Depictions of the future in books and film are usually influenced by what's going on at the time, reflecting social malaise, impending armageddon, or economic anxieties. The robots in classic sci-fi usually resembled humans, as most authors assumed they would eventually assist us in the same tasks humans did. Instead, however, today we find artificial intelligence doing some of our thinking for us, but it's more often solving problems that don't need intervention from self-contained humanoid robots. The promise of autonomous robots that matched our abilities has given way to a more specific focus on tasks that are fulfilled by armies of smaller bots controlled by machine learning and algorithms running in the cloud. Their scope is more complex, but a lot less dramatic than, say, Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot, or the replicants from Blade Runner.

So I started this as a journey to learn how to get an Android App to tell me the brand of the beer I was having, which would be a cool base idea to develop an app such as "Vivino" that does precisely this but with wine. Wouldn't it be nice to have app such as "Vivino" but for beer?… I first started checking how could software determine the contents of an image and came across TensorFlow which is Google's answer to that question (and many many others). TensorFlow provides the base machine learning algorithms that Google use to determine the contents of your images, mails, and your life in general (obviously). Since it is open source you are able to extend it as you like; for example to re-train it with another specific images, improving its chances to classify them.

That's because customers rely on an increasingly wide range of tools to connect with businesses, including social media, email, texting, and other messaging platforms. Today, enterprise technology giant Salesforce is rolling out new artificial intelligence tools to keep those communication channels running smoothly, and triage customer service requests as they come in. Salesforce calls the technology Service Cloud Einstein, extending its Einstein artificial intelligence initiative to its Service Cloud customer service platform. It's a collection of tools that use machine learning to inform, guide and learn from the work of customer service agents and contact center managers. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff launched the larger Einstein project last year, promising to bring artificial intelligence to all of the company's products and services.

Education stands to benefit from rapid developments in artificial intelligence. But historically, adaptive learning software has been programmed in a top-down fashion. It asks a question, and if the child provides a particular answer, a set of prompts or tips might be shared or a new (perhaps easier, perhaps more advanced) question might be asked. Whether this is or is not AI is up for debate; however, the development of such programs is labor intensive and generally only effective in providing practice for concepts taught in class. As the Innovation Leader at an international education company, I work with both educational leaders on leveraging digital learning ecosystems and with education technology companies to improve their products for use in our schools.

The world's first rotating skyscraper is set to be built in Dubai by 2020. The Dynamic Tower Hotel has been planned since 2008, having been proposed by Israeli-Italian architect David Fisher. It will stand at 1,375 feet tall, with each of its 80 storeys capable of rotating individually around a concrete core, offering 360-degree views of Dubai. Residents will be able to control rotation speeds and stop their apartment from spinning with voice commands. The skyscraper is expected to be completely self-powered, reportedly featuring as many as 79 horizontal-lying wind turbines between floors, as well as roof-mounted solar panels.

BERKELEY, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 25, 2017) - LeadGenius today announced that Qin Zhang has joined the company as Vice President of Engineering. LeadGenius provides B2B marketing and sales teams with highly-accurate lead generation data and go-to-market insights through a combination of machine learning and human researchers. Before joining LeadGenius, Zhang was Vice President of Engineering for EverString. With more than 15 years of technology product development experience, Zhang has scaled engineering teams at a range of companies, including firstRain, Primavera Systems, and EverString. "Qin will focus on scaling the LeadGenius engineering team and the core machine learning technology powering the LeadGenius platform," said Prayag Narula, CEO of LeadGenius.

A Recommender System predicts the likelihood that a user would prefer an item. Based on previous user interaction with the data source that the system takes the information from (besides the data from other users, or historical trends), the system is capable of recommending an item to a user. Think about the fact that Amazon recommends you books that they think you could like; Amazon might be making effective use of a Recommender System behind the curtains. This simple definition, allows us to think in a diverse set of applications where Recommender Systems might be useful. Applications such as documents, movies, music, romantic partners, or who to follow on Twitter, are pervasive and widely known in the world of Information Retrieval.

IBM Machine Learning for z/OS could be a boon to big banks and insurance companies that want advanced analytics on the mainframe. Next up is the IBM Power platform. Public cloud providers have popularized machine learning with low-cost, easily accessible services, but that's a separate world from the tightly regulated, on-premises computing environments maintained by many big banks and insurance companies. Now IBM is bringing cutting-edge analytics to these mainframe customers with IBM Machine Learning (IBM ML) for z/OS. Announced February 15 in New York, IBM ML is a private-cloud-only offshoot IBM Watson Machine Learning, the public-cloud service on IBM Bluemix.

Technology can inspire people to be creative in new ways. Magenta, an open-source project Google launched last year, aims to do that by giving developers tools to explore music using neural networks. To help show what's possible with Magenta, Google recently created an interactive experiment called A.I. Duet, which lets users play a duet with the computer. Just play some notes, and the computer will respond to your melody. You don't even have to know how to play piano--it's fun to just press some keys and listen to what comes back.

Pics Brit chip startup Graphcore has produced sexy images of its graph processing. We wrote about Graphcore scoring $30m A-round funding in October. The processor designer came out of two years in XMOS-incubated stealth mode at that time, and was founded by CEO Nigel Toon and CTO Simon Knowles. XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company developing micro-controllers, and it was founded in 2005 in Bristol, UK. There is a wide spread of Graphcore investors: Bosch, Samsung, Amadeus Capital, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital and Pitango Venture Capital.