For more than a decade, Silicon Valley's technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie. Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a "Like" button. The new era in Silicon Valley centers on artificial intelligence and robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet, two previous generations that spread computing globally. Computers have begun to speak, listen and see, as well as sprout legs, wings and wheels to move unfettered in the world.

At this year's Annual Meeting of the New Champions, hosted by the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, the Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies choose the top ten technologies of 2016, based on their potential to transform industry and society. A diverse range of breakthrough technologies, including autonomous vehicles, natural language artificial intelligence, and next generation batteries, were examined in collaboration with Scientific American, highlighting advances that have the power to improve lives, transform industries, and safeguard the planet. The report also provides an opportunity to debate human, societal, economic, or environmental risks and concerns that the technologies may pose prior to widespread adoption. "The global community needs to come together and agree on common principles if our society is to reap the benefits and hedge the risks of these technologies," said Dr. Bernard Meyerson, Chief Innovation Officer of IBM, and Chairman of the Meta-Council. In raising awareness about these technologies, moreover, the Council aims to address challenges in investment and regulation.

Deep learning algorithms could potentially learn to avoid the rules they where taught, so we won't understand their choices. So should we trust them like other humans? "Software governs much of our daily lives from behind the scenes, from which sorts of information we consume, to who we date. For some, secretive algorithms decide whether they are at risk of committing a future crime. It's only natural to want to understand how these black boxes accomplish all this, especially when it impacts us so directly.

Though deals to private artificial intelligence companies -- excluding incubator/accelerator rounds -- fell 10% in Q2'16, dollar funding reached an all-time high. Q2'16 saw 3 100M mega-rounds by companies using AI: a 154M Series A round to China-based healthcare startup iCarbonX (backed by Tencent, Vcanbio), a 100M growth equity round raised by New Jersey-based Fractal Analytics (backed by Khazanah Nasional Berhad) and a 100M Series D round raised by California-based cybersecurity unicorn Cylance (backed by investors including Blackstone Group, Insight Venture Partners, and Khosla Ventures). Our AI category includes companies applying AI solutions to verticals like healthcare, security, advertising, and finance as well as those developing general-purpose AI tech. Nearly 70% of the deals went to startups in the United States in Q2'16. A majority of the startups raising funds were still in their early-stages: Nearly 60% of the deals went to startups raising seed/angel and Series A rounds, while mid-stage startups (Series B and C) received 12% of the deals.

Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report. After selling his business and retiring from 25 years as a provider of computer direct marketing and consulting to the Democratic National Committee, major presidential and other campaigns and initiatives, he has energetically pursued a new career in researching and investing in robotics. In 2013 he co-founded Robo-stox LLC (renamed to ROBO Global) which developed a tracking index for the robotics industry: the ROBO Global Robotics & Automation Index.

This article was posted by Xiu-Shen Wei. Xiu-Shen Wei is a 2nd-year Ph.D. candidate of Department of Computer Science and Technology in Nanjing University and a member of LAMDA Group. Deep Neural Networks, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. These methods have dramatically improved the state-of-the-arts in visual object recognition, object detection, text recognition and many other domains such as drug discovery and genomics. In addition, many solid papers have been published in this topic, and some high quality open source CNN software packages have been made available.

A recent Gallup poll found that 37 percent of the U.S. workforce has telecommuted--a fourfold increase over 1995. Once a fairy tale perk that was likely unachievable in most positions, telecommuting is quickly becoming the norm for companies, both big and small. And with the growth of what has been dubbed the "Gig Economy", or the practice of companies hiring independent contract workers for various projects instead of having a team of full-time salaried employees, there is no doubt that there will be a rise in the use of home offices as well. And as this remote work revolution transitions our cubes into homier workspaces, technology is constantly evolving to keep up with changing needs of remote workers. From artificial intelligence assistants to virtual reality conferencing and web-based organization applications, the introduction of new types of technology will change how we work from home.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on a roll. It's happening through developments spurred on by 800 pound tech gorillas like Amazon and IBM, and big brands in transportation like Uber and Jaguar. Before we ponder that further, if you haven't had the time to keep up here are seven recent notches on the artificial intelligence belt…er, chipset. The future of artificial intelligence certainly seems rosy. Peter Norvig, research director at Google, agrees.

The growing popularity of messaging platforms, paired with rapid advances in A.I., is driving a new era of meaningful interaction with chabots. Just as browsers like Chrome and Firefox provide access to every web page, messaging platforms have begun to mirror that functionality to access branded conversational bots. A massive number of people -- 1.4 billion monthly users -- are now on messaging platforms and are spending an average of 23 minutes and 23 seconds a day on chat. Together, the top four messaging platforms -- Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Viber -- have more registered users, higher retention, and higher engagement than the top four social networks. With 80 percent of U.S. teens on chat platforms, Gen Z is at the center of a major disruption in the evolving ecosystem of communication innovation.

"We are in a new era, one in which we are building systems that can't be grasped in their totality or held in the mind of a single person." George Hotz has a gift for bending complex technologies in the direction of his own desire. As a teenage nobody, Hotz earned notoriety for being the first hacker to unlock Apple's iPhone -- much to the annoyance of AT&T, who had exclusive-ish networking rights at the time. Several years later, he became the focus of a Sony lawsuit for releasing hacked Playstation 3 software to the world. And last December, he discussed his latest project with Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance -- a patched together home-made driverless car. When asked what compels him to crack open these complicated technologies Hotz said, "I want power.