Say what you will about Google's AlphaGo AI, it generally turned up to its championship matches sober. Actually, most AI tend to stay away from the bottle – which makes sense given their lack of mouth, or digestive system, or sense of fun. One UK company is looking to change all that, though. IntelligentX's AI might not actually drink beer, but it is learning how to brew it thanks to machine-learning algorithms. It works like this: IntelligentX has made four different types of beer.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator founded by a Hong Kong-born venture capitalist wants to bring Asia's best AI start-ups to the global stage. Dubbed Zeroth.ai, the AI accelerator was founded by Tak Lo, who most recently was a venture partner at Hong Kong venture capital company Mind Fund and a director at UK-based VC Techstars. "AI for me is something that will move the meter on technology in the next five to 10 years, there's no dispute about that," Lo said. The accelerator programme, which is currently accepting applications from AI start-ups in Asia, will officially begin in November this year. "I want to bring the wealth of experience and network from being a venture capitalist in New York and London to Asia and Hong Kong," Lo said.

We all know about the incredible progress that deep learning has made in recent years. The previous technological revolution, the Internet revolution, turned out pretty well. The world that the Internet created has turned out to be open --amazingly open, in fact, a world that empowers individuals like never before. Much like almost anyone today can create a web app, because the tools and technologies underlying the web are easy to use, open-source, completely free, and learning resources are available everywhere with an Internet connection --again, for free.

There is a set of important emerging digital trends I track as a futurist that are together converging very fast. These digital trends are all potentially disruptive, unless we plan ahead for the impact and change that is coming. More agility, smarter business processes and better productivity are the likely outcomes. Recently I gave a talk about my thinking that the Next Digital Disruption is big data and AI. I call it Big Data Intelligence.

Read more about StatusToday, its AI and its unique approach to human behavior study in an exclusive article featured in the Business Reporter, distributed as a special supplement with The Telegraph.

It means that machines will have to handle complex interactions, make decisions, and answer different needs. A customer interaction generates complicated situations to manage in real-time, big data which allows you to keep a history of the relationship, and also the ability to crossover with behavioural data. All these topics are related to AI. There are two kinds of knowledge: explicit and implicit. Explicit means understandable, for example extracting insights from data, rules, and so on.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Only recently, Tesla Motors revealed that one of its self-driving cars, operating in Autopilot mode, had crashed in May and killed its driver. How much responsibility Tesla has for the death is still under debate, but many experts are already reminding us of the huge number of lives that could be saved by autonomous cars. Does that mean we shouldn't worry much about the single death--that we should look away for the sake of the greater good? Is it unethical to focus on negative things that could slow down autonomous-driving technology, which could mean letting thousands of people die in traffic accidents?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at left, with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. (Photo: Brian Smale) Microsoft and GE are joining forces for new cloud technologies that will bring improved use of big data to production. GE will bring its Predix industrial data-gathering operating system to Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, the two companies announced Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. The deal is the first in a planned strategic partnership between GE and Microsoft. "Every industry and every company around the world is being transformed by digital technology," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement announcing the partnership. "Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business -- from the factory floor to smart buildings."

Evolution as understood by Charles Darwin was supposed to happen very slowly and gradually. That's why he, and many other scientists, were puzzled by an event that happened about 540 million years ago, known as the Cambrian Explosion. During that period, life as it was known went in overdrive mode, and a world that was mostly comprised by simple life forms, suddenly – in geological scale – became extremely diversified, with most major animal phyla appearing in a span of 25 million years, to then slow down to its normal pace. There are many theories trying to explain it, like the increase in oxygen levels, or the onset of new genetic mechanisms drastically affecting embryo development. A possible explanation was made popular in 2003 by then Oxford professor Andrew Parker, who published the book "In the blink of an eye: how vision sparked the big bang of evolution".

A chart of global internet speeds, created using R. New features in the forecast package, updated to version 7. This year's Data Journalism Awards Data Visualization of the Year was created with R. Using GitHub avatars and the Microsoft Face API to estimate gender ratios of programmers by language used. Using the Data Science Virtual Machine and Microsoft R Server to analyze data from 600 million taxi rides. R is once again the top-ranked software in the KDnuggets annual poll.