South by Southwest has unveiled its list of featured speakers for the upcoming fest, which includes the cast of Veep, Seth Rogen and exec producers of AMC's, Better Call Saul's Bob Odenkrik, John Cena, and more. The fest, which runs from March 10-19, will feature discussions from fields in tech, film, music, television, business, literature, government and journalism. Check out the list below. Jessica Shortall (Social Impact) – Jessica is the Managing Director of Texas Competes, a coalition of more than 1,200 Texas companies making the data-driven case for Texas to be welcoming to LGBTQ people. This business-oriented voice has become a national model.

People can finally talk to their houses by shouting at their cars. Amazon and Logitech have announced that they will bring the Alexa voice assistant to the ZeroTouch app. That means that people can set up their phones in their car and use it to talk to the voice assistant without using their hands – and in doing so give instructions to everything from their lights to their heating. Logitech has long sold ZeroTouch, a special mount for people's phones that gives access to a personal assistant that can be used without being touch and so is intended to keep people from being distracted while driving. But the company has now announced that the app will include Amazon's Alexa, a voice assistant that can be used with a wide range of features.

Companies building applications that leverage speech recognition have a new machine-learning based tool to improve their work. Microsoft is opening the public beta for its Custom Speech Service, the company said Tuesday. The service, formerly known as CRIS, allows customers to train a speech recognition system to work in a specific scenario, allowing it to produce more accurate results. For example, the Custom Speech Service can be trained to provide better results in a noisy airport or set up to work better with voices from a particular group, like kids or people with different accents. Right now, the Custom Speech Service works with English and Chinese, but one of its advantages is that it can be trained to work with accents from non-native speakers. Microsoft is making it available as part of its suite of Cognitive Services, a set of cloud-based tools aimed at opening up the fruits of the company's artificial intelligence and machine learning research to the rest of the world.

What does a computer company want with a bunch of meteorologists? A few weeks ago, IBM announced it was acquiring The Weather Company, which owns Weather.com and Weather Underground, and the Wall Street Journal reported they were paying more than $2 billion for the privilege. According to The New York Times, while The Weather Company employs many atmospheric scientists and meteorologists, nearly three-quarters of its scientists work in data and computers. The Weather Company was already storing most of its data with IBM's cloud computing platform, and now Big Blue has access to all that data, which they can now sell to other companies who need to know about the weather. The ability to reliably predict the weather has always been important, but people wrongly assume that weather data is only useful to a handful of industries, like agriculture and transportation.

Sameer Gupta knows about electronic markets. The former COO for J.P. Morgan's global electronic equities trading and Americas high touch and program trading business has been steeped in trade mechanization since graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. He's worked as a programmer at Goldman, a business development executive at NYSE Euronext and an electronic trading implementer at J.P. Morgan. Now, he's C.O.O. of iSentium, a company that uses intelligent algorithms to turn social media sentiment into tradeable data. And he says banks are getting their approach to artificial intelligence (AI) all wrong.

The problem we face is so clear to me. Humans on spaceship earth are paralyzed by an inability to trust whether we are making the right decisions for our world, communities, companies and individual lives. This paralysis is a symptom of our innate human need to be connected with each other. We have a serious, yet very treatable condition called cognitive overload. Our desire for constant connectivity is producing more data and content than we have ever produced before.

Uber has reaffirmed its flying cars ambitions by hiring former Nasa engineer Mark Moore. Moore has 30 years of experience at Nasa, and becomes the director of engineering for aviation at Uber Elevate. "I can't think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real," said Moore, who published a white paper on vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (VTOL) back in 2010. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

We are on the brink of a technology tsunami that will likely be as challenging and transformative for us as the Industrial Revolution was for our ancestors. This tsunami will be led by artificial intelligence (AI), increased global connectivity, the Internet of Things, major advances in computing power, and virtual and augmented reality. As a result, the Smart Machine Age (SMA) will fundamentally change the availability and nature of human work and make obsolete the dominate Industrial Revolution model of business organization and leadership. The organization of the future will be staffed by a combination of smart robots, AI systems, and human beings. Humans will be needed to do the tasks that technology won't be able to do well: higher-order critical thinking, creativity, imagination, and innovation and tasks involving high emotional engagement with other human beings (SMA Skills).

I often sit back and watch certain things quietly. This past week has been one of those moments. An article this weekend in the British media brought up the old and oft disproven argument about the"warming pause." However, as scientists dug into this latest desperate "Hail Mary" pass, it was apparent that there was more to this latest saga. My colleagues Phil Plait at Blastr and Andrew Freedman at Mashable have written excellent pieces laying out how scientists debunked these latest claims. They also fill in other pieces to this rather odd story.

What do people who work in machine learning and AI think of actress Kristen Stewart's research paper on AI? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. There are perhaps two different questions to answer here: (1) What do we think of the paper? Let me address the second question first, because I think that is the root of the (possible) problem. As most things surrounding AI these days there is of course some hype effect and I understand how general publications would fall for a paper that manages to put together AI and a Hollywood actress. That said, I found Quartz approach was good and harmful enough.