The crash of oil prices and slowdown of China's economy have fetched headlines in media off late. The subject has encouraged me to understand economic reasons and relate the implications for Indian services industries. It would be good to preempt a discussion on the topic whether what could happen to Chinese manufacturing or to Middle-East Oil industry could repeat for Indian IT? If so, what should India do to prepare itself today to face this future? You are in the final lap of your early morning dream and the alarm goes off at 6AM.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) today announced it will receive a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. Based on a breakthrough neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy equivalent of a hearing aid battery – a mere 2.5 watts of power. The brain-like, neural network design of the IBM Neuromorphic System is able to infer complex cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and integrated sensory processing far more efficiently than conventional chips. The new system will be used to explore new computing capabilities important to the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) missions in cybersecurity, stewardship of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile and nonproliferation. NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program will evaluate machine-learning applications, deep-learning algorithms and architectures and conduct general computing feasibility studies.

Not quite yet: Factory 2050 in Sheffield, UK, isn't building anything you can buy. Instead, the brains behind the project are rethinking the manufacturing process itself, aiming to change how we make everything from airplanes to nuclear power plants. Inside the factory, things are looking a little unfinished. It opened in January, and the team from the University of Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) are still moving in. The place is sparkling clean, and smells like a newly furnished IKEA, but it's gearing up to change the way whole industries work by applying virtual reality, robotics and bitcoin's blockchain.

Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It's impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone's face and chat with them even though they're on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil made a thought-provoking presentation at a recent trade show for medical device companies, MD&M, in Anaheim, California. At one point during his 45-minute talk he shifted his attention to solar. Explaining the accelerating rate of technical progress, Kurzweil said technical developments form very predictable trajectories, and those trajectories are exponential. Consider the progress of the computing industry, he said. He spoke about his cell phone, which he said is several billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer he used as an undergraduate at MIT. "I went to MIT because it was so advanced that it actually had a computer in the late 1960s," Kurzweil said.

Smart grid analytics are solutions utilized for analyzing a huge amount of data generated via smart grid systems. Smart grid analytics are employed for gaining an enhanced predictive evaluation of grid conditions and consumer behavior and hence help optimize the efficiency of grids. The prime factor stimulating the growth of the smart grid analytics market is the increasing investment in smart grid systems. Owing to the ever-increasing electricity demand, a number of utility providers are looking for reliable solutions for optimizing the efficiency of smart grids. This will augment the demand for smart grid systems in forthcoming years, thus fuelling the market for smart grid analytics.

Tsetse flies feast on animal blood. When they do so, humans can get Trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, which starts as exhaustion and fever, and can lead to death if left untreated. In animals, the tsetse's bite can develop into paralysis. Tsetse flies are limited to sub saharan Africa, where they infect at least 10,000 people a year. It's a mess of an insect, but an organization in Spain thinks they have a solution, and they're going to use drones to deliver it. "Drones Against Tsetse" is a project by spanish dronemaker Embention, together with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It is hard to think of the words "artificial intelligence" without conjuring up Doomsday images of The Matrix and The Terminator where man and highly intelligent machine are pitched into battle. Even a step further back from that science-fiction precipice conflates the term with massive job losses and the eventual irrelevance – or liberation – of humankind from labour as we know it. Artificial intelligence or AI is, of course, all around us already in obvious ways – Apple's voice recognition service Siri or Google's increasingly reliable search results – or in more obscure ones such as better weather forecasting and lower levels of spam e-mail in your inbox. There is nothing new about the concept of AI which started to gain traction in the 1950s when Alan Turing explored the notion of machines that could think. J.C.R. Licklider's paper Man-Computer Symbiosis from 1960 may have sounded like something penned by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, but was instead a formative paper on how the world would move beyond programmable computers to one where computers "facilitate formative thinking".

A new low-power, "brain-inspired" supercomputing platform based on IBM chip technology will soon start exploring deep learning for the U.S. nuclear program. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced on Tuesday that it has purchased the platform, based on the TrueNorth neurosynaptic chip IBM introduced in 2014. It will use the technology to evaluate machine-learning and deep-learning applications for the National Nuclear Security Administration. The computer will process data with the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume roughly as much energy as a tablet PC. Also included will be an accompanying ecosystem consisting of a simulator; a programming language; an integrated programming environment; a library of algorithms and applications; firmware; tools for composing neural networks for deep learning; a teaching curriculum; and cloud enablement.

Oil company Total has almost tripled the performance of Pangea, a supercomputer it uses for analyzing subsurface imaging in search of new oilfields. Pangea's performance is now 6.7 petaflops (floating-point operations per second), up from 2.3 petaflops, the French company said Tuesday. That's enough to put it among the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, according to Total, which based its claim on rankings published last November by Top500.org, the international supercomputer ranking organization. Total's claim is based on the assumption that no other computer has been similarly upgraded in the meantime, something we won't know for sure until the next edition of the list is published in June. But there's another wrinkle that might cast doubt on Total's top 10 status, and that's what exactly the 2.3 petaflop figure represents.