Iranian-born bioengineer researcher Nima Enayati works on a robotic surgery machine during an interview with the Associated Press at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017. An Iranian researcher at Milan's Polytechnic University, Enayati was refused check-in Monday at Milan's Malpensa Airport for his U.S.-bound flight on Turkish Airlines after the Trump administration's executive order came down. Iranian-born bioengineer researcher Nima Enayati works on a robotic surgery machine during an interview with the Associated Press at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017. An Iranian researcher at Milan's Polytechnic University, Enayati was refused check-in Monday at Milan's Malpensa Airport for his U.S.-bound flight on Turkish Airlines after the Trump administration's executive order came down. Iranian-born bioengineer researcher Nima Enayati stands as he works on a robotic surgery machine during an interview with the Associated Press at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017.

Uber has made a major step towards making its self driving cars commonplace with a new deal with Germany's Daimler AG, maker of the luxury Mercedes-Benz cars and trucks. In the coming years, Daimler plans to incorporate its own self-driving Mercedes-Benz into Uber's growing fleet of self-driving cars. Daimler is the first auto company to join Uber as it opens up its platform for manufacturers to introduce their own self-driving cars - and Uber will not own or manage the Daimler cars, and won't help with R&D, simply letting the cars become part of its fleet. Daimler is the first auto company to join Uber as it opens up its platform for manufacturers to introduce their own self-driving cars. 'Under the terms of the cooperation, Daimler plans to introduce self-driving vehicles... on Uber's global ridesharing network in the coming years,' the companies said in a joint statement.

Researchers are taking inspiration from the group hunting tactics of penguins to test how car software is organized. The tool looks for ways to organize smart car code in the same way that penguins look for ways to obtain food. As cars become more complex and more connected, researchers say the penguin-inspired testing system could be key in finding optimum software's for smart cars to prevent them from being hacked. Penguins work together to match shoals of fish they hunt, helping them minimize the overall energy they need to catch fish - and researchers say their tactics could help catch hackers trying to take over smart cars. Engineers and researchers often look to plants and wildlife for technical solutions to problems.

The call for proposals is open for the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference NY 2017 now through January 18, 2017. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode I spoke with Vikash Mansinghka, research scientist at MIT, where he leads the Probabilistic Computing Project, and co-founder of Empirical Systems. I've long wanted to introduce listeners to recent developments in probabilistic programming, and I found the perfect guide in Mansinghka.

Chinese search giant Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) is often dismissed as a slow-growth tech stock that has run out of room to grow. Its heavy investments in expanding its ecosystem into adjacent markets have weighed down its bottom line growth, making the stock seem like dead money. Despite those challenges, however, I recently started a new position in Baidu for four main reasons. That dominant position enables it to expand its ecosystem in the same way as Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google. Its sprawling ecosystem now includes Baidu Maps, video streaming site iQiyi, its Duer voice assistant, the Baidu Wallet payment platform, numerous portal sites, and various O2O (online-to-offline) services in its "monolithic" mobile app.

Every day more and more articles and research reports are coming out regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI). Many perceive AI in the way Hollywood has portrayed it, not really relevant to their business needs, as too expensive to actually implement, or just another quasi-defined term within the industry. Even The New York Times described artificial intelligence as something that "is invoked as if its meaning were self-evident, but it has always been a source of confusion and controversy." In last year's report from the World Economic Forum, one of the six megatrends was AI and big data and how "exponential digitization creates exponentially more data – about everything and everyone." With more and more connected devices added to the market every year and increased internet access around the world, data is growing at an exponential rate.

Update: Last time AI took on humans at poker, the flesh-and-blood brigade won comfortably. Libratus has won $1,766,250 worth of chips at no-limit Texas Hold'em, knocking the stuffing out of its four human opponents in the process. "Yeah, this was a beat-down," was all human opponent Jimmy Chou could say after finishing his 30,000th hand on Monday. Libratus' co-creator, PhD student Noam Brown, was delighted with the AI's performance, telling The Guardian, "When I see the bot bluff the humans, I'm like, 'I didn't tell it to do that. I had no idea it was even capable of doing that.' It's satisfying to know I created something that can do that."

This essay appears in today's edition of the Fortune Brainstorm Health Daily. Get it delivered straight to your inbox. Those of you who read the Fortune CEO Daily--penned each morning at an ungodly hour by my boss, Alan Murray--got a taste of what seems like a fascinating panel on artificial intelligence at Davos. The panel included Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind (gobbled up for a song by Google in 2014), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Dow CEO Andrew Liveris, and the cognitively impressive head of IBM Watson, David Kenny, whom I interviewed at length in October. You can find Alan's full post from this morning here.

We pick the cell size to be bounded by (r)/( (n)), so that each grid cell will contain at most one sample, and thus the grid can be implemented as a simple n-dimensional array of integers: the default 1 indicates no sample, a non-negative integer gives the index of the sample located in a cell. Step 1. Select the initial sample, x0, randomly chosen uniformly from the domain.

The Chan Zuckerberg Inititative, a philanthropic initiative from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, has acquired a startup, Meta, focused on using AI and machine learning to sift through recently published scientific studies. The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed. Announced in September, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a limited liability company focused on the ambitious goal to "cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century." At least $3 billion will be allocated toward that goal, all coming out of Chan and Zuckerberg's Facebook shares. "In science, peer-reviewed articles are the medium for the global conversation among researchers, and they represent the foundational reference point by which we judge what is known, where science is going, and what to work on next," Meta CEO Sam Molyneux, who cofounded the startup with his sister Amy, wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. Each day, more than 4,000 scientific papers are published in biomedicine alone.