Teams representing the University of California, Berkeley and Arizona State compete in the Grand Final of last year's Heroes of the Dorm tournament at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles. By the end of this week, four teams will advance to determine a champion after an intense multi-week competition. Their names will look familiar -- UConn, Miami and Oregon -- and monetary stakes are high, to the tune of 500,000. They're battling with video game controllers in the growing arena of competitive video gaming, whose increasing popularity has attracted the attention of big names in tech and media, from Electronic Arts to ESPN to Yahoo'We have the early markers of what will ultimately make eSports mainstream," says Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research, which gathers data on the global games market. But it could require a generational shift before competitive video gaming -- known to many as "eSports" -- formally becomes mainstream entertainment. On April 3, the "Heroic Four" will be determined in Heroes of the Dorm, a competitive video game tournament hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, based on its action game Heroes of the Storm. For the second year, teams representing colleges from across the U.S., including the University of Connecticut and Arizona State University, are playing for glory and more than 500,000 in scholarships and prizes, including a free ride through school for the winning team. Fans watch the action online on ESPN, Twitch and YouTube, and they can even join tournament pools, where the winner with the most accurate bracket snags 10,000. It's the latest example of competitive video gaming's increased following, as younger fans gravitate towardeSports. The market is valued at 747 million, according to SuperData, and is expected to more than double to 1.9 billion in three years. The rising audience -- SuperData estimates it at 134 million as of last year -- is pushing video game publishers and cable networks to create competitive video game experiences and explore broadcasting options. The eSports market is young. Whalen Rozelle, Director of eSports at Riot Games -- makers of the hit competitive game League of Legends -- says it's still in "our pre-teen phase," with plenty of room to grow. "The industry still hasn't really figured out'is every game an eSport?

Yesterday, news emerged that Google was using a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called "RankBrain" to help sort through its search results. Wondering how that works and fits in with Google's overall ranking system? Here's what we know about RankBrain. The information covered below comes from three sources. First, the Bloomberg story that broke the news about RankBrain yesterday (see also our write-up of it).

OK, it's not the HAL 9000 (yet) but all over the world, intelligent machines are replacing jobs at an alarming rate. And the smarter they get, the faster they're going to be replacing us. What I am talking about here is not a subtle shift to more automation but a real threat to society and the human race. From self-driving cars and robot waiters to robotic doctors and robot journalists, what seem like novelties today will soon be commonplace. As just one example take Foxconn, the largest private employer in China that contract manufactures of products such as the iPhone, Kindle, Playstation etc.

Zipfian Academy has graduated more than 50 alumni, placing graduates into data science roles at Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber, Square, Coursera, and many more Silicon Valley companies. Participants in our program come from backgrounds in engineering, data analysis, statistics, and occasionally professional poker. Here, we share an interview with Alex Mentch, a graduate from our Winter 2014 Cohort. Alex hails originally from Idaho, and studied electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Looking for a career transition into data science, Alex attended our Winter 2014 cohort where he built a search engine for state legislation.

Many of the reports are pedestrian, and frequently involve seeing a drone near a conventional aircraft. However, some of the observers note that the drones got uncomfortably close -- in a few cases, just 50 feet away. There aren't reports of collisions with aircraft, but at least one pilot had to change course to avoid an accident. Statistically, the odds of drones creating serious problems are quite low. However, the sightings are only likely to fuel the FAA's belief that it needs to regulate drone usage through registration and no-fly zones. It's doubtful that the agency wants to look complacent if a drone triggers a crash.

Google Translate is expected to become the latest product of Google that will benefit from the company's deep learning technology. Deep learning is based on intelligent training of neural networks to analyze lots of data and then make predictions on new data. Google has already used this technology to enhance Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Photos. According to a report, a senior Google official, who has led many high-profile projects and now heads the team involved in deep learning, said that his team is working in tandem with the Translation team to carry out experiments with translations on the basis of deep learning. Google Translate currently operates using different technologies, and this particular development could make it based entirely on neural networks, mainly, long short-term memory network (LSTM).

"Cognitive conversations" with artificial intelligence are "the future" of customer care, IBM's CTO of Watson Europe reckons. Speaking at Computing's Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016 last week, Duncan Anderson explained how AI like IBM Watson is "not Ex Machina" - referring to the 2015 film in which human-like AIs become self-aware - but is now at the point where it can soon make considerable changes to the daily lives of people. "The practical reality of where we are is not Ex Machina - we're not building beautiful computers and spoofing humans, [but] we're solving practical problems today," he said. Anderson said Watson's growing ability to process unstructured data - "text documents, images, voice - the novel data types" - is now bringing to an end the traditional approach of putting such data "in a database clock and [doing] nothing with it". While this is nothing new, Watson's improving effectiveness at communicating what it's learning back to a user in the form of "chat" is now becoming an increasingly viable frontline tool. "If you're five years old and go into a hospital it's a scary place - it's all white and doctors are big scary old people," said Anderson.

The consequences of Korean player Lee Se-dol's historic defeat against a computer program in March 2016 will be both global and political. One reason is that the ancient and revered board-game Go (some claim it was invented by a Chinese emperor around 2300 BC) -- in its very essence, is a profound meditation on the art of war. There are only two types of stones in Go, black or white -- reminiscent of zeroes and ones in digital computers. Contrary to the hierarchical pawns, bishops and kings in chess, the pieces in Go are identical and theoretically equal in value, somewhat analogous to people in a communist regime. The aim is to capture territory and annihilate the enemy stones by surrounding them.

In what could be the last time that a human taunts a robot with a hockey stick and lives to brag about it, the latest demonstration of the Atlas Robot has prompted renewed fears about the future of intelligent machines. Born in 2013, Atlas is a DARPA-funded robot developed by Boston Dynamics. Its latest iteration stands at a very human-proportioned 5'9, weighing 180lbs. Like Lee Majors circa 1974, each successive version of Atlas has gotten better, stronger, faster than it was before. Aside from scaring the bejesus out of genius technophobic Oxbridge physicists, it's intended to perform tasks in emergency situations too dangerous for humans.

The World Economic Forum kicks off today, and the theme of this year's gathering of the world's leaders, celebrities, billionaires and the merely wealthy will be what it calls the "Fourth Industrial Revolution." That's its term for the accelerating pace of technological changes, especially those that are "blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres" -- the combination of things like artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and 3-D printing. To go with that theme, the WEF has released research looking at the effect all that change will have on jobs. It projects that by 2020, 7.1 million jobs are expected to be lost, and two million gained, with a net impact of five million jobs lost in the next half decade. "Davos Robot Eclipses Davos Man as Gloom Descends on World Elite," Bloomberg wrote in covering the news of this year's theme, which will be the topic of 20 sessions over the four-day conference.