According to The Verge, Facebook is using artificial intelligence to produce detailed maps illustrating population density and the access to internet across the globe. This should help Facebook bring internet to parts of the world that are without access. Facebook has analysed 20 countries and 21.6 million square kilometres amounting to 350TB of data. Facebook is also reported to be creating deep learning AI which aims to find out what matters to Facebook users. Facebook is definitely not new to the AI game.

On Wednesday afternoon in the South Korean capital, Seoul, Lee Se-dol, the 33-year-old master of the ancient Asian board game Go, will sit down to defend humanity. On the other side of the table will be his opponent: Alphago, a programme built by Google subsidiary DeepMind which became, in October, the first machine to beat a professional human Go player, the European champion Fan Hui. That match proved that Alphago could hold its own against the best; this one will demonstrate whether "the best" have to relinquish that title entirely. Related: Google throws down the gauntlet. But can anyone beat its computer at Go? Lee, who is regularly ranked among the top three players alive, has been a Go professional for 21 years; Alphago won its first such match less than 21 weeks ago.

So why does it take so much computing power and time to teach AI? The problem is that modern neural networks like Google's DeepMind or IBM Watson must perform billions of tasks in in parallel. That requires numerous CPU memory calls, which quickly adds up over billions of cycles. The researchers debated using new storage tech like resistive RAM that can permanently store data with DRAM-like speeds. However, they eventually came up with the idea for a new type of chip called a resistive processing unit (RPU) that puts large amounts of resistive RAM directly onto a CPU.

DEDHAM, MA--(Marketwired - Jan 28, 2016) - Rage Frameworks, a provider of knowledge-based automation technology and services, today announced major additions to its pioneering RAGE AI platform, adding two new powerful frameworks to its suite. RAGE AI significantly extends the frontier of deep learning and machine intelligence technology from "natural language processing" to "natural language understanding." RAGE AI incorporates deep linguistic parsing and proprietary innovations to understand meaning in context, which makes its solutions completely transparent, auditable and flexible. The platform facilitates unsupervised to supervised learning and contains several innovations to support automated knowledge acquisition including pragmatic knowledge. RAGE AI is not a black box and does not rely on statistical patterns present in training data.

The successful launch of Europe's first ExoMars mission earlier this month set the stage for a much more ambitious second act: arover landing on the Red Planet. But the timing on that mission may not be so certain. On March 14, the European Space Agency (ESA) and its Russian partners launched the ExoMars 2016 mission, an orbiter and lander that serve as a precursor to a full-blown rover slated to launch as early as May 2018. But funding issues and technical delays could push that ambitious follow-up mission to 2020. Rolf de Groot, ESA's coordinator of robotic exploration, told Space.com that it's going to be "very challenging"to have the mission fully prepared for its 2018 launch window but that program managers will know soon whether they'll have to start seriously thinking about a 2020 launch instead.

It's hard enough for non-technical users to deal with ransomware infections: understanding public-key cryptography, connecting to the Tor anonymity network and paying with Bitcoin cryptocurrency. A new malicious program now makes it even more difficult by completely locking victims out of their computers. The new Petya ransomware overwrites the master boot record (MBR) of the affected PCs, leaving their operating systems in an unbootable state, researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro said in a blog post. The MBR is the code stored in the first sectors of a hard disk drive. It contains information about the disk's partitions and launches the operating system's boot loader.

At the dawn of the cloud computing revolution, the winners were determined in their ability to rule with an "iron" fist (the hardware) but over the next ten years, we will see that having an iron-fist basis for rule is far easier than ruling with nuanced, multi-layered intelligence–and it takes a special kind of leader to do that. It takes a leader with boots on the ground for data collection, one who can deploy innumerable ears around every corner, every-watching eyes that are tuned to the whole of citizenry, listening without discretion, silently but busily meshing all of that information into a consciousness of sorts–a collective knowledge base that can be combed, smoothed, and rolled out to appease different divisions in that land. While indeed, this is a bit of dramatization for effect, this is exactly the kind of game of thrones that is happening just now among the giants of cloud. The iron throne is less a symbol than it used to be, the new seat of power is softer, changes position with the times, but always offers a 360 degree view. In short, winter is coming for some of the most seasoned of the old guard.

After Twitter users were able to convince Tay, the name of Microsoft's chatbot available via text, Twitter and Kik, to spit out offensive and racist comments, it appears Microsoft is giving it a break. It was targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States and was developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians. The problem was that Tay was created to continue learning how to talk by studying the conversations she'd have with real people on Twitter, and you can guess what those people made a decision to talk to her about. According to a statement from a Microsoft representative, "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments", the spokesperson said.

Zevenbergen Capital Investments Llc decreased its stake in Criteo S.A. (NASDAQ:CRTO) by 37.62% based on its latest Q4 2015 regulatory filing with the SEC. Zevenbergen Capital Investments Llc sold 276,870 shares as the company's stock rose 8.32% with the market. The institutional investor held 459,180 shares of the advertising company at the end of Q4, valued at 18.18 million, down from 736,050 at the end of the previous reported quarter. Zevenbergen Capital Investments Llc who had been investing in Criteo S.A. since many months, could be less bullish the 2.52 billion market cap company. The stock increased 1.72% or 0.67 on March 24, hitting 39.73.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has made its key machine learning technology freely available to developers. In a blog statement announcing the move, the company said that it had decided to make its Computational Network Toolkit freely available to developers by moving it to the Github platform. It said that it strongly believes that machine learning is the next important frontier in the overall field of artificial intelligence and that it stands to gain a lot from the input of other developers who may use the CNTK to make important advances in the field and that this will benefit all the stakeholders as well. The CNTK is a complex technology that the company developed and has been using to help it develop different applications in the field of machine learning. So far, it has proven a valuable tool for the researchers of the company.