He answered that, of course, we would think of this as a time when technology had progressed very quickly, and we had discovered many things that made our lives more convenient. But in the future, he said, we will look back on "a feeling of being handcuffed to our devices." The need to access our computers or handheld devices in order to get what we're looking for will be remembered as a clunky nuisance, Berners-Lee predicted, and we can expect a time "when everything becomes more intuitive, and the things we want are more naturally embedded within our environments." I sat there thinking that most people are not imagining what the experience of AI and machine learning will bring to their lives. It reminded me of an earlier time -- the advent of the Internet, and then mobile and social platforms -- which changed our lives in ways we never expected.

Ken Tran, Senior Research Engineer at Microsoft Research shares how they are using deep learning to create applications for people who are blind or visually impaired. Using Tesla M40 and TITAN X GPUs with the cuDNN-accelerated Caffe deep learning framework, they have trained their language model to describe images or scenes in natural language. The work is being used for Microsoft's research project called Seeing AI that uses computer vision and natural language processing to describe a person's surroundings, read text, answer questions and even identify emotions on people's faces. Watch more scientists and researchers share how accelerated computing is benefiting their work at http://nvda.ly/X7WpH

Google Cloud Natural Language API reveals the structure and meaning of text by offering powerful machine learning models in an easy to use REST API. You can use it to extract information about people, places, events and much more, mentioned in text documents, news articles or blog posts. You can use it to understand sentiment about your product on social media or parse intent from customer conversations happening in a call center or a messaging app. You can analyze text uploaded in your request or integrate with your document storage on Google Cloud Storage.

I'm pleased to announce that the IBM Watson IoT Platform now has the ability to add Internet of Things (IoT) data, to Blockchain transactions. Leveraging blockchain for your IoT data opens up new ways of automating business processes amongst your partners without setting up an expensive centralized IT infrastructure. This gives you the potential to improve business networks, reduce costs, increase trust and open up new markets. A solution brief provides an overview of the capabilities and use cases being announced. The new features within the Watson IoT Platform are available through two new Lab Services Offerings.

Machine learning is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for many large companies. Everyone has, for sure, heard about Google's AI algorithm beating the World Champion in Go, as well as technologies like RankBrain, but machine learning does not have to be a mystical subject relegated to the domain of math researchers. There are many approachable libraries and technologies that show promise of being very useful to any industry that has data to play with. Machine learning also has the ability to turn traditional website marketing and SEO on its head. Late last year, my colleagues and I (rather naively) began an experiment in which we threw several popular machine learning algorithms at the task of predicting ranking in Google. We ended up with an assembly that achieved 41 percent true positive and 41 percent true negative on our data set.

The amount of energy consumed by big data centers has always been a headache for tech companies. Keeping the servers cool as they crunch numbers is such a challenge that Facebook even built one of its facilities on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Well, Google has a different solution to this problem: putting its DeepMind artificial intelligence unit in charge and using AI to manage power usage in parts of its data centers. A 40 percent reduction in the amount of electricity needed for cooling, which Google describes as a "phenomenal step forward." After accounting for "electrical losses and other non-cooling inefficiencies," this 40 percent reduction translated into a 15 percent reduction in overall power saving, says Google.

New technology is arriving faster than ever and holds the promise of solving many of the world's most pressing challenges, such as food and water security, energy sustainability and personalized medicine. In the past year alone, 3D printing has been used for medical purposes; lighter, cheaper and flexible electronics made from organic materials have found practical applications; and drugs that use nanotechnology and can be delivered at the molecular level have been developed in medical labs. However, uninformed public opinion, outdated government and intergovernmental regulations, and inadequate existing funding models for research and development are the greatest challenges in effectively moving new technologies from the research lab to people's lives. At the same time, it has been observed that most of the global challenges of the 21st century are a direct consequence of the most important technological innovations of the 20st century. Understanding the implications of new technologies are crucial both for the timely use of new and powerful tools and for their safe integration in our everyday lives.

What will laws on self-driving cars look like? Think black boxes and'minimum attention' • The...

Are you familiar with self-driving cars? These things would not be possible without the help of Machine Learning--the study of pattern recognition and prediction within the field of computer science. This course is taught by Stanford-educated, Silicon Valley experts that have decades of direct experience under their belts. They will teach you, in the simplest way possible (and with major visual techniques), to put Machine Learning and Python into action. With these skills under your belt, your programming skills will take a whole new level of power.