For die-hard fans of the Syfy drama "Battlestar Galactica," the closing night reunion panel at the ATX Television Festival was a treat-filled trip down memory lane. Seven key cast members -- Edward James Olmos (Admiral Adama), Mary McDonnell (President Laura Roslin), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), James Callis (Gaius Baltar), Tricia Helfer (Number Six), Grace Park (Boomer/Number Eight) and Michael Trucco (Sam Anders) -- and executive producer Ronald D. Moore came together to celebrate the groundbreaking series that was as much post-9/11 allegory as it was grand space adventure. The "BSG" gang still clearly enjoy each other's company and had both the audience and each other cracking up throughout the nearly two-hour Q&A session at Austin's Paramount Theatre. From awkward sex scenes (Callis and Helfer) to uncontrollable giggles (McDonnell and Sackhoff) to Olmos's Adama-like leadership qualities, the cast mates and Moore fondly recalled funny and touching moments from their time on the series, which ran from 2004 to 2009. Callis recalled a scene in which he fell and hit his head requiring a trip to an emergency room.

Artificial intelligence pioneer Alain Colmerauer passed away on May 12. Alain Colmerauer, a French computer scientist and a father of the logic programming language Prolog, passed away on May 15 at the age of 76. Alain Marie Albert Colmerauer was born in the French town of Carcassonne on Jan. 24, 1941. He earned a degree in computer science from the Institut polytechnique de Grenoble (Grenoble Institute of Technology) in 1963, and a doctorate in the discipline in 1967 from the École nationale supérieure d'informatique et de mathématiques appliquées de Grenoble, which is part of the Institut. The newly minted doctor spent 1967–1970 as assistant professor at the University of Montreal, where he created Q-Systems, a method of directed graph transformations according to given grammar rules. Colmerauer moved to the University of Aix-Marseille at Luminy in 1970 as Professeur 2ème classe (associate professor).

How will AI change healthcare? "I'm sorry, you have cancer." These are words NO one wants to hear. When my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, I truly wish he'd had access to the amazing healthcare possibilities enabled by AI. Incredibly, a flawed second opinion probably saved his life--and nearly killed him.

They are used for a number of things like customer service and personal queries. Sometimes, they seem positively human. Today's chat bots are appearing everywhere and anywhere. That's because more people are adopting mobile devices and relying on mobile applications. Companies are forced to deliver a mobile-first experience, one that tailors to everything the platform is known for -- the number one element being convenience.

These are heady times in machine learning and artificial intelligence; new algorithms, TensorFlow, and clusters of powerful GPU's are combining to produce powerful systems that can do things like beat the world's best Go player. But with great power comes great responsibility. Let me tell you a story about the unintended consequences of well-meaning machine learning research. I had been working on Amazon.com's You know, the recommender systems that sell you stuff you never knew existed based on your past interests and purchases, and generate a sizable percentage of Amazon's revenue.

We met up with Jeh Daruvala, CEO of Yactraq, a machine learning company with cutting edge technology that delivers business intelligence using audible or video input. In layman terms, their patent pending technology can be used to accurately search through tens of millions of hours of call center recordings TV shows, movies etc. in a fast and cost effective manner in order to provide actionable insights and intelligence. Here is what he had to say about one of the most coveted spaces in technology. Q: Can you please tell us about your company and the specific challenge that you are addressing? Yactraq empowers SMB & Enterprise clients with machine learning driven insights extracted from any audible media.

In this research, we investigate the subject of path-finding. A pruned version of visibility graph based on Candidate Vertices is formulated, followed by a new visibility check technique. Such combination enables us to quickly identify the useful vertices and thus find the optimal path more efficiently. The algorithm proposed is demonstrated on various path-finding cases. The performance of the new technique on visibility graphs is compared to the traditional A* on Grids, Theta* and A* on Visibility Graphs in terms of path length, number of nodes evaluated, as well as computational time. The key algorithmic contribution is that the new approach combines the merits of grid-based method and visibility graph-based method and thus yields better overall performance.

Andrew Ng is one of the foremost thinkers on the topic of artificial intelligence. He founded and led the "Google Brain" project which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms. In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University's main Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform. His course on Machine Learning would eventually reach an "enrollment" of over 100,000 students. That experience led Ng to co-found Coursera, a MOOC that partners with some of the top universities in the world to offer high quality online courses. Today, Coursera is the largest MOOC platform in the world.

It's pretty clear that the next big battleground for public cloud providers will involve artificial intelligence. Just as companies like Amazon Web Services made it possible for ten-person startups to take advantage of world-class computing infrastructure, so too will the big cloud providers compete to provide artificial intelligence expertise to companies that can't afford to duplicate the advanced machine-learning research already underway. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon AI, is one of the key drivers of AI research for AWS. Cloud rivals like Google and Microsoft have signaled quite clearly that they will attempt to compete for the cloud workloads of the future by pushing the envelope of AI and machine-learning research and abstracting that effort for their cloud customers, and AWS must at least match those efforts to stay on top. Sivasubramian will be talking about Amazon's work in this area at our Cloud Tech Summit this Wednesday in Bellevue, and I recently caught up with him to get a preview of his talk.

The companies had poured $8.6 million into a campaign to keep fingerprinting, which can be expensive and time-consuming, out of driver checks. The vote came after the City Council passed an ordinance in December that, among other rules for ride-sharing companies, required their drivers to undergo fingerprint-based background checks by February 1, 2017. Uber and Lyft announced after the results of Saturday's vote that they were set to suspend operations in Austin, the capital city of Texas, on the morning of May 9, 2016.