Futurist, author and inventor Ray Kurzweil delivered a keynote speech to 800 attendees at 2016 Tech Leadership Conference in Waterloo, Canada. Ray Kurzweil envisions the future -- by year 2020, 3D printing will transform manufacturing. People will print their own clothing, he predicts. In Asia, builders are making small office buildings using modules made by 3D printers. Inventors created jet engines and cars out of printed parts, Kurzweil says. Impact on a declining manufacturing industry could be catastrophic. Jobs will be lost, manufacturing will turn into an information industry, but there's a silver lining behind industry disruption, he says. The fashion industry will explode with new ideas as people design, make and share clothes using 3D printers. Kurzweil sees manufacturing moving into open source design and production.

Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.

Even then, just 1 per cent of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields. Essentially, only 0.007 per cent of the planet's water is available to fuel and feed our ever growing population. The more statistics we read about the ever growing freshwater crisis the more we can convince ourselves that solutions aren't within reach. I am becoming convinced that there is sufficient talent and passion in the environmental technology industry to change direction. During the conference I listened to a keynote by Aromar Revi, Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlement, on the enormous challenge facing all of us to meet the UN water related sustainable development goals, given the exponential growth of the global economy which is increasing the pressures on the world's water resources.

Google, playing catch-up with Amazon's surprise hit Echo speaker, unveiled a rival device called Home that promises even more dazzling artificial intelligence. The Home, slated for release later this year, will be powered by the impressively chatty Google Assistant, a voice-activated rival to Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri that Google execs said can better understand human speech and complex queries. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai -- who took the reins of the search giant last year after founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created its holding company, Alphabet -- showed off the assistant's abilities at Google's annual I/O developer conference Wednesday in Mountain View, Calif. In addition to showing it ordering movie tickets, arranging travel and answering trivia questions, Pichai demonstrated how the Assistant can answer queries about photographs. It can even group them into surprising categories, like those that show "hugs."

If opening musical numbers are any indication, Google wanted to make sure everyone knew it was going to be a mind-blowing yet quirky day right from the start. After two years holed up in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Google's annual I/O developer conference kicked off outside on Wednesday, in a white-tented amphitheater on the company's campus in Mountain View. To begin, two musicians, placed in what looked like giant crows' nests, played strings that ran the length of the forum, stretching from their perches to the metalwork above the stage where Google CEO Sundar Pichai would soon appear. The tune was a number by Yann Tiersen, whose jaunty French folk music has found a wide and loving audience through films like Amélie. The video that followed took that vibe and gave it a Four Loko.

Google (GOOGL) kicked off its developer conference Wednesday by highlighting its progress with artificial intelligence. CEO Sundar Pichai opened and closed the closely watched event at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters by outlining the Internet giant's research in AI and machine learning. Among the applications Google sees for this technology is teaching computers how to "see" what's in a person's photo, as well as understanding what users are asking a software program to do, rather than simply deciphering spoken language. All of that baseline research, which companies such as Facebook (FB), IBM (IBM), Microsoft (MSFT) and China's Baidu (BIDU) are also pursuing, today is already being used in Google products in some way, he said. Notably, Pichai explained, Google's focus on AI shows its efforts to move away from its search engine's reliance on links and instead delivering information based on where users and what they have asked for in the past.

When you think of artificial intelligence these days, it's easy to think of the chat bots that the tech industry seems obsessed with. And chat bots as they exist today are pretty underwhelming. But Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says that AI is way bigger than that, and is really the next big thing after mobile and social changed the tech world over the past five years. Smart computers that can think, talk, reason, and predict will be able to do more than just search Google for us or order a pizza. They will eventually do stuff we haven't even imagined yet.

Artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, cognitive computing - whatever you want to call machines that are capable of understanding and acting upon their environment - is no longer solely the purview of highly credentialed lab directors and deep-thinking computer scientists. Facebook today is talking for the first time about FBLearner Flow, a piece of software that manages machine learning models for employees throughout the social networking company. Way back in the last century, one of the most common put-downs of computers was the accusation that they only did what they were programmed to do. These days, it is increasingly common for marketing and many other kinds of systems to employ some variety of "machine learning," which moves away from the days when programmers dictated computers' every move. And pretty soon, they'll come for us.

According to a new market research report, "Speech Analytics Market by Type (Solutions (Speech Engine, Indexing, Analysis and Query Tools, and Dash Boards and Reporting Tool) and Services), by Deployment Type (On- Remise, Cloud), by Organization Size, by Vertical, & by Region – Global Forecast to 2020?, published by MarketsandMarkets, the market size is estimated to grow from USD 589.2 Million in 2015 to USD 1.60 Billion by 2020, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.0% from 2015 to 2020. Browse 66 market data Tables and 25 Figures spread through 145 Pages and in-depth TOC on"Speech Analytics Market" Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report. The speech analytics technology is witnessing the rising demand due to the need to decipher hidden insights from the customer interaction data. Rising number of contact centers, importance of customer feedback, need for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), product development, increasing competition among organizations, and stringent compliance management are some of the factors deriving the demand of speech analytics solutions and services. The speech analytics solutions are expected to dominate the market from 2015 to 2020, with larger market share than the service segment, due to growing trends of analytical insights from customer interaction data.

In this post we will explore why you are interested in machine learning. We will look at some questions that can help you get to the root of what draws you to the field. We will finish with a map showing the 4 main "whys" so that you identify where you fit and what resources to target. Why are you interested in machine learning? Have you deeply considered this question?