As a high-value professional, you know that information overload is becoming worse. You're continuously bombarded by more information from ever more apps. Perhaps you have three thousand unread emails, or thirty thousand, or even three hundred thousand. And you expect your information overload to intensify in the future, because it's the price you pay for your professional success. You cannot afford to miss out on new tools for communicating with colleagues, new media for expanding your professional network, and new information sources providing updates relevant to your priorities.

In a paper published in Nature on 28th January 2016, we describe a new approach to computer Go. This is the first time ever that a computer program "AlphaGo" has defeated a human professional player. The game of Go is widely viewed as an unsolved "grand challenge" for artificial intelligence. Games are a great testing ground for inventing smarter, more flexible algorithms that have the ability to tackle problems in ways similar to humans. The first classic game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952. But until now, one game has thwarted A.I. researchers: the ancient game of Go.

One of the huge drawbacks of modern technology is that it fills the air around us with radio signals. From your kitchen radio to your LTE-enabled smartphone, all of these devices use radio waves to communicate. Unfortunately, there is only a certain amount of radio frequencies that can be used. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is looking for a way around this problem, and wants teams to develop an artificially intelligent system that will control what devices use what radio waves and when. Basically, instead of forcing devices to make use of narrow frequency bands when the spectrum gets congested, DARPA wants devices to negotiate sharing frequencies when they need them.

For Dr. Stuart Seides, director of the MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute, the first sign of trouble surfaced early Monday when he checked his email as he prepared to leave for the hospital. "I noticed that I didn't have any emails since the previous evening," Seides told U.S. News Tuesday as the hospital system's computer crisis stretched into its second day. "I get lots of emails every day... That was the first indication that something wasn't quite right." The problem was a computer virus that shut down the data network of the second largest health system in Maryland, with 30,000 employees, 6,000 affiliated physicians and nearly 50,000 annual admissions at two major hospitals – the nearly 800-bed MedStar Washington Hospital Center and 400-bed MedStar Georgetown University Hospital – and thousands of outpatients at other facilities.

Control, shift: How tight does airport security need to be? Tycoonomics: The rising number of emerging-market billionaires is a good... Asylum-seekers in Europe: A proper comparison might show Italy is more... Comic books on the big screen: What "Batman vs Superman" owes Frank... Criminal justice: Longer jail sentences do deter crime, but only up to a... Visit The Economist e-store and you'll find a range of carefully selected products for business and pleasure, Economist books and diaries, and much more

The new social media chat bot Tay started as an innocent social experiment for people between the ages of 18-24, but the project soon went astray once Twitter users abused the vulnerabilities of the ignorant robot. Tay was the name given to the artificial intelligence chat bot created by Microsoft and Bing's technology and research teams. She is essentially a virtual personality anyone can chat with on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe. But in less than a day, internet trolls turned Tay into a racist and genocidal terror through their tweets at Tay and as a result of Microsoft's design. Anyone could tweet Tay or chat with her and she was designed to learn, as conversations progress, from what people say.

Increasingly flexible, responsive, sensing, even humanlike, robots are beginning to augment and replace labour in a wide range of industries: a megatrend that is transforming the economics of manufacturing and reshaping the business landscape. Already used to fight wars, remove dangerous land mines, and fill customer orders, robots can also clean, dance, and play the violin; assist with surgery and rehabilitation, bathe elderly patients, measure and deliver medication, and offer companionship; and provide disaster relief, report the news, and drive cars. In short, robots can perform quite a few of the jobs that humans currently do – often more efficiently and at a far lower cost. Because robots can sharply improve productivity and offset regional differences in labour costs and availability, they'll likely have a major impact on the competitiveness of companies and countries alike. For instance, countries with a greater number of robotic programmers and robotic infrastructure could become more attractive to manufacturers than countries with cheap labour.

Go is an ancient board game that was first played in China over 2000 years ago. While the rules of Go are relatively simple, strategy is extremely complex and games between experts can last days. Famously, there are more positions in a game of Go than there are atoms in the universe. Artificial Intelligence Due to this complexity, traditional methods of artificial intelligence (AI) have been unsuccessful at defeating human opponents. This is in contrast to chess, where a computer can relatively simply determine the "best" move by analyzing all possible downstream outcomes from any action.

WATERLOO, ON--(Marketwired - Mar 29, 2016) - Maluuba, a deep-learning company helping machines think, reason and communicate with human-like intelligence, today announced it has opened an R&D lab in Montreal. As part of the labs, Maluuba has partnered with machine learning and neural computation expert, Yoshua Bengio from the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) and reinforcement learning expert Richard Sutton from the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning, to further Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and artificial intelligence (AI) advances. The research lab, staffed by 13 deep learning research scientists, is led by Maluuba's CTO, Kaheer Suleman, an information retrieval and artificial intelligence expert. With a focus on the development of proprietary algorithms to solve language problems, Maluuba's goal is to build the world's most advanced research facility in deep learning and AI. "While we're closer to the goal of getting machines to exercise reasoning and understand conversational language, we still have a long way to go," said Yoshua Bengio.

Smartron is headed by founder chairman Mahesh Lingareddy who is also the co-founder and CEO of Soft Machines Inc, a United Statesbased semiconductor company with operations in the US, India and Russia. It has research and development centres in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Smartron is riding on the back of the IoT wave by innovating in the areas of smart, sensor, robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud and big data technologies to bring next generation smart devices, services and care, targeting consumer, enterprise, industrial and infrastructure markets. The company is funded by investors from the US, India and West Asia, among others.