From web to mobile to natural language interfaces, tools emerge that allow companies to create chatbots and voicebots that interact with users. These tools make it simple to create experiences, integrate and distribute to different messaging platforms, and later improve and analyze the end product. API.AI, recently acquired by Google, is a great example of such a tool, focused on NLU capabilities. We will have Ilya Gelfenbeyn (former Co-Founder and CEO) and now Product Manager of API.AI present the company's products, the tool's capabilities, demo how to create an experience and integrate/distribute to messaging channels (including the recent integration with Google Home!). We will hold the event on Monday 2/27 at 6pm at Galvanize, 44 Tehama Street, San Francisco.

Hoping to go to Google's annual developer conference this spring? If you are, mark your calendar for Feb. 22. That's the day when you can first apply for tickets to Google I/O. Google announced on its events page that the window for submitting ticket applications is between Feb. 22 at 1 p.m. ET and Feb. 27 at 8 p.m. ET. The conference is being held May 17-19 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, Calif. This is the second year that the event will be held in Mountain View.

While there has been plenty of conversation over the possibility that robots will replace humans in the work force, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes the threat is existential for people. The billionaire warned humans will soon have to learn to communicate with artificial intelligence or face becoming obsolete. "Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk said while speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, according to a report from CNBC. Musk, who was at the event to announce the launch of Tesla in the United Arab Emirates, suggested that a merger between humans and machines will be necessary for the species going forward, lest it find itself made irrelevant. The founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX pointed to the processing power of a computer compared to that of a person's brain, explaining that computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second" while humans do so at about 10 bits per second.

Google is bringing artificial intelligence to a whole new set of devices, including Android Wear 2.0 smartwatches and the Raspberry Pi board, later this year. A cool thing is these devices don't require a set of powerful CPUs and GPUs to carry out machine learning tasks. Google researchers are instead trying to lighten the hardware load to carry out basic AI tasks, as exhibited by last week's release of Android Wear 2.0 operating system for wearables. Google has added some basic AI features to smartwatches with Android Wear 2.0, and those features can work within the limited memory and CPU constraints of wearables. Android Wear 2.0 has a "smart reply" feature, which provides basic responses to conversations.

There are many great tutorials on neural networks that one can find online nowadays. Simply searching for the words "Neural Network" will produce numerous results on GithubGist. Even tough there are many examples floating around on the web, I decided to have my own Introduction to Neural Networks! In my tutorial, I specifically tried to illustrate the use of Python classes to define layers in the network as objects. Each layer object has forward and backward propagation methods which leads to compact, easily readable code.

Signature and behavioural based anti-malware are no match for next generation adversaries who use mutating hashes, sophisticated obfuscation mechanisms, self-propagating malware and intelligent malware components, according to the findings of a new report. The report, published by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), said that it is "no longer enough" to detect and respond to cyber-attacks and that artificial intelligence (AI) is necessary to offer the predictive quality that can give organisations a "much-needed edge on their more sophisticated, less burdened, and more evasive adversaries". The research paper, titled Signature Based Malware Detection is Dead, said that the average data breach costs $158 per stolen record, and is often undetected for 229 days. In some organisations, especially ones containing critical infrastructure, feature layers of incompatible technologies are "Frankensteined" together in a haphazard attempt at nominally meeting security standards. "Any unused technology in every layer exponentially increases cyber-security noise and could result in exploitable security vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, C-level executives suffer from security solution fatigue as the result of incessant product evaluations, investments, and failures," the paper said.

Late last year, famed physicist Stephen Hawking issued a warning that the continued advancement of artificial intelligence will either be "the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity". We've all seen the Terminator movies, and the apocalyptic nightmare that the self-aware AI system, Skynet, wrought upon humanity, and now results from recent behavior tests of Google's new DeepMind AI system are making it clear just how careful we need to be when building the robots of the future. In tests late last year, Google's DeepMind AI system demonstrated an ability to learn independently from its own memory, and beat the world's best Go playersat their own game. It's since been figuring out how to seamlessly mimic a human voice. Now, researchers have been testing its willingness to cooperate with others, and have revealed that when DeepMind feels like it's about to lose, it opts for "highly aggressive" strategies to ensure that it comes out on top. The Google team ran 40 million turns of a simple'fruit gathering' computer game that asks two DeepMind'agents' to compete against each other to gather as many virtual apples as they could.

Yuval Noah Harari might be Silicon Valley's favorite historian. His last book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which detailed the entirety of human history and how Homo Sapiens came to dominate the Earth, was blurbed by President Barack Obama and Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg recommended it for his book club. And more than 100,000 students have taken Harari's online course. In his new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harari looks forward and hazards a few guesses on what comes next for humanity. These next chapters in our history range from the utopian to the horrific, he says.

How humanity will meet its end is a an endless source of fascination in science fiction. But scientists claim many of the scenarios depicted in films - such as an asteroid strike and killer robots - may not be as far fetched as you might think. Now researchers at Cambridge University's Study of Existential Risk (CESR) have come up with a list of 10 threats that may some day trigger an apocalypse. Humanity faces an uncertain future as technology learns to think for itself and adapt to its environment. Artificial Intelligence, disguised as helpful digital assistants and self-driving vehicles, is gaining a foothold and it could one day spell the end for mankind if allowed to develop without strict controls.

This machine learning brain is, arguably, the most important part of any self driving car. Having taken in the information from cameras and sensors mounted around the car, the brain then needs to tell the steering, throttle and brakes what to do – all in a fraction of a second. What's more, it needs to be able to understand what other drivers are doing anywhere in the world, where there are different driving habits and road rules.