For more than a decade, Silicon Valley's technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people find new friends, get a lift home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie. Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. The new era in Silicon Valley centres on artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, a transformation many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet. Computers have begun to speak, listen and see, as well as sprout legs, wings and wheels to move unfettered. The shift was evident in a Lowe's home improvement store this month, when a prototype inventory checker developed by Bossa Nova Robotics silently glided through the aisles using computer vision to perform a task humans have done manually for centuries. The robot, which was skilled enough to autonomously move out of the way of shoppers, alerted people to its presence with soft birdsong chirps.

The tool, which the nation's largest department store chain calls a "mobile companion," can be accessed for now through a browser and will accept questions in 10 U.S. locations about products, services and facilities. It uses natural language and offers feedback in seconds. It's developed by IBM Watson -- the Jeopardy-winning "cognitive computing" service and is designed to keep learning more about the store's customers. That's a key element as Macy's seeks to spur sluggish sales, make being at the store more enjoyable and distinguish itself from online portals and specialty retailers. "We want to improve the shopping experience. We want the customers to shop at Macy's and come back," Serena Potter, Macy's group vice president of digital media strategy told The Associated Press.

Is Honda's walking robot Asimo marrying Pepper, the chattering robot from SoftBank? Automaker Honda Motor Co. and internet company SoftBank said Thursday they will work together on artificial intelligence to develop products with sensors and cameras that can converse with drivers. Asimo, first shown in 1996, walks, runs, dances and grips things. Pepper, which went on sale last year, doesn't have legs but is programmed to recognize mood swings in people it interacts with. Major automakers and technology companies are interested in robotics to improve driving safety and comfort.

The brain looks like a featureless expanse of folds and bulges, but it's actually carved up into invisible territories. Each is specialized: Some groups of neurons become active when we recognize faces, others when we read, others when we raise our hands. On Wednesday, in what many experts are calling a milestone in neuroscience, researchers published a spectacular new map of the brain, detailing nearly 100 previously unknown regions -- an unprecedented glimpse into the machinery of the human mind. Scientists will rely on this guide as they attempt to understand virtually every aspect of the brain, from how it develops in children and ages over decades, to how it can be corrupted by diseases like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. "It's a step towards understanding why we're we," said David Kleinfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based equipment will increasingly become standard in both infotainment and in advanced driver assisted systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle applications, according to a recent Automotive Electronics Roadmap Report from IHS. The report indicates that "…unit shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) systems used in infotainment and ADAS systems are expected to rise from just seven million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025." It explains that the attach rate of AI-based systems in new vehicles was a mere 8% in 2015, but is set to rise to 109% in 2025, as multiple AI systems are routinely installed. The use of AI in cars has important implications for building Smart Sustainable Cities. As city leaders aim to streamline transportation, they are studying how AI-equipped vehicles can help to increase road safety, reduce commuting time, eliminate traffic bottlenecks, and lessen reliance on parking spaces – among other applications.

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.