Welcome back to Across the Network -- Lab41's weekly look at what is going on in the world of AI. As always these are all links that I pulled from the Lab41 Slack channels. A Neural Network for Machine Translation -- I have a 3-year old son, who, thanks to his mother (whose family is from Taiwan) and our Chinese au-pair, speaks Mandarin fluently. And while I'm proud of this fact (and a bit miffed that he is so much more capable at picking up language than me), his fluency has required me to become a regular user of Google Translate. So I was excited to see the details behind the latest technology being used by the Google Translate team.

At the two-day RoboBusiness Conference, about 2,000 people were serenaded with lullabies and Disney tunes, including "Let It Go" from the hit film "Frozen," by a human-like robot designed to comfort senior citizens and autistic children. And next to a man-size robot that can drive a motorcycle 190 mph around a race track, a half-dozen ant-size robots quickly scurried about a miniature factory floor. "In five years, could you imagine what this conference is going to look like?" "There are going to be 8-foot robots walking all around us, talking to us, some of them maybe being smarter than us." The 12th annual conference, which wrapped up Thursday, illustrated how the focus of robotics is shifting from industrial uses to consumer products. That's especially true at a time when drones, self-driving cars and police robots that carry bombs are making news.

Mathematics is everywhere, if you know where to look. A recently opened exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) is displaying the St. John Altarpiece, a 14th-century work by Francescuccio Ghissi. It has nine scenes in total: eight smaller pictures featuring St. John the Evangelist flanking a larger central Crucifixion. At the end of the 19th century, the altarpiece was separated into parts by a saw and eight of the nine resulting panels were sold to different collectors. One panel, the last of the smaller scenes, was lost.

Without cloud computing, today's artificial intelligence (A.I.) boom would not exist. Both the advent of cloud computing and advances in machine intelligence have made it easier for companies to deliver A.I.-based features that create new ways of engaging customers. Most companies now use cloud-based systems for complex computing tasks that require intense CPU/GPU utilization, data operations and analytics work, or other tasks that would cause a traditional, locally-managed server to have a bad day within a few minutes. A.I.-based systems typically rely on these same computing characteristics because they often require several models of the machine's understanding of data to provide a reliable "human-like" result. Three of the largest technology companies -- Google, Amazon and IBM -- have already begun to provide A.I.-based systems on top of their existing platforms in an effort to push the limits of cloud computing forward.

MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson provides his learned perspective on the future of U.S. productivity in a recent Bloomberg podcast, "54: The Optimist's Guide to the Economy." Given the widely-held belief that "U.S. productivity growth has stagnated and the economy has been unable to break out of 2 percent expansion," Professor Brynjolfsson explains why he thinks the current wave of advances in technology means we don't have to worry about stagnation. Below are excerpts from Professor Brynjolfsson and "The Optimist's Guide to the Economy:" Opening Thoughts I think much better days are ahead of us. And my optimism comes not from extrapolating what happened with productivity recently. It comes from going out and visiting companies. The Promise of Artificial Intelligence When we [co-author Andrew McAfee] wrote the book [The Second Machine Age, 2014], humans could see better than machines; now, in many tasks, machines are much better, for instance at recognizing street signs or interpreting images in big databases like ImageNet.

Nvidia Corp. has unveiled two more graphics processing unit (GPU) chips aimed at the fast-growing branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning. At the GPU Technology Conference currently underway in Beijing, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (pictured) introduced the Tesla P4 and Tesla P40 GPUs that form part of the Pascal architecture-based deep learning platform. The company had officially entered the deep learning market in April with the announcement of the 15-billion transistor Tesla P100 chip, aimed at deep learning. "With the Tesla P100 and now Tesla P4 and P40, Nvidia offers the only end-to-end deep learning platform for the data center, unlocking the enormous power of AI for a broad range of industries," said Ian Buck, general manager of accelerated computing at Nvidia. While the Tesla P100 focuses on training tasks, the Tesla P4 and P40 has been designed specifically for inferencing.

A simple Google image search for'women's professional hairstyles' returns the following: We're back in New York this November for the 4th edition of our growth-focused technology event. That is, until you try searching for'unprofessional women's hairstyles' and find this: In it, you'll find a hodge-podge of hairstyles sported by black women, all of which seem, well, rather normal. In fact, Boing Boing spotted this back in April. In five years, 10 years, 25 years, you can imagine how much of our lives will be dictated by algorithms.

Shares of tech companies rebounded after a stellar stock-market debut for a software company quieted fears about lack of appetite for new tech issues. Nutanix shares more than doubled on its stock-market debut after the maker of software for data management priced its initial public offering above expectations. Japanese conglomerate Softbank's Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said the company plans to invest around 4.5 billion in South Korea's technology sector over the next decade, expressing interest in emerging fields of smart robots, the "Internet of Things" and artificial intelligence.

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach. Everyone says there is an information security talent gap. In fact, some sources say the demand for security professionals exceeds the supply by a million jobs. Their argument is basically this: attacks are not being detected quickly or often enough, and the tools are generating more alerts than can be investigated, so we need more people to investigate those alarms. We believe that, even if companies aroaund the world miraculously hired a million qualified InfoSec professionals tomorrow there would be no change in detection effectiveness and we would still have a "talent gap."

Joey: I come to this restaurant called Greenspan Grilled Cheese, and oh my god, the sandwiches here are so fly, you wouldn't even believe it. If there was going to be a Joey Bada grilled cheese, what would be on it? Joey: It would be tuna, toasted bread, of course some nice cheese, tomato sauce and grapes, because that's how they make theirs. Joey: I'm going to be back in Brooklyn as soon as my tour is over. No Brooklyn shows coming up, but I'm sure we'll book one very soon.