On the heels of acquiring data science community Kaggle, Google is launching a machine learning competition of its own for startups. Google is targeting early stage companies taking an innovative approach to machine learning. The competition is being run in partnership with seven venture capital firms that include Sequoia, KPCB, GV, Data Collective, Emergence Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock. To qualify for that prize, startups will not be required to use Google services. However, there are other prizes available for companies using Google Cloud and TensorFlow.

Flippy the robot is starting its culinary career with one simple task, but just like any rookie, it is learning on the job. With some practice and training, Flippy will be able to do everything from chopping vegetables to plating meals like a pro. Miso Robotics created the robot, which debuted in a kitchen at the restaurant chain CaliBurger in Pasadena this week. "Flippy will initially only focus on flipping burgers and placing them on buns," David Zito, CEO of Miso Robotics tells ZDNet. He adds, "But since Flippy is powered by our own cooking AI software, it will continuously learn from its experiences to improve and adapt over time. This means Flippy will learn to take on additional tasks including grilling chicken, bacon, onions, and buns in addition to frying, prepping, and finishing plates. Eventually, Flippy will support CaliBurger's entire menu."

Most press coverage of AWS's recent outage has explained the event as having been caused by a "typo" that one of its engineers made when updating a billing subsystem. The'typo' spin on this story may be the media's way of dramatizing the blunder and making it easy to explain. Certainly, Amazon's own post-mortem noted that "one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly {read'typo'} and a larger set of servers was removed than intended." I believe that Amazon is trying to shift the blame from how they have designed, protected and audited their systems – a systemic process that affects all of their operations – and have instead chosen to portray this as a one-off event that happened just within one small subsystem bcause someone didn't follow the approved playbook. Google's advice to make it hard for errors to happen follows the practice of all leading safety organizations.

Some of the time they haven't been a bother; other times you've hated them. They're those little boxes that pop up on websites that demand you type in a distorted alphanumeric string or solve a simple puzzle before they let you access the site. They're called CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) and Google's latest version has gone stealth. It may be there, but the only time you'll see it is if Google thinks you're a bot. Google has worked to make reCAPTCHA, their world-leading CAPTCHA utility, as easy for the website user as possible.

Wetherspoon might have killed off the traditional pub and heralded the rise of the robots. Or it might just have saved it. The company has unleashed into the world its Order & Pay app – specifically made so that nobody will ever have to queue at the bar again. The way it works is simple enough: you tell it what your table you're at, what food or drink you want, and pay for it. Seconds or minutes later your request will arrive, served by one of the bar staff. But what it actually means isn't simple at all.

Less clear was how a new IBM partnership will change Salesforce AI plans. What's the state of Salesforce Einstein, the portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities announced last fall? Salesforce generated plenty of media coverage this week with two big announcements. Here's my take on the realities of a partnership with IBM and what we have yet to understand about the packaging and pricing of Einstein. The first announcement from Salesforce this week was the unexpected bombshell on a new partnership with IBM that headlines simplified as "Watson meets Einstein."

This post is a simple yet illustrative application of K-means clustering technique. Using K-means clustering, we will perform quantization of colours present in the image which will further help in compressing the image. In a coloured image, each pixel is of size 3 bytes (RGB), where each colour can have intensity values from 0 to 255. Following combinatorics, the total number of colours which can be represented are 256*256*256. Practically, we are able to visualize only a few colours in an image.

The significant factor driving the shift towards chatbots is couched in Moore's law. Today, processing of heavy applications can be enabled through cheaper computing, which was considered prohibitively expensive earlier. Chatbots are integrated with messaging apps. Cloud computing and integration is making this possible as powerful integration techniques can be leveraged to ensure synchronization of apps with API. The emergence of conversational interfaces is turning chatbot into an independent and universal entity, adapt to the tone and subject used as per context.

Stephen Hawking is concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence. Physicist Stephen Hawking may be a proponent of artificial intelligence, but he has also been outspoken about the potential challenges it creates. In a recent interview, he sounded a similar tone, and offered a solution that conservatives may find hard to accept. Speaking to The Times of London to commemorate being awarded the Honorary Freedom of the City of London, a title that was conferred on him on Monday, Professor Hawking expressed optimism for the future. He added, however, that he is concerned about artificial intelligence (AI), as well as other global threats.

If news, polls and investment figures are any indication, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will soon become an inherent part of everything we do in our daily lives. Backing up the argument are a slew of innovations and breakthroughs that have brought the power and efficiency of AI into various fields including medicine, shopping, finance, news, fighting crime and more. We're covering the weird and wonderful tech at SXSW, join us in the fun. But the explosion of AI has also highlighted the fact that while machines will plug some of the holes human-led efforts leave behind, they will bring disruptive changes and give rise to new problems that can challenge the economical, legal and ethical fabric of our societies. Here are four issues that need Artificial Intelligence companies need to address as the technology evolves and invades even more domains.