Google will start shipping development kits for its Project Soli wireless gesture recognition technology later this year. Project Soli involves a millimeter-wave radar chip that can detect "very fine" gestures with fingers and hands. It can then be used for playing games using hand gestures on mobile devices, computers, and electronics. The technology has the potential to get rid of controllers and input devices. Its biggest impact could be in virtual and augmented reality.

McDonald's called Donald Trump a "disgusting excuse for a President" with "tiny hands", in a message on Twitter. The post, now deleted, also said that the company "would love to have Barack Obama back". The company claimed that the tweet, sent from its corporate Twitter, was posted because the account was hacked into. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

The much-heralded technological singularity will happen in 2029, according to Google's director of engineering. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who has made a name for himself through his predictions, shared his thoughts about what's in store for humans and machines in an interview with SXSW in Texas. He believes that the so-called singularity – the moment when artificial intelligence exceeds man's intellectual capacity and creates a runaway effect, which many believe will lead to the demise of the human race – is little over a decade away. "By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence," said Mr Kurzweil. "That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. It's here, in part, and it's going to accelerate."

Hangovers are a fixture of South by Southwest. Free branded booze abounds, turning late nights into too-early mornings filled with product demos and repetitive panels. But determined marketers and wide-eyed founders pitch on through the pain, in the unbridled belief they might just be SXSW's next breakout star. But this year, the conference itself feels a lot like a hangover. It's as if the coastal elites who attend each year finally woke up with a serious case of the Sunday scaries, realizing that the many apps, platforms, and doodads SXSW has launched and glorified over the years haven't really made the world a better place.

Keras, a popular deep learning library, has been updated with a new API to make it easier for developers to use machine learning in Python. Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now and techies are keen to explore ways they can use machine learning. Built in 2015 by Google software engineer and AI researcher François Chollet, Keras was designed to be used on top of TensorFlow and Theano – open-source software libraries developed by machine learning researchers at Google and the University of Montreal, Canada. The update, dubbed Keras 2, has been changed to adapt to TensorFlow API better, allowing developers to mix and match TensorFlow and Keras components together. Since the software runs on TensorFlow and Theano, there is no performance cost to using Keras compared to the other more complex frameworks. Keras is more specialized for deep learning than TensorFlow or Theano.

Wi-Fi is crucial to the way we work today. Fast, reliable, and consistent wireless coverage in an enterprise is business-critical. Many day-to-day operations in the enterprise depend on it. And yet, most of the time, IT teams are flying blind when it comes to individual experience. This springs from two main challenges. The first challenge is data collection.

AI has achieved milestones in mastering games like chess, Go, and, recently, poker--illustrating how successful machines have become at completing specific, narrow tasks. But can AI move beyond the narrow, toward achieving more general, human-like skills? On Thursday, Microsoft launched a competition to address this question. Microsoft's Project Malmo, which the company calls a "sophisticated AI experimentation platform," brings researchers together to use Minecraft as a testing tool for developing AI--smart, collaborative AI that can compete in a virtual world. The Malmo Collaborative AI Challenge asks PhD students to enter this world and create AI that can team up with randomly assigned players to compete for a high score in Minecraft.

New powerful InsurTech solutions are coming to market and they are driving insurance companies to rethink core systems strategies. Google's "Alpha Go" artificial intelligence (AI) program provides insight into the impact and change these latest solutions are bringing. Last year Alpha Go triumphed over the Go World Champion Lee Sodol in a 5-game match. For those imagining this as an example of computing brute force calculating all possible game moves to overtake a human--think again. Alpha Go actually taught itself how to play the game of Go using real matches and then playing matches itself; just like a human does but much, much faster.

And, it was first published on Dataconomy on Dec 21, 2016; I'm reposting here for ease of access.] In recent years, AI (artificial intelligence) researchers have finally cracked problems that they've worked on for decades, from Go to human-level speech recognition. A key piece was the ability to gather and learn on mountains of data, which pulled error rates past the success line. In short, big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level. Blockchain technology could transform AI too, in its own particular ways. Some applications of blockchains to AI are mundane, like audit trails on AI models. Some appear almost unreasonable, like AI that can own itself -- AI DAOs. All of them are opportunities. This article will explore these applications. Before we discuss applications, let's first review what's different about blockchains compared to traditional big-data distributed databases like MongoDB. We can think of blockchains as "blue ocean" databases: they escape the "bloody red ocean" of sharks competing in an existing market, opting instead to be in a blue ocean of uncontested market space.

If you're a company entrenched in an arms race for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, you could do worse than tapping into a pool of thousands of data scientists to augment your digital products and services. That's the pole position Google holds after acquiring crowdsourcing platform Kaggle last week for an undisclosed sum. Some 600,000 professional data crunchers use Kaggle to build prediction models for such heady challenges as cancer detection and heart disease diagnoses. And experts say Kaggle could help Google facilitate broader adoption of AI technologies. "Data science and machine learning is now global and this is a validation of the idea that Google recognizes that most of the smartest people in the world work for somebody else," Neil Jacobstein, who chairs the artificial intelligence and robotics track at Singularity University, told CIO.com.