The environmental costs of moving data around the world or building a better smartphone often go unappreciated. Both tasks take a great deal of energy and other resources, though the effects are often felt hundreds or thousands of miles from most end users. The world's biggest technology firms are increasingly focused on finding ways to go green. Facebook announced in January that it is building a new data center in Ireland powered entirely by renewable energy. In March, Apple introduced a recycling robot named "Liam" that can surgically disassemble old iPhones so their parts can be reused.

The IDLF project can be used by application developers, cloud service providers, academic researchers, or anyone seeking the best performance on the full spectrum of Intel platforms for Deep Learning. Support for additional hardware platforms can be added over time in a completely API-agnostic manner allowing for maximum code reuse. This is an active open source project distributed under the BSD 3-clause open source license. Intel is the leading contributor to IDLF, enabling application and system developers to make the most of Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors as well as Intel Iris Pro graphics.

Technology has transformed how customers and brands interact with each other. Shoppers once relied on face-to-face, in-store interactions to make purchases and receive support. Now, shoppers do their research before entering a store (81 percent of shoppers conduct online research before buying) and seldom rely on salespeople to help them make decisions. Retailers, for their part, have realized that by embracing technology, they can extend their storefronts to their customers' fingertips. The Internet, buy buttons, mobile payment apps such as Square and Venmo, and couponing and price-matching apps like SnipSnap have changed how we shop.

Making sense of the mountains of data collected on a daily basis requires specialized data science skills that are hard to come by, and hard to keep. Augmented or even eliminated some of these specialized tasks with machine learning. Making sense of the mountains of data collected on a daily basis requires specialized data science skills that are hard to come by, and hard to keep. But what if some of these specialized tasks could be augmented or even eliminated by machine learning? DataRobot customers are enjoying these game changing benefits and more, right now.

Here's What We Can Expect from Deep Learning in 2016 and Beyond

A patient walks into the emergency department at Rush University Medical Center with a fever and bloodshot eyes. In days of yore, doctors would have to exhaust the obvious possibilities -- like a flu or allergic reaction -- before finally figuring a patient was suffering from Zika virus. But Rush says its predictive software, a system called Guardian, helps alert doctors to a possible diagnosis hours faster than physicians normally would. When dealing with more rare diagnoses, doctors typically think, "it's going to be everything else besides smallpox," said Dr. Dino Rumoro, who's been working on the technology for more than 20 years and is the chairman of Rush's Department of Emergency Medicine. "This gives the clinician a crutch."

Microsoft recently launched an online tool called CaptionBot that tries to describe what's going on in your photos. We took it for a spin and it's quite impressive, albeit not always accurate, so here's the deal. Microsoft launched a new online tool called CaptionBot that leverages AI to try and figure out what's going on in your photos. The whole process is pretty straightforward. You upload an image of your choice and let the Microsoft CaptionBot analyze it, after which it comes up with a description of the image. It's worth pointing out, however, that the CaptionBot will hold on to any image you submit so it can use it to improve its accuracy.

Reflektion*–which delivers innovative "individualized commerce" technology for retailers–recently announced it has raised 18 million in Series B financing led by Battery Ventures. Here, Powered by Battery chats with CEO Sean Moran about the how the company is aiming to transform digital retail, partly by leveraging new types of artificial-intelligence technologies. Powered by Battery: We hear a lot about "personalization" and predictive analytics when it comes to online retail. How does Reflektion and "individualized commerce" fit in? What exactly do you do?

A Russian photographer has proved how easy it is to track down people on social media using facial recognition software. Yegor Tsvetkov took photos of strangers on St Petersburg's metro and used a facial recognition app which trawls through profiles on VKontakte, Russia's biggest social network, to track down their online profiles. Named "Your Face is Big Data", the series of photographs shows how powerful facial recognition software has become, to the point that a complete stranger can find you at the click of a button. Tsvetkov told the Guardian the project aimed to show technology can affect privacy, particularly if you don't activate the relevant settings on your social media profiles. "Nobody noticed that I photographed them, but I used a simple camera and I didn't try to hide it," he said.

If bots are the new apps, we're in for a bombardment of spam that could force you into blocking brands, bots and services, if Facebook's new chatbots are anything to go by. In trying out the new bots, the launch of which Facebook's head of messaging David Marcus called "the first day of a new era", it's obvious that Facebook and its partners, including news organisations such as CNN and the Wall Street Journal, need to learn a few things, and fast. User intrigue over what a chatbot can actually do quickly turned into loathing, once they began being spammed through a channel hitherto restricted to personal messages from people they care about. While users might put up with spam on a social network, messaging systems are more akin to a phone call or SMS, where sender is essentially shouting in the recipients face "talk to me now". That's fine if it's a select friend that you might want to actually talk to, but if it's a brand you're very unsure about, it quickly grates.