Mobile phone apps took center stage at Google's annual developer conference on Wednesday as the search giant announced new features for its digital assistant and its popular photo app while devoting little time to the Android mobile operating system. Addressing an audience of thousands of developers in Mountain View, California, Google executives delivered a broad-based update to their product portfolio which also included a slate of new features for the Google Home speaker, a job search tool and even a set of new virtual reality headsets. Meet Google's first 19 employees Meet Google's first 19 employees Only six of Google's earliest employees still work at the internet giant -- and these include co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Some early Google employees have gone on to become entrepreneurs, others angel investors, and a lucky few have gone on to become top executives at other tech companies. A few are happily retired. In 2015, a Quora user compiled a list of all the original Googlers and where there careers have taken them. Of the first 21 employees, only six are still at the company.

In the last ten years, artificial intelligence has changed the world in subtle but sweeping ways, but it's got nothing on the coming decade, if you look at what's being developed today.

On Tuesday at the 2017 SAP Sapphire Now conference, a panel of top product experts at SAP and AI researchers discussed a critical issue facing businesses: Avoiding hiring bias. The panel included Brenda Reid, product management at SAP SuccessFactors, Patricia Fletcher, solution management at SAP SuccessFactors, Anka Wittenberg, chief diversity and inclusion officer at SAP, and Yvonne Baur, product management at SAP SuccessFactors, and was moderated by Gabriela Burlacu, principal human capital management (HCM) researcher at SAP SuccessFactors. When it comes to diversifying the workplace, many people say "We get the'why,'" said Reid. "But where's the'how'?" Other panelists emphasized this point, illustrating why it's essential for businesses to embrace diversity initiatives. "We're starting to see people say'How do I do this?'" said Burlacu.

Google I/O is, far and away, Google's most important single event of the year, where CEO Sundar Pichai presents his grand vision for the company in the year to come. So it was a little baffling, at first blush, that Google -- a search company, which makes its money from search advertising -- would spend so much time talking about Google Photos, its photo-sharing service, and camera-related apps in general. At the same time, it makes perfect sense, in its own way. It's the same old Google, adapted for a world where cameras rule over keyboards. Way back in 2009, it launched an app called Google Goggles that let you snap a picture of, say, a book, and search for it online.

Two big Boston institutions, General Electric Co. and Partners HealthCare, on Wednesday launched an ambitious initiative to employ artificial intelligence to improve medical care. The decade-long effort will include clinical and technology experts at the Partners-owned Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's hospitals working alongside engineers and developers at GE. The companies will begin by building software to help doctors more quickly and accurately interpret medical images, but over time, they also want to create applications for genomics, population health, and other areas of medicine. Artificial intelligence -- also called machine learning technology -- refers to computers that can sift through vast amounts of data to recognize patterns, becoming more accurate over time. Executives from GE, one of the nation's largest corporations, and Partners, Massachusetts' biggest nonprofit hospital network, said such technology has the potential to help care providers do their jobs more efficiently so that patients receive more accurate diagnoses and better treatments.

It is hardly surprising that Artificial Intelligence was a major focus of Microsoft's Build 2017 conference. In fact, given the rapid advancements in all areas of AI technology and the raging debates about if – or rather, when – robots will take over our jobs, it would be surprising if one of the world's biggest technology companies weren't thinking about these problems in a big way. When Harry Shum – Executive Vice President of Microsoft's AI and Research group – took to the main stage on Monday, he talked about how soon it will be almost impossible to imagine a technology that doesn't tap into the power of AI in one way or another. What made this possible, he continued, was the convergence of three forces – increased cloud computing power, algorithms running off deep neural networks, and access to massive datasets. This means that AI does indeed have the potential to disturb every single industry and process out there.

While the technology industry is a goldmine of employment, for anyone not developing an app or working on AI, finding a job can be tough. This is especially true for folks looking for entry-level positions. Craigslist decimated the classified section of newspapers and while sites like Monster, Linkedin and others are helpful if you have an established career, for entry-level jobs, it's tough to find work. According to Google, it's also hard for employers to find people to fill those positions. So, in partnership with Linkedin, Monster, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, and -- surprisingly -- Facebook, the tech giant will be launching Google for Jobs, an AI-powered search engine that combines Google search, machine learning (to delve into career sites), job boards, staffing agencies and applicant tracking systems to help you find work in your area.

It seemed obvious, at first, that Jade Wu was getting punked. In the fall of 2009, the Cornell University undergraduate had come across a posting for a job in the lab of one of the world's best-known social psychologists. A short while later, she found herself in a conference room, seated alongside several other undergraduate women. "Have you guys heard of extrasensory perception?" Daryl Bem asked the students. While most labs in the psych department were harshly lit with fluorescent ceiling bulbs, Bem's was set up for tranquility. A large tasseled tapestry stretched across one wall, and a cubicle partition was draped with soft, black fabric. It felt like the kind of place where one might stage a séance. "Well, extrasensory perception, also called ESP, is when you can perceive things that are not immediately available in space or time," Bem said. "So, for example, when you can perceive something on the other side of the world, or in a different room, or something that hasn't happened yet." It occurred to Wu that the flyer might have been a trick. What if she and the other women were themselves the subjects of Bem's experiment? What if he were testing whether they'd go along with total nonsense? "I know this sounds kind of out there," Wu remembers Bem saying, "but there is evidence for ESP, and I really believe it. But I don't need you to believe it. It's better if I can say, 'Even my staff don't believe in this.' " As Bem went on, Wu began to feel more at ease. He seemed genuine and kind, and he wasn't trying to convert her to his way of thinking. OK, so maybe there's going to be a you-got-punked moment at the end of this, she thought, but at least this guy will pay me.

Amazon announced that its virtual assistant Alexa will soon be able to deliver notifications, including telling you to go for a run if the weather is nice. Users will be able to enable notifications for specific updates about news, the weather and shopping. Skills like AccuWeather will provide weather updates, The Washington Post will provide breaking news alerts, and Just Eat will give food order confirmations. Amazon Echo is a voice-controlled smart speaker that works alongside a smartphone app. Using a virtual assistant called Alexa, the speaker can respond to voice commands from the user, such as setting an alarm or ordering a cab.

The future of Android will be a lot smarter, thanks to new programming tools that Google unveiled on Wednesday. The company announced TensorFlow Lite, a version of its machine learning framework that's designed to run on smartphones and other mobile devices, during the keynote address at its Google I/O developer conference. "TensorFlow Lite will leverage a new neural network API to tap into silicon-specific accelerators, and over time we expect to see [digital signal processing chips] specifically designed for neural network inference and training," said Dave Burke, Google's vice president of engineering for Android. "We think these new capabilities will help power a next generation of on-device speech processing, visual search, augmented reality, and more." The Lite framework will be made a part of the open source TensorFlow project soon, and the neural network API will come to the next major release of Android later this year.