We might be tempted to think that artificial intelligence is a 21st-century invention, but to be exact, the technology claims its origin from mythical stories.

Price: £89.99Amazon's second-generation Echo is a revamped version of the device that invented the whole category of smart speakers in 2014. The new Echo is smaller, better sounding and better looking, in a choice of fabric or wood finishes. What makes the Echo great is Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa. A ring of seven microphones in the top listens out for your choice of wake word – the default is simply "Alexa" – before sending what you say to Amazon's servers for interpretation. Alexa can almost always hear you including over music noise as loud as an extractor fan and from pretty far away.

Among the top companies in attendance was General Atomics, a San Diego-based defense contractor known for its Predator drones. The UAE previously purchased some $200 million worth of surveillance-only Predator drones.

Despite efforts to tackle corruption around the world, progress is still frustratingly slow, according to the latest report from Transparency International. Its annual Corruption Perception index reveals some alarming trends. It shows public service corruption is still a huge problem for two-thirds of the world's economies. The report uses a scale of zero to 100 to rank countries: zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. New Zealand comes out on top but with a score of 89.

Another difference is that the V30S will hit the market with all the new artificial intelligence features already announced, but these will also be released on other devices through a software update. So, if you have a V30 in your pocket, do not despair because you can also take advantage of AI very soon.

It also plans to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to add innovative features. Its platform, along with the new HELP cryptocurrency, expects to open for business at the end of 2018.

Microsoft (ticker: MSFT) and IPO contender Xiaomi have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on artificial intelligence in a rare technology pact of its kind between U.S. and Chinese companies.

Over the last few years Deep Learning was applied to hundreds of problems, ranging from computer vision to natural language processing. In many cases Deep Learning outperformed previous work. Deep Learning is heavily used in both academia to study intelligence and in the industry in building intelligent systems to assist humans in various tasks. The goal of this post is to share amazing applications of Deep Learning that I've seen. I hope this will excite people about the opportunities this field brings, as well as remind us that every new technology carries with it potential dangers. I believe the latter is especially true about Deep Learning, and I hope that by exposing people to all these amazing results I can encourage more discussion on the topic. There are many different applications and this list below is in no way exhaustive. So if you know of other cool applications I would appreciate it if you can mention them in the comments.

My current favorite is Spectral Clustering. It is sort of the flagship algorithm for a whole class of methods called Spectral Algorithms[1], which have been gaining increasing attention from the ML community in recent years. Why is it my favorite? Because it brings together some of the most fascinating areas of mathematics in an interesting way. I've never seen an algorithm combine so many ideas and insights from seemingly disparate fields.