"Excuse me," the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. Outside Gore's New York City office, spring has certainly sprung--early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Small drones need to stay aloft to do their jobs--whether it's searching for dangerous gas leaks or remotely monitoring atmospheric conditions. But the effort can quickly drain battery power. Now, scientists have created RoboBees, insect-sized flying robots that have a switchable electro-adhesive that allows them to perch on materials such glass, wood, or a leaf, using roughly 1,000 times less power than sustained flight. "One of the biggest difficulties with building insect-sized robots is that the physics change as you go that small. A lot of technologies that have been deployed successfully on larger robots become impractical on a centimeter-sized robot," says coauthor Sawyer Fuller, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington.

This weekend, I hopped on a train for my annual trek to Maker Faire, held this year at the San Mateo Events Center. Over 150,000 people attended this year's show, coming to check out new drones, 3D printers, robots and more. This particular event is the granddaddy of Maker Faires, started by Maker Media and its visionary founder Dale Dougherty. It bills itself as the greatest "Show and Tell on Earth." I've long been following the Maker Movement as a part of my overall interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education.

IBM Corp. announced on Thursday (May 19) Nvidia power on IBM cloud. Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly powerful option for enterprises looking for data analytics, storage, and application hosting. By adopting Nvidia's Tesla solution, IBM is making inroads in supporting AI and cognitive across a variety of enterprises. HPC (high performance computing) need powerful GPUs to do data analytics, AI, and graphical computations. In the energy sector, Haliburton and Repsol both use GPUs to analyze seismic data.

It was big week for solar power as well. For starters, scientists developed a breakthrough photovoltaic cell that set a new world record for efficiency. Portugal made headlines by running on 100-percent renewable energy for more than four days. The Mistbox is a new device that uses solar energy to cut down on summer cooling costs. And scientists discovered a new form of spiralized light that flies in the face of everything quantum physics says about photons.

Predictive modeling tools and services are undergoing an inevitable step-change which will free data scientists to focus on applications and insight, and result in more powerful and robust models than ever before. Amongst the key enabling technologies are new hugely scalable cross-validation frameworks, and meta-learning. Over the past two to three years there has been a small explosion of companies offering cloud-based Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) and Predictive Analytics as a Service (PAaaS). IBM and Microsoft both have major freemium offerings in the form of Watson Analytics and Azure Machine Learning respectively, with companies like BigML, Ayasdi, LogicalGlue and ErsatzLabs occupying the smaller end of the spectrum. These are services which allow a data owner to upload data and rapidly build predictive or descriptive models, on the cloud, with a minimum of data science expertise.

This week's economic calendar is pretty light. Market participants will be looking to an early getaway for the long weekend. While there will be plenty of entertaining FedSpeak, I expect a different topic to be at the fore. The news was pretty good, but the stock market was not. In my last WTWA, I predicted that the punditry would be asking whether it was "springtime for housing". That was the recurring topic as housing news was reported on several different days and garnered plenty of discussion. Competition came from the Fed Minutes, some dramatic earnings reports, and the election race. I always start my personal review of the week by looking at this great chart from Doug Short.

The 2016 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest, organized by the IADF TC, was opened on January 3, 2016. The submission deadline was April 29, 2016. Participants submitted open topic manuscripts using the VHR and video-from-space data released for the competition. Evaluation and ranking were conducted by the Award Committee. The winners are reported below along with the abstracts of the submitted papers.

Overnight on October 14, 2015, Tesla introduced an semi-autonomous driving system for owners of the Model S. Within a day, owners began uploading videos of themselves being driven around. You can see the fear wash over people's faces when cars slow down in front of them or the Model S automatically changes lanes. They brace themselves for impact. You can tell that part of them just wants to throw their hands on the steering wheel and take over. But slowly, as the car makes the right choices over and over, the human drivers slowly relax and enjoy the experience.

Google executives talk about the company's future in artificial intelligence. During his keynote talk, Pichai also showed a video of several robot arms that a research group at Google taught to pick up objects. "It's also conflated with the fact that people look at things like robots learning to pick things up and that's somehow inherently scary to people," Giannandrea said. In April, Facebook unveiled a new Applied Machine Learning group.