Dean Nelson has joined transportation company Uber as head of Uber Compute, as the company continues to expand its data storage and processing capabilities. Nelson previously worked at companies including Sun Microsystems, Allegro Networks, and eBay. In March, he left his position as the man leading eBay's data center strategy to establish a data center industry group called Infrastructure Masons. "My pivotal moment is today. I'm starting the most exciting job of my career as the Head of Uber Compute," Nelson said in a LinkedIn post.

Machine learning, autonomy, and artificial intelligence are being explored as key new areas for cybersecurity. What is their history and likely future? As we rely more on autonomous machines for our security, what are the benefits? How can policymakers keep pace? A panel of leading experts will explore the issues from the perspectives of computer science, political science, ethics and law.

But deciding to build an app in the first place was driven by a broader purpose. As one doctor put it, "If you want to do world-class sociology research, build Facebook."

When you see or hear something happen, you can instantly describe it: "a girl in a blue shirt caught a ball thrown by a baseball player," or "a dog runs along the beach." It's a simple task for us, but an immensely hard one for computers -- fortunately, IBM and MIT are partnering up to see what they can do about making it a little easier. The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension -- we'll just call it BM3C -- is a multi-year collaboration between the two organizations that will be looking specifically at the problem of computer vision and audition. The problem of computer vision spans multiple disciplines, so it has to be attacked from multiple directions. Say your camera is good enough to track objects minutely -- what good is it if you don't know how to separate objects from their background?

Spending on cognitive systems in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) will reach over US 1.9 billion in 2019 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 65.36 percent from 2014 - 2019. According to IDC findings, more than 40 percent of all cognitive systems spending throughout the forecast will go to software, which includes both cognitive applications and cognitive software platforms, which facilitate the development of intelligent, advisory, and cognitively enabled solutions. "The barriers of artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning are rapidly dropping," says Chwee Chua, AVP, Big Data and Analytics and Cognitive Computing, IDC Asia/Pacific. "As such, cognitive systems will soon be powering data-driven applications across a wide spectrum of solutions. "This new generation of tools and capabilities is capable of offering intelligent assistance, advice, and recommendations to end users; thus enhancing their competitive edge or supplementing information for better decision making." Cognitive applications is the largest and fastest-growing category in cognitive systems in APeJ, with spending expected to reach US 909.33 million by 2019. Cognitive-related services (e.g. business services and IT consulting) represent the second largest spending category while hardware spending, which is mostly on servers and storage, will grow nearly as fast as software spending. "Cognitively enabled solutions are the next evolution in analysing structured and unstructured data," Chua adds. "Cognitive platforms are offering innovators the ability to build new products and services that would have been previously impossible without large resources." The manufacturing industry currently spends the most on cognitive systems, representing nearly 32 percent of the total APeJ spend throughout the forecast - leading uses in manufacturing include quality management, recommendation systems, and research. Other verticals actively leveraging on cognitive systems are the retail and healthcare industries with an estimated combined spending on cognitive systems over US 675 million in 2019. The leading use cases in retail are automated customer service agents and merchandising for omni-channel operations while the leading use case in healthcare is diagnosis and treatment systems. "We are already seeing use cases for cognitive systems being implemented in Asia/Pacific to address problems across verticals," adds Qiao Li, Senior Market Analyst, Asia/Pacific Big Data and Analytics, IDC Asia/Pacific. "For instance, banks are using cognitive applications to improve customer experiences with recommendations based on customer profile and changing market conditions.

Chennai: Buying on Amazon, Flipkart or Snapdeal always comes with the prompt Do you want to save your card details?' A question that poses a lot of risks -at the merchant gateway, bank and customer end -irrespective of whether it is a large retailer or your neighbourhood florist and confectioners.For banks, customers using e-commerce sites poses the debate of convenience versus security . With convenience comes lesser steps and faster buying, but higher security would mean multiple authentications and more time -so to strike a fine balance between the two -Indian banks are now looking at software products like FSS' Access Control, geo-fencing of accounts and rule-based access. "What it means is, if you use your card at an ATM in Chennai and in the next 5 minutes your husband tries to buy a product online from an ecommerce site from Delhi -the card could get blocked or ask for further authentication. With artificial intelligence, the system could sense this is an unusual transaction because the same card is being used within 5 minutes at locations more than 1,000 kilometres apart," says Suresh Raja gopalan, president products, FSS. Banks now have the capability to set rules to ensure that any unusual transaction gets blocked or requires multiple authenticators.

It's not just gigantic search engines that are looking to acquire tech and talent around emerging areas like speech recognition. Even design and craft marketplaces can use a little machine learning and artificial intelligence to make their wheels turn a little better. Today, the popular handmade-goods site Etsy announced it has acquired a startup called Blackbird Technologies, which has developed algorithms that can help Etsy develop better and more advanced search with features like natural language processing, image recognition and analytics. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but we're asking and will update if we learn more. The company's employees -- it appears there were around 10 -- will all be joining Etsy.

Beginning in September 2016 in Cambridge, the BM3C collaboration will bring together leading brain, cognitive, and computer scientists to conduct research in the field of unsupervised machine understanding of audio-visual streams of data, using insights from next-generation models of the brain to inform advances in machine vision. The vision is that this integrated cross-disciplinary research will lead to advances that are likely to change both our personal and professional lives - from helping clinicians improve elderly and disabled care to helping organizations maintain and repair complex machinery as well as a host of cross-industry applications. "In a world where humans and machines are working together in increasingly collaborative relationships, breakthroughs in the field of machine vision will potentially help us live healthier more productive lives," said Guru Banavar, Chief Scientist, Cognitive Computing and VP at IBM Research. "By bringing together brain researchers and computer scientists to solve this complex technical challenge, we will advance the state-of-the-art in AI with our collaborators at MIT." The BM3C will be led by Professor James DiCarlo, head of the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences (BCS) at MIT, who will be supported by a team of faculty members, researchers, and graduate students from both the Brain & Cognitive Sciences department and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

About a decade ago, the author Alexander Weinstein suffered an unexpectedly affecting loss: His computer died, taking with it years of his creative work. "I was deeply upset," says the 39-year-old writer and instructor. "Around the same time, a lot of my students were getting iPhones, and talking about how much they loved them--saying that, if they lost anything, please don't let it be their iPhones. I got the sense that we were all starting to forge this very deep emotional connection with technology." Weinstein's response came in the form of a short story, "Saying Goodbye to Yang," which is now the first entry in his future-shocked, surprisingly moving, thoroughly excellent new speculative-fiction collection, Children of the New World.

Microsoft says it aims to help oncologists consider the individual elements of each patient's cancer at the genetic level. Google's UK subsidiary DeepMind isn't the only group using artificial intelligence to fight cancer by helping doctors make faster decisions. Microsoft today outed a number of key cancer-fighting projects it has under way, showing off its application of machine learning to solve bigger challenges than identifying dog breeds. One such application, dubbed Project Hanover, is seeking to make personalized, precision cancer therapy available to all cancer sufferers by helping oncologists sift through reams of biomedical research papers faster. Microsoft is targeting the so-called "molecular tumor board", which convenes to devise personal therapy to suite a patient's specific cancer.