human record in 2048 that I could find. Below is a video of the first 20 seconds of the AI hacking away at the game, mashing and merging tiles at superhuman speeds that we only wish we could match.

Artificial intelligence-related research has tremendous potential to become useful in practical, everyday applications and to dramatically increase productivity. The field has been developing rapidly in recent years and is expected to really start taking off in the near future. A few of the cool things happening on the cutting edge in AI are highlighted below. AI Crossword App Could Help Machines Understand Language Researchers have designed a web-based platform that uses artificial neural networks to answer standard crossword clues better than existing commercial products specifically designed for the task. The system, which is freely available online, could help machines understand language more effectively.

Future computers will be smarter than humans, but they'will never be wiser' Internet tycoons have reached a rare consensus on the promise of artificial intelligence following the historic victory earlier this month for Google Inc's AI-powered AlphaGo over its human competitor, South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol. The widely watched five-match series came to a close on Tuesday, with four victories for the machine to the human's one. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc, told an audience at the China Development Forum in Beijing on Saturday that he predicted more great advances for AI within the next decade. "Artificial intelligence will understand senses, such as vision and hearing, and grasp language better than human beings over the next five to 10 years," he said. Lei Jun, founder and chairman of Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi Corp, agreed, describing the win as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.

Dan Chao is an avid cyclist who likes to train on a stationary bike. Lately while training he's been sporting a pair of trendy-looking headphones that also stimulate his brain. And he says the device has helped him improve his performance on his real bike. Chao is a cofounder and the CEO of a startup called Halo Neuroscience, which released the neurostimulating headphones, called Halo Sport, last month. The arch of the headphones contains two electrodes that deliver a very small amount of electric current to the wearer's head, aimed at the neurons in the motor cortex, a brain region that coördinates movement. The mild stimulation, called transcranial direct current stimulation, essentially makes it "slightly easier for the neurons to fire," says Chao.

This was the title of a very popular book published in 2012, featuring several job interview questions (brain teasers) asked by Google's hiring managers to candidates. They apparently dropped all these questions, as they found out that they were not good indicators of career success. Do you think you are smart enough to work for Google? I had one phone interview with Google long ago, and was rejected right away. The interviewer was just focused on very technical details, and spent all her time arguing about Lasso regression, and was clearly looking for a specialist, dismissing people with a broad range of skills and non-standard approach to solving tech problems.

No longer the exclusive domain of data-reliant businesses like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, machine learning has been making its way into the masses as an essential approach to data. Today, machine learning is understood and accepted by a more mainstream audience, and has become a measurable driver for big business benefits both on and offline. There are three key reasons why machine learning has become one of the top 10 strategic technology trends that will shape digital business opportunities through 2020. First, the volume of data companies now collect is so massive that many companies struggle to make sense of it and fail to take advantage of it. Second, the computing power required to process these exploding data assets, previously exclusive to the Googles of this world, is now widely available to smaller businesses.

God moves the player, he in turn the piece. But what god beyond God begins the round Of dust and time and sleep and agony? As I write this column, a computer program called AlphaGo is beating the professional go player Lee Sedol at a highly publicized tournament in Seoul. Sedol is among the top three players in the world, having attained the highest rank of nine dan. The victory over one of humanity's best representatives of this very old and traditional board game is a crushing 3 to 1, with one more game to come.