According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 16.5 percent in 2016 to total 204 billion (up from 175 billion in 2015). Gartner also revealed that Amazon's cloud is 10x bigger than its next 14 competitors, combined. The technology research company's final revelation is that there's a two-horse race between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure to capture the IaaS cloud computing market. The Google cloud platform has been sitting in third place and rapidly losing ground, but maybe that's about to change. Recently, we have seen the AlphaGo program defeat world Go champion Lee Sedol, and Google has revealed its cunning plan to catch up in the cloud.

Google has made its Cloud Machine Learning platform available to developers today, giving them access to the platform that powers Google Photos, Translate and the Google Inbox app. The move means that developers can build Google's translation, photo, and speech recognition APIs into their own apps utilising the Cloud Machine Learning platform moving forward. The platform was launched at NEXT 2016, Google's Cloud Platform conference and is now available in limited preview. "Cloud Machine Learning will take machine learning mainstream, giving data scientists and developers a way to build a new class of intelligent applications," Fausto Ibarra, Google's director of product management wrote in a blog post. "It provides access to the same technologies that power Google Now, Google Photos, and voice recognition in Google Search as easy to use REST APIs."

Beyond that, there are other important issues in machine learning besides representation learning, such as learning from delayed rewards, which is the focus of reinforcement learning, which deep learning per se does not address. Again, what we see here is combinations of deep learning with other types (e.g., Q-learning in DeepMind's Atari player). And backpropagation, which is what powers most deep learning systems, solves the credit assignment problem, but it doesn't solve other crucial problems, like learning structure, learning composable knowledge, generalizing out of sample, etc. So we need lots more besides deep learning to have a truly general-purpose learner.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be traced back to John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956 to define the concept of computers working as a human mind. Today, the scientists and tech-pundits define AI to be more creative than a human mind, something that can surpass and learn from the data gathered. Data Science can be defined as the part of AI, which analyses the data gathered with ever changing algorithms and has the capability to transform a program into self learning. Here are a few startups transforming the way people perceive AI and most of all, helping people and businesses transform by automating work. Jukedeck is based on state-of-the-art tech, brings artificial intelligence to music composition.

Artificial Intelligence became a hot topic early in 2015 when suddenly all the heads of big tech firms were voicing their opinions around it. A movie called Ex-Machina helped contribute to the debate around AI as it demonstrated how a robot could gain so much human intelligence that it was able to manipulate humans and escape from their control. Understandably it prompted both excitement and concern. Similarly the Matrix films portrayed humans as believing they exist while actually living in an artificial or simulated world. It is thanks to popular science fiction films that our understanding of AI has grown.

Most babies' first words are "mama" and "dada," but for an artificially intelligent being called "BABY X," her first words were "puppy," "apple," and "sheep." Aww! How adorable for technology that so many believe will power our future mechanical overlords. And at least it's better than Tay.ai, Microsoft's teenaged AI Twitter robot that recently got sent to her room for spewing hate all over the Internet. BABY X was created by Dr. Mark Sagar, a motion graphics specialist who won Oscars for his work on movies like King Kong and Avatar.

"As much as I liked finance, I think there is a lot of potential for technology to do good in the world and I wanted to have an adventure." She quit her high-paying finance job recently to join a robotics start-up. Machine learning allows high-quality information extraction from images and is helping replace and complement repetitive tasks normally carried out by humans. Google has built a YouTube machine that can differentiate between dogs and cats. In March, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Korean Lee Sedol, one of the world's best players of the ancient Chinese game of Weiqi, better known as Go.

A new human-like Android has confirmed everything sci fi taught us about robots – by purring, 'I will destroy humans' in a TV interview. The robot, Sophia, has cameras behind its eyes – and monitors people's facial expressions, and reacts to seem more human. Didn't Terminator do that, too, come to think of it? Sophia was on show at SXSW this year, exhibited by Hanson Robotics. In an interview with Dr David Hanson, her creator, Hanson asked, 'Do you want to destroy humans?'

CIOs believe industry convergence is the biggest trend on the horizon. Lines between industries are blurring, and new opportunities and threats are emerging, according to IBM's "The CIO Point of View." One of the greatest convergences is between technology giants and healthcare. As a trends analyst, I talk to many stakeholders, including leaders from technology giants, all of whom have designs on the future of health. While healthcare is trying to come up with standards, tech giants are creating their own ecosystems in health.

Utrip is a free travel planning service that brings together the best in artificial intelligence and human experience, making it easy for travelers to create their perfect trip quickly. Here's how it works: we start with a vast travel database that has been curated by local area experts. To start planning a trip, a traveler enters their destinations and travel dates. Next they rank their travel preferences in sixteen categories, such as history, food, nightlife and budget. Utrip's powerful AI algorithm, created by machine learning scientists, sorts through millions of potential combinations of hotels, sites, activities and restaurants.