These bizarre images, created by users via Russian website Ostagram, are the product of an art technique known as Inceptionism, where images are combined using neural networks to generate a single mind-bending picture.

From medical diagnosis, speech, and handwriting recognition to automated trading and movie recommendations, machine learning techniques are being used to make critical business and life decisions every moment of the day. Each machine learning problem is unique, so it can be challenging to manage raw data, identify key features that impact your model, train multiple models, and perform model assessments. In this session we explore the fundamentals of machine learning using MATLAB. Through several examples we review typical workflows for both supervised learning (classification) and unsupervised learning (clustering). About the Presenter: Shashank Prasanna is a product marketing manager at MathWorks, where he focuses on MATLAB and add-on products for statistics, machine learning, and data analytics.

I started off life with many heroes. Thanks to my grandparents, I had enough and more from mythology. And then of course, there was Hercules. Then I grew a little older, became monotheistic and concentrated all my worship on Alan Turing. The pattern of the monomyth or the'hero's journey' is always the same - mysterious adventures into supernatural worlds, supernatural encounters, fantastic victories and of course, they all come back with the greater powers to help common folk like you and me.

Two engineers who helped build Siri, the famous voice assistant built into every iPhone, have claimed to have gone one step better with an all new digital assistant nicknamed Viv. Unlike her predecessor promiscuous Viv flirt will not be locked down to one ecosystem – an advantage which is likely to set it apart from the likes Facebook's M, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now and Siri itself by Apple. Anyone familiar with existing voice assistants will feel instantly at home with the latest version, which relies on users clicking on a'Viv' button before posing it a question or voice command. Unlike prior iterations however Viv promises to be a whole lot more advanced; as Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and chief executive of Viv demonstrated by querying: "Will it be warmer than 70 degrees Fahrenheit near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5 pm on the day after tomorrow?" For which he received a detailed answer within 10 milliseconds.

Apple is looking to broaden Siri's footprint and usefulness with help from third party app developers and a software development kit. The big question is whether the move will be able to thwart rivals such as Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. From connected light bulbs, to plant sensors, to smart locks, and beyond, smart home tech is growing and evolving rapidly. Here you'll find the latest product reviews, news, and how-tos to help you connect your surroundings to the internet in the smartest way possible. The Information is reporting that Apple is opening up Siri to third-party applications.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. Fifteen years ago, when the time became ripe for post-PC devices that put a premium on integrating software and hardware, Apple was the best-positioned company to lead the charge -- and it did. The company's vertical integration, its attention to detail and innovation in both software and hardware, and its willingness to make big bets gave it an edge. And it used that edge to reel off its now-familiar string of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, and the iPad. Now, the iPod is essentially gone, and the other products are in mature or maturing markets, with either pretty flat or dropping sales.

While assisting customers through their digital transformation is the current priority for SAP, CEO Bill McDermott has predicted over the next five to 10 years the hype will be around machine learning, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality. "I think very strongly that intelligent applications will fundamentally change the way you do work in the enterprise and the way you collaborate with your trading partners outside of the enterprise," he said during his keynote at 2016 SAP Sapphire Now. He went on to say it's no longer viable for businesses to just automate internal processes, rather the future needs to focus on using automated systems to make intelligent predictions. "This idea of CRM and SFA -- that's dead; everybody has got that. We're not just automating internal sales process anymore so the sales director has a sales forecast that makes sense. Even with all that technology investment you still only have about 22 percent confidence on the sales forecast, while other companies have 44 percent, so there's something wrong with the sales forecast," he said.

It was several weeks ago, Google came out with the most shocking earning and its managers could not stop taking about the business's investments in artificial intelligence and apparatus learning. For any company that would be a complete distraction from its core business. Google combined the two topics. Artificial intelligence sits on the far end of the machine learning which people create software's that can learn about what is happening around the world. Google is the largest sponsors of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may some day surpass the human race and lead to our extinction, but we're all right so far. It's technologically advanced, but it doesn't yet understand how humans interact in the real world. Remember Tay, Microsoft's teen chatbot? They released her into the wild, wild Web, innocent one moment and a racist, sexist and genocidal AI the next? Tay was an IRL Chappie, corrupted by trolls and abusers, picking up the worst parts of social media until its plug was pulled.