After being away from the research on AI over the last few years, I took a deep dive over the last week into the current state of affairs. I downloaded and worked through Tutorials on Theano, Tensorflow and Torch. I read a number of scientific papers from arXiv and a book on a roadmap for machine learning, which you've probably come across. I tweeted a bunch of notes and thoughts while I was training my own Deep Learning model with new data (aka my human brain). And so what was I looking for as a result of all this research about learning?

Despite predictions of a tech slowdown, big-name businesses like Facebook, Apple, and IBM are pouring resources into artificial intelligence (AI), changing the field and gaining the interest of venture capitalists everywhere. As investors actively seek innovative players in the AI space, more entrepreneurs are gravitating toward the technology as they build and grow their own companies. Businesses such as Sentient, Context Relevant, and Scaled Inference all continue to work on their own multifunction AI platforms for computation and analysis, but this is only a small segment of the AI market. Multiple businesses now invest time and effort into purpose-built AI products. Here are a few of the businesses that are capturing attention in their respective industries for their AI work. With total capital of 58 million, AI specialist Kensho is already showing just how serious investors are about the technology.

In this post I consider three learning approaches and argue that it could be a bad idea to avoid the mathematics and theory when starting out with machine learning. There are three approaches to starting out in machine learning that I have seen practiced. One is a bottom-up approach, in which the student starts with the mathematics and theory and then puts it into practice in either a high-level programming language -- such as Matlab, Python, R or Octave -- or by coding from scratch in a 3GL like Java, C# or C . The second is the top-down approach, in which machine learning tools and/or libraries are used to shelter the student from the coding, mathematics and theory. S/he is instructed to worry about how it all works later and to instead practice working with datasets.

Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once. This post (sixth in a series of seven) is a look at robotics. Be sure to read the first five posts if you haven't already: When the World Is Wired: The Magic of the Internet of Everything Where Artificial Intelligence Is Now and What's Just Around the Corner The Near Future of VR and AR: What You Need to Know Drones Have Reached at Tipping Point--Here's What Happens Next How 3D Printing Is Transforming the Way We Make Things An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., 3D Printing), but try to predict the future when AI, robotics, VR, drones, and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining…You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. This post is the result of an interview with Rodney Brooks on the top five recent robotics breakthroughs (2012-2015) and the top five anticipated robotics breakthroughs (2016-2018). Rodney is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT.

This week humankind was delivered a body blow by an artificial intelligence (AI) called AlphaGo that beat Go's world champion, Lee Sedol, so is it now time for humans to let the machines rule the world? Not just yet--while this adds to a growing list of machines that have beaten the best humans at chess, checkers and backgammon, Lee Sedol won a game back against AlphaGo, so there is still hope for us. The ancient Chinese strategy game Go has substantially more moves to consider each turn than chess. With the two players having to look several moves ahead with more possible outcomes than there are atoms in the universe before deciding what move to make. For each move in a game such as Go, the AI uses a tree search that plays out scenarios, notes which lead to the most victories, and then works back to find out the next move that will lead to the best scenario.

Twenty years ago, Louis Gerstner transformed IBM by emphasizing consulting and technology services -- not just technology -- to solve customer problems. Today, as the wave of digitization continues to grow and envelope all the world's enterprises, IBM is at a crucial juncture once again. CEO Ginni Rometty is leading the company into new areas, betting big on its Watson software and cloud computing. But these new services have yet to grow fast enough to supplant the profit declines in the company's eroding legacy products. This time, the transformation IBM faces is far more difficult, for two reasons.

An anti-tank missile fires by an Iraqi CH-4 drone destroys an ISIS artillery piece, seen in footage captured by the drone's onboard, retractable sensor turret. China's armed CH-3 and CH-4 drones have recently made international news, being used by nations that range from Iraq to Nigeria. And now NORINCO, one of China's leading defense contractors, is getting in on the international drone export game, showing off a new armed drone helicopter. The Sky Saker H300, seen here in Dubai, is China's first helicopter UCAV. Being cheaper and easier to use then larger UCAVs like the Reaper and CH-4, it could become a battalion and company level UCAV for on demand air strikes.

In the winter of 2012, I travelled from New Delhi, where I grew up, to Calcutta to visit my cousin Moni. My father accompanied me as a guide and companion, but he was a sullen and brooding presence, lost in a private anguish. He is the youngest of five brothers, and Moni is his firstborn nephew--the eldest brother's son. Since 2004, Moni, now fifty-two, has been confined to an institution for the mentally ill (a "lunatic home," as my father calls it), with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He is kept awash in antipsychotics and sedatives, and an attendant watches, bathes, and feeds him through the day. My father has never accepted Moni's diagnosis. Over the years, he has waged a lonely campaign against the psychiatrists charged with his nephew's care, hoping to convince them that their diagnosis was a colossal error, or that Moni's broken psyche would somehow mend itself. He has visited the institution in Calcutta twice--once without warning, hoping to see a transformed Moni, living a secretly normal life behind the barred gates. But there was more than just avuncular love at stake for him in these visits. Moni is not the only member of the family with mental illness. Two of my father's four brothers suffered from various unravellings of the mind. Madness has been among the Mukherjees for generations, and at least part of my father's reluctance to accept Moni's diagnosis lies in a grim suspicion that something of the illness may be buried, like toxic waste, in himself. Rajesh, my father's third-born brother, had once been the most promising of the Mukherjee boys--the nimblest, the most charismatic, the most admired. But in the summer of 1946, at the age of twenty-two, he began to behave oddly, as if a wire had been tripped in his brain. The most obvious change in his personality was a volatility: good news triggered uncontained outbursts of joy; bad news plunged him into inconsolable desolation. By that winter, the sine curve of Rajesh's psyche had tightened in its frequency and gained in its amplitude.

"Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business" (Random House) is Charles Duhigg's follow-up to his best-selling "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," which was published in 2012. The new book, like its predecessor, has a format that's familiar in contemporary nonfiction: exemplary tales interpolated with a little social and cognitive science. The purpose of the tales is to create entertaining human-interest narratives; the purpose of the science is to help the author pick out a replicable feature of those narratives for readers to emulate. What enabled the pilot to land the badly damaged plane? How did the academic dropout with anxiety disorder become a champion poker player? What made "West Side Story" and Disney's "Frozen" into mega-hits?

The head of Microsoft's Xbox has apologised after the company hosted a party for computer games developers that featured podium performances by female go-go dancers. The evening event in San Francisco was held on the same day as a Microsoft-sponsored "women in games" lunch. The dancers were dressed in short skirts and crop tops. Phil Spencer said it was "unequivocally wrong", after attendees took to social media to complain. The event took place during a week-long conference for developers creating games for Xbox.