A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.

At first I was worried that this was going to be just another drone footage video with pompous music, but all of a sudden...that GIANT ROBOT EYEBALL BLIMP we saw in Germany last month shows up.

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which organizers hope to make an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a PhD student in human-centered computing.

AI may have trounced humanity in the ancient game of Go, but it remains untested in countless other gaming arenas. Case in point: Doom, which, it turns out, will be the technology's next big challenge. Launched in 1993, Doom is widely considered a landmark title in the video-game industry for popularizing the first-person shooter genre. Now, artificial-intelligence researchers will have a chance to pit their creations against others in a contest based on the game at the IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games conference in September. To create their bots, competitors in the Visual Doom AI competition will use ViZDoom, a platform based on the game that's used for research in machine learning.

Real-time machine learning has access to a continuous flow of transactional data, but what it really needs in order to be effective is a continuous flow of labeled transactional data, and accurate labeling introduces latency.

Internet giant Google has asserted that its Artificial Intelligence(AI) and cloud computing is the most lucrative and promising businesses in the tech industry. That AI type of service-based business is fast becoming the new way to reap profits in the tech industry, the California-based tech giant said. "We've always been doing cloud, it's just that we've been consuming it all internally at Google. But as we have grown, really matured in how we handle our data center investments and how we can do this at scale, we have definitely crossed over to the other side to where we can thoughtfully serve external customers," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said. "We have been investing in machine learning and AI for years, but I think we're at an exceptionally interesting tipping point where these technologies are really taking off. That is very, very applicable to businesses as well. So thoughtfully doing that externally we view as a big differentiator we have over others," Pichai added.

A team of students and alumni from UC Santa Cruz developed a prototype device called Raven that clips onto a GoPro camera and automatically tracks a selected target with the help of computer vision. Enes Mentese, cofounder of Raven, thought of the idea for the device after he filmed his snowboarding experience and majority of the video was of sky and the ground. By using an NVIDIA Jetson TX1 and machine learning, the system actively "learns" to recognize the object being tracked as it moves and changes position. "It's very computationally intensive, but we wanted to keep the system small and compact, so it was a complex project in terms of both the hardware development and the software development," Mentese said. The team is gearing up to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds so they can start to manufacture the device.

The organizations that will prevail in the current transformation are those whose employees can learn fastest and make the best decisions. At all ages, learning readiness is influenced by technological familiarity and fluency. Our hope for solving the seemingly intractable global problems includes an optimistic outlook on the partnership between artificial intelligence and human intelligence – person by person. You'll also hear from leading executives at Konica Minolta, Cigna, Cisco, Fujitsu and Xerox. A.I. Expert Neil Jacobstein and VR Expert Andrew Wasserman will speak on the importance of these technologies in this new frontier.

Truls Unholt is the founder of the consulting firm Theory & Practice. OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company, announced itself to the world on December 11, 2015. With 1 billion in funding from high-profile investors, such as Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, the company put forward an ambitious research agenda to keep artificial intelligence beneficial to humanity. Both the research agenda and the objective of the company are based on the premise that machines, in the future, can reach beyond human-level intelligence and potentially turn against humankind. This scenario is thoroughly explained in Ray Kurzweil's books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near, as well as in numerous essays and articles.

A robot walks into a bar. "What can I get you?" the bartender asks. "I need something to loosen up," the robot replies. So the bartender serves him a screwdriver. This joke is about as basic as humor can get, and would probably merit only the most tepid of chortles at a comedy club.