After the keynote, I caught up with Google senior VP of engineering John Giannandrea–who, though he didn't appear onstage, is deeply involved in all of the above efforts and others as the company's lead for AI. "Last year, we talked about becoming an AI-first company and people weren't entirely sure what we meant," he told me. At I/O, Google announced Google.ai–which is maybe less of an actual thing than a statement (and accompanying website) designed to remind the world of the company's ambitious and far-flung efforts in AI. Giannandrea calls it "an umbrella brand" that shows off Google's work in hopes of inspiring others to build upon it. "We're saying, 'Come use this amazing stuff, see what you can do," he explains.

The Internet of Things is expected to grow quickly to tens of billions of connected devices, from smart refrigerators to smart showers to smart cruise ships. And pretty soon, it's going to extend to smart cars, Intel demonstrated at its recent autonomous cars event in San Jose, Calif. But Intel knows that we'll have to get data in and out of those cars at rates that are much faster than today's LTE mobile networks can handle. And that's why Rob Topol, general manager of Intel's 5G business and technology, believes that 5G wireless networking will be like the "oxygen" for self-driving cars. Intel is making 5G modem chips to transfer data at gigabits a second over wireless networks in the future, perhaps as early as 2020. Topol believes this wireless networking will enable self-driving cars to communicate with connected infrastructure. That infrastructure will help the cars process sensor, safety, and information for the car and return the results quickly to the cars.

Kaggle's 2017 March Machine Learning Mania competition challenged Kagglers to do what millions of sports fans do every year–try to predict the winners and losers of the US men's college basketball tournament. In this winner's interview, 1st place winner, Andrew Landgraf, describes how he cleverly analyzed his competition to optimize his luck. I am interested in sports analytics and have followed the previous competitions on Kaggle. Reading last year's winner's interview, I realized that luck is a major component of winning this competition, just like all brackets. I wanted to see if there was a way of maximizing my luck.

Last year, in the height of the election season, the Obama administration quietly released a national strategic plan for artificial intelligence (AI) research and development. The plan was the beginning of a national effort to prepare Americans for a future with AI--a future some computer scientist believe our nation is ill-equipped to handle. AI has become a part of the American fabric for some time. Siri and Alexa are already taking orders, self-driving cars have hit some streets, and the concept of interconnectivity is now a reality through the Internet of Things. But experts assert that in order for the society to fully embrace AI, learning machines should not replace human workers, but complement them.

Beyond membership in the Pantheon of Famous Brits, Winston Churchill and George Orwell would seem to have little in the way of common ground. Orwell was a journalist and novelist. Churchill had money and pedigree; the young Orwell lived on the street and raised his own vegetables during World War II. Churchill's political leanings were conservative; Orwell flirted with communism until he witnessed the betrayal of his Republican comrades by Soviet agents in the Spanish Civil War. In "Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom," Thomas E. Ricks gets beyond these differences and finds the iron core of both men.

In 1950, Alan Turing published his famous paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". The paper proposed a test to determine if a machine was artificially intelligent. Basically, Turing said that if a machine could have a conversation with a human and trick the human into thinking the machine was a person itself, then it was artificially intelligent. This became known as the Turing Test, and passing it has been one of the most sought after goals in computer science. Passing the Turing Test would signal the birth of artificial intelligence.

Food delivery company DoorDash says personalized restaurant recommendations based on AI are seeing a significant lift in orders, compared to regular recommendations based on popularity. In an interview with VentureBeat, DoorDash product manager Jimmy Liu said customers who saw personalized recommendations on average "were over 25 percent more likely" to place an order versus people who saw the most popular restaurants in their area. We talked with Liu on the eve of the company's announcement today that it's rolling out these machine-learning based recommendations to all of its users, after testing it on increasing percentages of its customer base. Millions of users have already seen the recommendations, the company said. Liu said the 25 percent lift from recommendations came specifically from email campaigns.

A world renowned pioneer in social robotics, Cynthia Breazeal splits her time as an Associate Professor at MIT, where she received her PhD and founded the Personal Robots Group, and Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, a personal robotics company with over $85 million in funding. While Breazeal's work has won numerous academic awards, industry accolades, and media attention, she had to fight early skepticism in the 1990s from other experts in robotics and AI. At the time, robots were seen as physical and industrial tools, not social or emotional companions. Her first social robot, Kismet, was unfairly called out in popular press as "useless". Breazeal bucked the trend with a very different vision: "I wanted to create robots with social and emotional intelligence that could work in collaborative partnership with people. In 2-5 years, I see social robots helping families with things that really matter, like education, health, eldercare, entertainment, and companionship." She hopes her work and influence will inspire others to create robots "not only with smarts, but with heart, too."

Rocker Chris Cornell, who gained fame as the lead singer of the bands Soundgarden and later Audioslave, has died at age 52, according to his representative. Cornell, who had been on tour, died Wednesday night in Detroit, Brian Bumbery said in a statement to The Associated Press. Bumbery called the death "sudden and unexpected" and said his wife and family were shocked by it. The statement said the family would be working closely with the medical examiner to determine the cause and asked for privacy. With his powerful, nearly four-octave vocal range, Cornell was one of the leading voices of the 1990s grunge movement with Soundgarden, which emerged as one of the biggest bands out of Seattle's emerging music scene, joining the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains.

When Tesla bought a decommissioned car factory in Fremont, California, Elon Musk transformed the old-fashioned, unionized plant into a much-vaunted "factory of the future", where giant robots named after X-Men shape and fold sheets of metal inside a gleaming white mecca of advanced manufacturing. The appetite for Musk's electric cars, and his promise to disrupt the carbon-reliant automobile industry, has helped Tesla's value exceed that of both Ford and, briefly, General Motors (GM). But some of the human workers who share the factory with their robotic counterparts complain of grueling work pressure they attribute to Musk's aggressive production goals, and sometimes life-changing injuries. Ambulances have been called more than 100 times since 2014 for workers experiencing fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing and chest pains, according to incident reports obtained by the Guardian. Hundreds more were called for injuries and other medical issues. In a phone interview about the conditions at the factory, which employs some 10,000 workers, the Tesla CEO conceded his workers had been "having a hard time, working long hours, and on hard jobs", but said he cared deeply about their health and wellbeing.