Alphabet CEO gives Google's chief a huge megaphone, as he lays the current and future vision of both companies. The Founders Letter is a powerful statement for Google. Start with the original "Don't be evil" mission of 2004, to last year's opus that formed Alphabet and marked a major restructuring of Google. Today, in a 2016 Founders' Letter, Alphabet CEO Larry Page hands the virtual pen to Google CEO Sundar Pichai for an update. "I wanted to give him most of the bully-pulpit here to reflect on Google's accomplishments and share his vision," Page writes, noting that we'll see him, Pichai and Sergey Brin share that space in the future.

Global insurance company MetLife is taking the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning very seriously, despite still being in the early stages of implementing and exploiting the technology, according to MetLife VP of enterprise analytics Malene Haxholdt. Haxholdt told V3 at a SAS Global Forum media event in North Carolina that the IoT has the potential to help the company develop new products, but that work in this area is still very much at an "exploratory" stage. "IoT is definitely being considered as something you have to take seriously in this business. It's not an'Oh it's going to go away' type of conversation. That data is not going away, so you have to take it seriously and figure out if there is a use for it," she said.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the next big evolution for technology is artificial intelligence. "Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the'device' to fade away," Pichai wrote in the technology giant's annual founders' letter to shareholders. His vision: Over time, computers, whatever shape they take, a mobile device in your hand or a mini computer on your wrist, "will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day." This marks the first time anyone other than founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have penned the annual letter outlining Google's mission. Page and Brin wrote their first founders' letter in 2004 in which they famously warned: "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin typically write a public letter every year to reflect on the company's accomplishments and goals. This year, however, Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai penned the annual note for the first time. Pichai was made CEO of Google after a recent reorganization made the company a subsidiary of umbrella organization Alphabet. Pichai's note delves into Google's accomplishments around search, YouTube, artificial intelligence, and more. He writes that Google will continue to push heavily into the development of artificial intelligence as a means of improving and advancing its most important products.

The Yelp Restaurant Photo Classification recruitment competition ran on Kaggle from December 2015 to April 2016. Dmitrii Tsybulevskii took the cake by finishing in 1st place with his winning solution. In this blog, Dmitrii dishes the details of his approach including how he tackled the multi-label and multi-instance aspects of this problem which made this competition a unique challenge. I hold a degree in Applied Mathematics, and I'm currently working as a software engineer on computer vision, information retrieval and machine learning projects. Yes, since I work as a computer vision engineer, I have image classification experience, deep learning knowledge, and so on.

In this episode of the O'Reilly Podcast, O'Reilly's Ben Lorica sat down with Eliot Knudsen, Field Architect at Tamr. Lorica and Knudsen discuss the role of prescriptive analytics in driving business change, using feedback to train machine learning algorithms, coalescing various sources of business data, and the importance of explaining your algorithms in order to relay their value. The idea behind prescriptive analytics is that you're combining forecasting ability with a specific process or change that folks want to drive in their business--whether it's how they onboard their customers, whether it's how they negotiate with their suppliers, whether it's how they move different products or materials through their supply chain. Feedback is one of these fascinating things, where ultimately there are different ways that these systems are tuning and learning. You're growing, and based upon data and other heuristics, you're changing how your algorithms predict and fit themselves to these points.

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In his 2013 paper, Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics, Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, noted "computers are in the middle of most economic transactions" – to the point that the global economy can no longer function without them. In recent years, computers have moved beyond simple tools to facilitate the movement of money and are now taking a lead role in initiating and managing millions of transactions per day. Process virtualization, driven by Big Data, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), has accelerated to the point that computers will dramatically alter the world we live in. What happens when Big Data meets AI? For starters, the confluence leads to new insights and efficiencies for business and customers; and while some occupations will be eliminated, entirely new fields will be created.

In the 2004 film I, Robot, Will Smith's character Detective Spooner harbors a deep grudge for all things technological -- and turns out to be justified after a new generation of robots engage in a full out, summer blockbuster-style revolt against their human creators. Why was Detective Spooner such a Luddite–even before the Robots' vicious revolt? Much of his resentment stems from a car accident he endured in which a robot saved his life instead of a little girl's. The robot's decision haunts Smith's character throughout the movie; he feels the decision lacked emotion, and what one might call'humanity'. "I was the logical choice," he says. "(The robot) calculated that I had a 45% chance of survival. Sarah only had an 11% chance." He continues, dramatically, "But that was somebody's baby. A human being would've known that."

A bevy of robocar-oriented companies has founded a lobby--a move than provides the single clearest sign that the industry is maturing. The lobby's chief, David Strickland, would like all regulatory decisions to be coordinated by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Strickland sure knows what to do: he's a former administrator of NHTSA--and yet another example of Washington's revolving door. The lobby is called the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, and it includes Google, Ford, Volvo, Uber and Lyft. It looks as if Google is the prime mover here. Yesterday, at a public hearing that NHTSA held at Stanford University, Google's robocar chief Chris Urmson emphasized the importance of uniform regulations.