Introduction As we, the humans aim for broader capabilities beyond our intelligence, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will undoubtedly create complex security challenges that will likely be beyond our capabilities to manage. While companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Baidu have got into an AI arms race already, it is important to identify, understand and evaluate the strategic security risks, we the humans will face in the coming years due to AI. The use of AI is not new. From cars to phones, to thermostats, emails and games like checkers and chess have been using basic "Artificial Narrow Intelligence" (ANI) system for a long time. More advanced ANI systems have also been widely used in sectors and industries like military, manufacturing, finance and so on.

That's the old Sun Microsystems slogan coined by Sun computer scientist and researcher John Gage. The slogan predated cloud computing, but it's a great way to envision the cloud idea. The slogan for today should be: "The house is the Internet of Things appliance." But I think the successful model for home automation is where the home has intelligence built in, and where the house itself is "smart," with sensors and brains, while other devices simply add capability. The idea of a smart home is a smart idea when the home is built smart from the start.

A report shown at the 2016 World Economic Forum in January says millions of jobs will be lost to robots in the next few years. When thinking about who is most vulnerable, factory workers, drivers, and pilots come to mind. Surely the jobs requiring a human touch, such as artists, entertainers, and managers, will stick around, right? Maybe some of those jobs will be safe. Managers, not so much; very soon, robots will be replacing humans in top management positions, even up to the CEO level.

Microsoft is showing off its artificial intelligence abilities, with a new program that can produce an'original' Rembrandt painting based on the master's old works. The project is a collaboration between ING, Microsoft, Delft University of Technology, The Mauritshuis and Museum Het Rembrandthuis. 'The Next Rembrandt' project uses AI, capable of deep learning, was imprinted with 346 of Rembrandt's known works in the hopes that it can create a unique 3D printed image in his style. The computer analysed Dutch master Rembrandt's work, thoroughly tagged by humans. "We examined the entire collection of Rembrandt's work, studying the contents of his paintings pixel by pixel," the project team explained.

Intelligent machines are still far off in the future, how far is anyone's guess but the reality is the concept is being worked on. There's much debate on intelligent machines, otherwise known as "artificial intelligence", and whether or not creating such things is wise. On one hand the benefits of intelligent machines could have a massively positive impact on the well being of some of the populace. On the other hand those same machines could cause hardship for others in the populace through job loss and replacement. Jeff Hawkins delivered a thirty minute presentation on what it will take to create intelligent machines and no matter what side of the fence you sit on, it is worth watching.

Venture capital firm IvyCap Ventures has raised the first tranche of Rs 300 crore in its Rs 600-crore IvyCap Fund 2, which was launched last October. The fund saw the participation of five of the 15 existing institutional investors of IvyCap. As a part of the IvyCap Ventures Initiative, we will invest in 25-30 startups in the next two years, in sectors like healthtech, IoT, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, edtech and agritech." Last December, IvyCamp had partnered with Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), a business incubator of IIT Bombay. The objective was to leverage the IvyCamp Platform to connect and create value for entrepreneurs and innovators across the student and alumni community.

Stepping back from what may seem like hype and examples steeped in robotics, VR and infrastructure, the truth is, the announcements today show that deep learning in action is at most a year away, and as soon as now. In addition, the innovation coming out of robotics, VR and infrastructure will allow introduction of new form factors and channels to engage with customers and shape our workforce. In the end, it is a data challenge for the very reason that for every channel we use and add, it always ends up being a data challenge.

Google made headlines when it revealed that it is using machine learning to optimize its data center performance. In fact, Google's effort is only the latest in a series of initiatives to create an electronic "data center brain" that can analyze IT infrastructure. Automation has always been a priority for data center managers, and has become more important as facilities have become more complex. The DevOps movement seeks to "automate all the things" in a data center, while the push for greater efficiency has driven the development of smarter cooling systems. Where is this all headed? The data center won't be a portal to Skynet anytime soon.

Today's Internet applications are required to be highly scalable and available in the face of rapidly changing, unpredictable workloads. Multi-tier architecture is commonly used to build Internet applications, with different tiers providing load balancing, application logic, and persistence. The advent of cloud computing has given rise to rapid horizontal scaling of applications hosted in virtual machines (VMs) in each of the tiers. Currently, this scaling is done by monitoring system-level metrics (e.g., CPU utilization) and determining whether to scale out or in based on a threshold. These threshold-based algorithms, however, do not capture the complex interaction among multiple tiers, and determining the right set of thresholds for multiple resources to achieve a particular service level objective (SLO) is difficult. In this paper, we present vScale, a horizontal scaling system that can automatically scale the number of VMs in a tier to meet end-to-end application SLOs.

"Things that were, things that are… and some things that have not yet come to pass." I wish I had Galadriel's dramatic voice telling what the future will look like, as we are rapidly entering a time that still felt like a distant scenario not long ago. In the last few years, artificial intelligence, robots and connected devices have expanded into a whole new context: our everyday lives. They've also started making the headlines. We read how the Go-playing AI AlphaGo beat the world-class Go player Sedol by 5–1, and how toy robots like Pleo and social robots like Jibo and Pepper are coming to our homes.