Minecraft--the popular world-building game--is now available in virtual reality. Minecraft: Gear VR Edition went on sale Wednesday in the Oculus Store, selling at 7 to download. The game includes all the features of Pocket Edition, including a "creative" mode that lets you build out a world, "survival" mode for fighting, and a multiplayer option. While available in the Oculus store, the game is meant to be played on the 100 Samsung Gear VR headset, which in turn requires the use of a Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 Edge, Galaxy Note5, Galaxy S6 edge, Galaxy S6, or Galaxy S6 Edge. "Experiencing (Minecraft) in virtual reality changes it from an abstract activity to a visceral one," Oculus's John Carmack said in a blog post announcing the game.

Second beauty contest, where humans are judged by Artificial Intelligence Beauty.AI 2.0 launches. Robot judgement day is set for 01.08.2016. People are encouraged to download the free Beauty.AI 2.0 mobile app in either the Google Play market or Apple App Store and algorithm developers should reach out to the organizers through a form on the http://beauty.ai/ Beauty.AI 1.0 was covered by the leading reporters and journalists at New Scientist, Techcrunch, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Yahoo! Beauty.AI 2.0 will provide valuable prizes for both human competitors and robot jury members.

Guided by a circular reticle that expanded and contracted along with the movements of my diaphragm, I floated gracefully through a Tron-like underwater world shaded by cool blues, cheerful pinks and relaxing purples as low-poly models of marine life swam about. It took only about 10 seconds or so for the game's breathing-based control scheme to become intuitive, at which point I'd become so engrossed in gliding through the environment and surrendering my mental state to the fuzzy murmur of binaural beats soundtracking it, that I'd forgotten about Tribeca and the media frenzy around me. In truth, I only took off the headset because I knew I had to make way for other journalists, not because I was ready to end my play session. When I did, Owen Harris, the video game designer who originated the concept for Deep VR, was delighted: According to Harris and his Dutch co-creator Niki Smit, I'd officially stayed in the experience longer than any other viewer who'd demoed it. "We want to help teach people these breathing techniques so that they can then manage these conditions outside of the game," says Harris of Deep VR's intended stress- and anxiety-reducing goal.

Like so many organizations today, Infosys, the Indian consulting giant, is a company in transition. For years it has made a good living helping customers manage legacy tools, but CEO Vishal Sikka, who took over 21 months ago saw a shifting landscape and he began implementing new systems immediately. One of those changes involved developing a new artificial intelligence system they have called Mana, which is designed to help customers automate repetitive system maintenance tasks and build knowledge about the underlying systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Sikka announced the system this morning at the Infosys Confluence conference in San Francisco. Mana involves three main tools: Infosys Information Platform for analytics, Infosys Automation Platform for automating and continuously building knowledge about system maintenance and workflow tasks and Infosys Knowledge Platform, a formal platform for capturing and storing knowledge.

Today, people are more connected than ever before – and this complexity of technology connections is creating a wealth of data. Thanks to the magic of machine learning, this data is fueling intelligence that is empowering humans to do more and in turn creating new opportunities for marketers. Artificial intelligence is in fact not artificial at all, it is a web of intelligence surfacing the most pertinent elements at the right time for the right purpose – and enabling humans to make the choices that are right for them. Ubiquitous relationships between humans and technology mean that machines are already informing decisions all around us. From suggesting the next item to buy in your favourite clothes store, to providing you with discount offers on items that your supermarket knows you're going to buy, these are all based on a cumulative understanding of what you like.

In this Mastery webinar, Ernan Roman of ERDM will reveal transformational Voice of Customer research findings regarding the personalized communications that buyers expect, and how this can drive double-digit improvements in response rates and customer engagement. Over 50% of attendees are repeated customers or referrals. The 52nd, 53rd and 54th will be held in Hong Kong, Dubai and Madrid. Book early to enjoy USD300 discount. One Size Does Not Fit All.

The Ying Ao sink foundry in southern China's Guangdong province does not look like a factory of the future. The sign over the entrance is faded; inside, the floor is greasy with patches of mud, and a thick metal dust -- the by-product of the stainless-steel polishing process -- clogs the air. Guangdong is the growth engine of China's manufacturing industry, generating 615bn in exports last year -- more than a quarter of the country's total. In this part of the province, the standard wage for workers is about Rmb4,000 ( 600) per month. Ying Ao, which manufactures sinks destined for the kitchens of Europe and the US, has to pay double that, according to deputy manager Chen Conghan, because conditions in the factory are so unpleasant. So, four years ago, the company started buying machines to replace the ever more costly humans. Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers.

Last month a computer program called AlphaGo took on one of the greatest players of the complex board game, Go, and beat him four games to one. Lee Sedol, the South Korean Go master, lost 1 million, offered as prize money by Google, the challenger's proprietor. But, more momentously, his humbling has taken the battle of wits between machines and humans to yet another level. To be sure, this isn't the first time software has got the better of an exceptionally clever human. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue had checkmated Garry Kasparov, the erstwhile world chess champion.

For years, Person of Interest has been right on the cutting edge between commenting on current events and speculating about the future. With its final season, the show is depicting a futuristic nightmare--and yet, it's also more topical than ever before. We talked to producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman, and they told us the real villain of Person of Interest is Facebook. First off, I've seen the season premiere of Person of Interest, which airs next Tuesday, May 3. True to form, it's a brilliant hour of television that will keep you throwing things at your TV screen as the Machine Gang struggles to come back from their devastating loss at the end of season four. The super-intelligent Machine, which was built to predict terrorist threats but wound up trying to save ordinary people from smaller crimes, has been destroyed, and the race to reconstruct it from some memory chips is as intense as any thriller I've seen in ages. I honestly don't know what I can say about Person of Interest that we haven't said a dozen times before--this is one of the best science fiction shows of the past decade.

Last December, Tesla CEO Elon Musk teamed up with Y Combinator president Sam Altman and former Google Brain Team scientist Ilya Sutskever to launch OpenAI, a 1 billion non-profit organization dedicated to furthering our understanding of artificial intelligence with a promise to share its research openly with the world. Today, it's taken its first step in that direction by launching a free toolkit for developers to build and train their own AI bots with games and algorithmic challenges. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! The OpenAI Gym, currently in beta, includes environments to simulate situations for your AI to learn from, as well as a site to compare and reproduce results. The tools are designed for use with Reinforcement Learning (RL), one of the technologies used to develop Google's AlphaGo AI that defeated Go world champion Lee Se-Dol recently. RL works on the principle that a bot will receive a reward every time it completes an action successfully – similar to how you might train a dog.