China's ambitions to build its own version of AlphaGo or Sophia the Robot could be a boon for voice technology company iFlytek and surveillance equipment maker Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology. While China lags the U.S. in hardware like advanced circuit boards that are key to becoming an artificial intelligence powerhouse, the two Chinese companies showcase the nation's emerging strength in other key technologies that are vital to helping advanced computers learn: algorithms and big data.

Google DeepMind has come out with its AlphaGo artificial intelligence that can crack trevigintillion (1072) possible positions in the game Go and beat a human champion. "It was the first time a computer program has ever beaten a professional Go player," Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind wrote in a blog. What makes Go a hard task in AI is the magnitude of complexity in the game. "That's more than the number of atoms in the universe, and more than a googol times larger than chess," wrote Hassabis. Google DeepMind tested AlphaGo against a three-time European Go champion.

Editor's Note: Don't miss our new free on-demand training course about how to create data pipeline applications using Apache Spark – learn more here. Decision trees are widely used for the machine learning tasks of classification and regression. In this blog post, I'll help you get started using Apache Spark's MLlib machine learning decision trees for classification. In general, machine learning may be broken down into two classes of algorithms: supervised and unsupervised. Supervised algorithms use labeled data in which both the input and output are provided to the algorithm.

IBM announced that its Watson AI is getting image recognition capabilities earlier in the year, but this site that lets you feed in your own photos to see what it thinks is in them is both impressive and scary. The visual recognition demo lets you give Watson an image URL or upload a photo and it'll come back in a few seconds with what it thinks it sees. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech. In my tests I fed Watson a few random photos I had on hand and the accuracy was quite surprising. It could figure out what was in landscape shots, animals (down to the breed) and even what's in the background.

There are lots of conversations about the lack of diversity in science and tech these days. But along with them, people constantly ask, "So what? There are lots of ways to answer that question, but perhaps the easiest way is this: because a homogenous team produces homogenous products for a very heterogeneous world. This column will explore the products, research programs, and conclusions that are made not because any designer or scientist or engineer sets out to discriminate, but because the "normal" user always looks exactly the same. The result is products and research that are biased by design. Facial recognition systems are all over the place: Facebook, airports, shopping malls. And they're poised to become nearly ubiquitous as everything from a security measure to a way to recognize frequent shoppers. For some people that will make certain interactions even more seamless. But because many facial recognition systems struggle with non-white faces, for others, facial recognition is ...

DeepMind's stunning victories over Go legend Lee Se-dol have stoked excitement over artificial intelligence's potential more than any event in recent memory. But the Google subsidiary's AlphaGo program is far from its only project -- it's not even the main one. As co-founder Demis Hassabis said earlier in the week, DeepMind wants to "solve intelligence," and he has more than a few ideas about how to get there. Hassabis himself has had an unusual path to this point, but one that makes perfect sense in retrospect. A child chess prodigy who won the Pentamind championship at the Mind Sports Olympiad five times, he rose to fame at a young age with UK computer games developers Bullfrog and Lionhead, working on AI-heavy games like Theme Park and Black & White, and later forming his own studio, Elixir. Hassabis then left the games industry in the mid-2000s to complete a PhD in neuroscience before co-founding DeepMind in 2010.

A new Federal Government report has outlined the future of Australia's workforce and revealed growing demand for professionals in STEM industries. The report by CSIRO and the Australian Computer Society, titled Tomorrow's Digitally Enabled Workforce, identified six megatrends. The trends include continued advances in automation and artificial intelligence; jobs will be more flexible and agile due to digital technology; a requirement for entrepreneurial skills; and an increase in skills and education requirements for many professions. While the report found that 44% of Australian jobs would be impacted by these changes, Andrew Johnson, CEO of the Australian Computer Society and one of the report's authors, said there are numerous opportunities for engineers. 'The intent of this report is to look at a 15- to 20-year timeframe.

San Francisco-based startup Fove has developed eye-tracking for virtual reality -- that kernel of technology many feel is key for the illusion of becoming immersed in a setting. Or use a death stare to shoot down virtual spaceships. Watch a movie of a forest or a room and be able to look around wherever you want. "It allows you to go inside the world that's behind the display," said Yuka Kojima, Fove's co-founder and a rare female chief executive in male-dominated Japan Inc. Fove, which comes from "fovea," the part of the eye with the sharpest vision, from "field of view," and the word's similarity with "love," has devised a way to use tiny infrared sensors inside headset goggles to monitor the movements of a wearer's pupils. It's a small company, founded in 2014, with offices in Tokyo, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and employing just 17 people.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 21 (Reuters) - Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley elder statesman who made Intel into the world's top chipmaker and helped usher in the personal computer age, died on Tuesday at age 79, Intel said. The company did not describe the circumstances of his death but Grove, who endured the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War Two, living under a fake name, and came to the United States to escape the chaos of Soviet rule, had suffered from Parkinson's. Grove was Intel's first hire after it was founded in 1968 and became the practical-minded member of a triumvirate that eventually led "Intel Inside" processors to be used in more than 80 percent of the world's personal computers. With his motto "only the paranoid survive," which became the title of his best-selling management book, Grove championed an innovative environment within Intel that became a blueprint for successful California startups. Grove, who was named man of the year by Time magazine in 1997, encouraged disagreement and insisted employees be vigilant of disruptions in industry and technology that could be major dangers - or opportunities - for Intel.

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