Peter Shulman, an associate history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was lecturing on the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s when a student asked an odd question: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? He confessed that he was not aware of that allegation, but that Harding had been in favor of anti-lynching legislation, so it seemed unlikely. But then a second student pulled out his phone and announced that yes, Harding had been a Klan member, and so had four other presidents. For most of its history, Google did not answer questions. Users typed in what they were looking for and got a list of web pages that might contain the desired information.

The next time you enter a query into Google's search engine or consult the company's map service for directions to a movie theater, remember that a big brain is working behind the scenes to provide relevant search results and make sure you don't get lost while driving. As Fortune's Roger Parloff wrote, the Google Brain research team has created over 1,000 so-called deep learning projects that have supercharged many of Google's products over the past few years like YouTube, translation, and photos. With deep learning, researchers can feed huge amounts of data into software systems called neural nets that learn to recognize patterns within the vast information faster than humans. In an interview with Fortune, one of Google Brain's co-founders and leaders, Jeff Dean, talks about cutting-edge AI research, the challenges involved, and using AI in its products. The following, done against the backdrop of the 50th annual Turing Award, an honor in computer science from the Association for Computing Machinery, has been edited for length and clarity. What are some challenges researchers face with pushing the field of artificial intelligence?

This week's milestones in the history of technology include the invention of the telephone, automating telephone exchanges and textile weaving, and the idea of searching for information through associative links. The first-ever nationally televised awards ceremony devoted to the Internet is broadcast. U.S. patent 174,465 for "Improvement in telegraphy" is issued to 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell. This was the patent for his invention of the telephone, covering "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically ... by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound." E-book publisher Rosetta Books wins the lawsuit brought against it by Random House for acquiring titles directly from authors.

For a while it seemed like all we ever did in video games was shoot Nazis. In 1997, Steven Spielberg, post-Schindler's List, pre-Saving Private Ryan and apparently in the midst of a second world war fixation, met with a team at DreamWorks to outline an idea for a first-person shooter set in 1944. In the resulting game, Medal of Honor, you played as protagonist Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson, who parachutes into Nazi territory in a bid to single-handedly turn the tide of war. In this way, Spielberg's game was reminiscent of Hollywood's most jingoistic postwar output. Like 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima or 1965's Battle of the Bulge, Medal of Honor used the theatre and mud-flecked aesthetic of the war to present a revisionist, nationalistic yet deeply cathartic take on the war of our grandparents.

Power spectral density (PSD) maps providing the distribution of RF power across space and frequency are constructed using power measurements collected by a network of low-cost sensors. By introducing linear compression and quantization to a small number of bits, sensor measurements can be communicated to the fusion center with minimal bandwidth requirements. Strengths of data- and model-driven approaches are combined to develop estimators capable of incorporating multiple forms of spectral and propagation prior information while fitting the rapid variations of shadow fading across space. To this end, novel nonparametric and semiparametric formulations are investigated. It is shown that PSD maps can be obtained using support vector machine-type solvers. In addition to batch approaches, an online algorithm attuned to real-time operation is developed. Numerical tests assess the performance of the novel algorithms.

From helping you take care of email to creating personalized online shopping experiences, AI promises to transform the way we live and work. But with all the hype out there, how do we know which benefits we'll actually see? We're inviting 250 to exhibit at TNW Conference and pitch on stage! What is the top benefit you predict emerging from AI, and do you think the overall benefits will live up to the hype? The greatest benefit of AI -- which is already emerging -- is the elimination of repetitive tasks.

From helping you take care of email to creating personalized online shopping experiences, AI promises to transform the way we live and work. But with all the hype out there, how do we know which benefits we'll actually see? What is the top benefit you predict emerging from AI, and do you think the overall benefits will live up to the hype? The greatest benefit of AI -- which is already emerging -- is the elimination of repetitive tasks. From chat bots that can free up human staffers' times to work on more complex issues, to scheduling AIs like x.ai that eliminate the need to schedule meetings, AI will ultimately help humans spend more time focusing on creative and high-mental-effort activities.

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is being played by gamers everywhere, and our partners at iDigitalTimes have been working hard discovering every inch of 2017's incarnation of Hyrule. The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is shaping up to be a once-in-a-lifetime game, and we're happy you've chosen us to kick off your celebration. For even more on this epic, sprawling adventure, be sure to read the iDigitalTimes full review. What do you think of The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild so far? Which guides would you like to see next?

High-performance graphics cards, typically associated with gaming, have become popular over the last few years in an area many might not expect: artificial intelligence. Many experts attribute recent acceleration of success in AI to a wider availability and use of graphics processing units (GPUs), as their advantages include cores designed for running multiple tasks simultaneously, which can efficiently handle the vector and matrix operations that are prevalent in deep learning. Training and deploying state of the art deep neural networks is very computationally intensive, and, while modern GPUs offer high density computation, researchers need more than a fast processor -- they also need optimized libraries, and tools to efficiently program so that they can experiment with new ideas. Bryan Catanzaro, VP of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, joined us at the 2017 Deep Learning Summit in San Francisco, to share expertise on GPUs and platforms for deep learning, as well as giving insights on the latest deep learning developments at NVIDIA. I asked him some questions at the summit to learn more about his work. What motivated you to begin your work in deep learning?

How do you plan to kick off your summer this year? How do you plan to kick off your summer this year? If you're like me, you will attend the Starmus Festival Of Science And Arts in gorgeous Trondheim, Norway, between 18 – 23 June. The Starmus -- "stars" and "music" -- Science and Arts Festival was the brain child of astrophysicist Brian May, lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, and his dissertation advisor, Garik Israelian, an astrophysicist who led the team that discovered the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of stellar mass black holes. This festival is designed to bring together the sciences -- astronomy, physics, and the biological sciences -- with art, film, music and other performing arts, specifically to communicate science to the public.