The co-founder of online education platform Coursera has made it his mission to build talent for AI through his new project, deeplearning.ai. Andrew is preparing courses on deep-learning--advanced AI inspired by the human brain's neural networks--that will be available on Coursera. In an interview with ET's J Vignesh, the former chief scientist at Baidu also spoke about how technology disruption can help countries like India leapfrog and take a lead in the new world. Edited excerpts: How are we progressing towards the concept of singularity, or general intelligence, from sector-specific artificial intelligence? That is hard to project.

Apoorv Saxena, lead product manager at Google and co-founder of the AI Frontiers conference that will be held in Santa Clara, Calif., from November 3-5, speaks with Knowledge@Wharton about why interest in artificial intelligence is growing, what is likely to happen in the near future and which challenges will take longer to overcome. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Knowledge@Wharton: Interest in artificial intelligence has picked up dramatically in recent times. What is driving this hype? What are some of the biggest prevailing misconceptions about AI and how would you separate the hype from reality? Apoorv Saxena: There are multiple factors driving strong interest in AI recently. First is significant gains in dealing with long-standing problems in AI.

The Kinect is officially dead. But the reality is that Microsoft signed the do-all sensor's fate years ago. Faced with slumping hardware sales in 2014, then-new Xbox chief Phil Spencer had a decision to make. Either Microsoft would drop the price of the Xbox One, or continue letting Sony and the $400 PlayStation 4 eat its lunch. So it stopped bundling the Kinect with the console and cut $100 off the asking price.

Yann LeCun is one of AI's most accomplished minds, so when he says that even recent advances in the field aren't taking us closer to super-intelligent machines, you need to pay attention. LeCun has been working in AI for decades, and is one of the co-creators of convolutional neural networks -- a type of program that's proved particularly adept at analyzing visual data, and powers everything from self-driving cars to facial recognition. Now, as head of Facebook's AI research facility FAIR, he helps AI make the journey from the lab to the real world. His team's software automatically captions photos for blind users and performs 4.5 billion AI-powered translations a day. "We had a bigger impact on products than Mark Zuckerberg expected," LeCun told The Verge over Skype recently.

Is there a global theory for the shapes of fish? But for most of the history of biology, it's not the kind of thing anyone would ever have asked. Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And it's now 100 years since D'Arcy Thompson published the first edition of his magnum opus On Growth and Form--and tried to use ideas from mathematics and physics to discuss global questions of biological growth and form. Stretch one kind of fish, and it looks like another. Yes, without constraints on how you stretch. It's not quite clear what this is telling one, and I don't think it's much. But just to ask the question is interesting, and On Growth and Form is full of interesting questions--together with all manner of curious and interesting answers. D'Arcy Thompson was in many ways a quintessential British Victorian academic, steeped in the classics, and writing books with titles like A Glossary of Greek Fishes (i.e. But he was also a diligent natural scientist, and he became a serious enthusiast of mathematics and physics. And where Aristotle (whom Thompson had translated) used plain language, with perhaps a dash of logic, to try to describe the natural world, Thompson tried to use the language of mathematics and physics.

It is fall in Heidelberg and the leaves on the trees are already turning. This is the fifth year of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/) and it continues to be a highlight of the year for me and for about 250 others who participate. This year, computer science was heavily represented. There were fewer mathematicians, but they made up for smaller numbers by their extraordinary qualifications. A new cohort of laureates was added this year: recipients of the ACM Prize for Computing.a

In 2017, we celebrated 50 years of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, known simply as the Turing Award. Justifiably, the Turing Award is often accompanied by the tagline "The Nobel Prize in Computing." How did this prestigious award come to be? The early history of the Turing Award is somewhat murky. The minutes of meetings of ACM Council from the mid-1960s shed some, but not complete light on this history.

Ranked the world's third-largest non-game app developer, Cheetah Mobile faces significant challenges in meeting the different needs of a diverse advertiser clientele. In Asia-Pacific, specifically, advertisers have yet to catch up – in terms of media investments – with consumers who are rapidly moving towards mobile devices, according to Josh Ong (pictured below), Cheetah Mobile's director of global marketing and communications. In this Q&A with ExchangeWire, Ong explains how the Chinese app developer is enhancing its programmatic and technology stack to better cater to advertisers' needs, as well as glean deeper insights on its monthly user base of more than 600 million. Khin Mu Yar Soe, PubMatic's customer success manager, also chimes in to discuss how the publisher ad platform works to support Cheetah Mobile, compared to publishers in other regions. If we get that right, then we have a solid base on which to build our business.

"Microsoft Monday" is a weekly column that focuses on all things Microsoft. This week, Microsoft Monday includes details about the new Xbox dashboard rolling out, the KRACK Wi-Fi vulnerability being patched, new tree house offices, four new Xbox One S bundles, 62 vulnerabilities fixed in the "Patch Tuesday" update, Cortana integration in Skype, a machine learning partnership with Amazon, several major LinkedIn updates and much more! Microsoft is now rolling out the new Xbox dashboard for all users. The new Xbox dashboard features Microsoft's "Fluid Design" interface. There are four areas in the Xbox dash: the first area lets you resume what you were playing quickly, the second and third areas are suggestions for friends and the fourth area highlights deals and offers. And there is a horizontal strip at the bottom with most recently used content. The new Xbox Dashboard also has a new feature called "Content Blocks." Each content block has large visuals focused on a game, a friend or what is happening in the Gold Lounge.

It was found out over the weekend that Samsung Electronics apparently invested in a Chinese artificial intelligence startup called DeePhi Tech in August. Industry sources are now claiming that the South Korean company's move was likely due to political consideration. In an interview with The Korea Herald, one industry source disclosed that Samsung made a big investment in the Tsinghua-based startup that focuses on deep learning technologies. However, the decision to invest in the 1-year-old company is said to be not primarily due to DeePhi Tech's expertise. Instead, it is believed to be politically motivated.