When a person's intelligence is tested, there are exams. When artificial intelligence is tested, there are games. But what happens when computer programs beat humans at all of those games? This is the question AI experts must ask after a Google-developed program called AlphaGo defeated a world champion Go player in four out of five matches in a series that concluded Tuesday. Long a yardstick for advances in AI, the era of board game testing has come to an end, said Murray Campbell, an IBM research scientist who was part of the team that developed Deep Blue, the first computer program to beat a world chess champion.

Facebook is releasing for free the designs of a powerful new computer server it crafted to put more power behind artificial-intelligence software. Serkan Piantino, an engineering director in Facebook's AI Research group, says the new servers are twice as fast as those Facebook used before. "We will discover more things in machine learning and AI as a result," he says. The social network's giveaway is the latest in a recent flurry of announcements by tech giants that are open-sourcing artificial-intelligence technology, which is becoming vital to consumer and business-computing services. Opening up the technology is seen as a way to accelerate progress in the broader field, while also helping tech companies to boost their reputations and make key hires.

I have voraciously read endless pro and con scenarios about artificial intelligence since first writing about it years ago. At this point, there is no doubt that concerns about the dangers of runaway AI raised by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Bill Joy and others are genuine. There also is no doubt whatsoever that the new organizations aimed at mitigating the dangers -- OpenAI, The Future of Life Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute and others -- are extremely important developments. Clearly, no sane person or organization wants to see, let alone encounter, runaway AI. However, a base problem is that no one knows where the actual crossover point -- the edge or tipping point -- exists, and thus we mortals are unlikely to be able to prevent it from occurring. Said differently, there is a very high probability that we will misjudge where that crossover point is and will thus go beyond the key threshold.

With the advent of Amazon's Alexa and Siri's consistent capacity to take on more chores (and get more and more sassy), many are wondering: what's next for natural language understanding and conversational voice interfaces? There are several companies neck-and-neck in this race. There's Wit.ai, the company Facebook acquired -- you can toy around with demo. Apple has its HomeKit and, with it, is doing what Apple does best -- kicking ass. One company hot on the trail of natural language understanding is MindMeld. MindMeld provides its natural language understanding capabilities to other companies that are looking to add intelligent voice interfaces to their products, services, or devices.

The James Webb telescope will be the world biggest and most powerful telescope when it launches in 2018. Nasa describes it as a'time machine' that can peer back 200 million years after the Big Bang. This week, Nasa engineers in Maryland got a little closer to launch with the completion of testing on its science cameras and the installation of the final flight mirrors. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope completed primary mirror sits in the cleanroom at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and supported over it on the tripod is the secondary mirror After over a year of planning, nearly four months of final cold testing and monitoring, the testing on the science instruments module of the observatory was completed. They were removed from a giant thermal vacuum chamber at Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland called the Space Environment Simulator.

Sony has announced the closure of the UK's Evolution Studios. The Cheshire-based video games development house dates back to 1999, and had most recently worked on the troubled PlayStation title Driveclub. Sony has confirmed that there will be at least some compulsory redundancies as a consequence of its decision. The announcement closely follows Microsoft's announcement of plans to close another British developer, Lionhead Studios. Sony said that its decision had followed a review of its European operations.

It is made up of 650M real user search queries bucketed into 25 vertical categories (Auto, Health, Finance, etc.) containing roughly 450K sub-categories. It's a rule-based system, and we use NLP and nGram chunking to parse long and short form text and map search queries, social posts, web content, blogs, forums, reviews, etc. to the category hierarchy providing structured, topical intelligence to data streams at scale. It is extremely accurate because we've built 55M controlled vocabularies (Ex. Being the noob I am, I am trying to understand how our real time classification capabilities can improve the efficiency of machine learned processes. I understand that supervised training models require a corpus of text from which a model can determine entities, ontological connections, and apply statistical models to understand what people, places, things, concepts are and how they may be connected, but we've already built out the taxonomy to understand connections between things, and can provide greater context to "what" something truly is.

I will start by giving some background information. Currently I am a final year (graduation year) CS student who got interested in machine learning about 6 months ago. I started with the Andrew NG course from Coursera which I recently finished (about 3 weeks ago). When I finished the Coursera course I saw a suggestion that if you'd like to continue to learn more about machine learning you could follow the online Coursera specialization from the Washington university. In this AMA he suggested that if you'd like to learn more about machine learning one of the things you could do was to follow and complete the Coursera course from Andrew NG and their specialization course.

What do you think of when someone says "AI" or "Artificial Intelligence"? For most of us, it conjures up an image of the future. It doesn't much evoke the here and now. Artificial intelligence is already out of the box. And while it might not be as slick as the movies, it has vast applications in almost every field, from business to medicine, traffic jams to Facebook photos. Most of us use or benefit from artificial intelligence every day.

Global technology leaders and senior executives from around the world spoke on a range of topics, including Digital India, Smart Cities, Make in India, Skill India and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing, drones, robotics, robotic surgeries and genomics, at the two-day EmTech India 2016 event, held in New Delhi on 18 and 19 March. The event was organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The speakers included R.S. Sharma, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc. and chairman of the US-India Business Council; Una-May O'Reilly, principal research scientist, AnyScale Learning For All Group, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and Harsh Mariwala, chairman of Marico Ltd. The full list can be accessed here. Here are edited excerpts from their speeches and discussions that followed. John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc and Chairman of US-India Business Council (USIBC), reiterated the reason for his bullishness on India in a chat with Mint's R. Sukumar, on the first day of EmTech India 2016. When most of us here read the India narrative, it is not uniformly positive. Yet, you are amazingly bullish on the country. What do you see that others don't? Sometimes when you see what is happening in other countries and other businesses around the world from the outside, you are able to gather data very quickly, and then you can connect the dots on the market transitions. I am very bullish on the country for that very simple reason--follow and connect the dots on transitions. The transition to digitization will be the biggest technology change ever. I don't go into a country unless the leader, he or she, really understands this. Second, I don't go to a country that does not have sustainable differentiation capabilities.