There are reasons to believe that true AI is right around the corner but I don't see it coming from the mainstream AI community. Right now, they are all having a feeding frenzy over a soon to be obsolete technology. There is no question that deep learning is a powerful and useful machine learning technique but it works in a narrow domain: the classification of labeled data. Someone has to go through the data and carefully label it according to a category or class. This is kind of lame because this is not the way humans and animals learn.

Developing effective tools against cancer has been a long, complicated endeavor with successes and disappointments. Despite all, cancer remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Now, machine learning and data analytics are being recruited as tools in the effort fight the disease and show significant promise according to two recent papers. In one paper – An Analytics Approach to Designing Combination Chemotherapy Regimens for Cancer – researchers from MIT and Stanford "propose models that use machine learning and optimization to suggest regimens to be tested in phase II and phase III trials." Their work, published in March in Management Science, could help cut costs and speed clinical trials.

There can be no doubt that technology trends over the years point to a rapid change in user requirements. The days of relying on a large, clunky desktop PC to provide a portal to the internet and other traditional, desktop-only applications are quickly diminishing. While PC sales continue to plummet, smartphone sales continue to soar and innovative devices such as Chromebooks are increasing their market share dramatically, poaching customers that, traditionally, would rely on desktop programs that can now be fully accessed in the cloud. The importance of speed and portability to users cannot be understated, but can cloud computing really enhance the data analytics sector? Their push into analytics with'Cloud Machine Learning' demonstrates their eagerness to challenge the offerings from their big-name competitors, such as IBM and Microsoft, entering an already crowded marketplace.

The CEO of Baltimore-based nonprofit Digit All Systems Inc., Lance Lucas described a real-world approach to using coding to create opportunity. His company has trained more than 10,000 students in cybersecurity certifications and computer programming through partnerships with 60 schools in the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area, and has donated more than 3,500 computers to churches, schools, community groups and other organizations in need. He organized the first guns-for-computers trade-in program in the U.S. in 2013 and, after the rioting in Baltimore in 2015, offered people in affected areas a chance to reboot their lives.

Google has taken a big leap forward with the speed of its machine learning systems by creating its own custom chip that it's been using for over a year. The company was rumored to have been designing its own chip, based partly on job ads it posted in recent years. But until today it had kept the effort largely under wraps. It calls the chip a Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, named after the TensorFlow software it uses for its machine learning programs. In a blog post, Google engineer Norm Jouppi refers to it as an accelerator chip, which means it speeds up a specific task.

During the keynote of its three-day developers' conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai focused on Google's plans to bake artificial intelligence and machine learning more thoroughly into all of its services. In that vein, the company also unveiled a bunch of new products, including two messaging apps and a smart speaker.

Thousands of people gathered near Google's headquarters on Wednesday to hear the company's vision for the future. In past years, Google has used its developers conference to unveil all sorts of shiny new toys and services. Not all of them have been smash hits. Google Glass had its big coming out party at IO back in 2012, after all. Google TV was the star of 2010. And remember the Nexus Q, the orb-shaped music player that never even reached the market?

Google announced a bunch of new products today at the I/O 2016 conference in Mountain View, California. Some, like Google Home and Android N, were expected while others, such as the VR standard Daydream, weren't. Here's the best of what they announced: The search company announced an always-listening virtual assistant for the home at today's Google I/O 2016. Similar to Amazon's Echo, Google Home will allow users to discover movie times, answer a question, or carry out a task using a vocal command from anywhere in the room. In addition, Google Home can control your TV, presumably if it has a Chromecast attached.

Google is catching up to competitors Facebook, Apple and Amazon in messaging, video calling and home speaker-embedded digital assistants. But it's taking the lead in virtual reality and may have changed mobile phones forever with a new twist on mobile apps that allows them to play without being installed. That's the conclusion of Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research, who was at the Google I/O annual developers conference Wednesday in Mountain View, California. Dawson said Google's new Allo app focuses on the search giant's strengths in search and natural language recognition, but may have come too late behind bigger rivals to gain much use. In a research note he praised Google's new Daydream virtual reality platform, but noted it'll take time to become popular because the high bar for specifications means no devices can support it yet.

Google wants to play an even bigger role in managing people's daily lives, while also nudging them into an alternate reality, as the Internet company responds to competitive threats posed by Facebook, Amazon and Apple. As part of an onslaught of upcoming products, Google will implant a more personable form of artificial intelligence into an Internet-connected device called Home, which echoes the Echo, Amazon.com's Meanwhile, Google will also delve deeper into the still-nascent realm of virtual reality with a system called Daydream that's meant to challenge Facebook-owned Oculus's early lead in fabricating artificial worlds. In an attempt to outshine Apple, Google is also adding features to its Android operating system, including the ability to run apps without actually installing them on a device. That feature, called Instant Apps, might have been the biggest breakthrough that Google announced Wednesday at its annual developers conference held in an amphitheater located a few blocks from its Mountain View, California, headquarters.