The patter of automated machinery fills the air inside wire-basket manufacturer Marlin Steel's bustling factory in a rugged industrial section of this city. Maxi Cifarelli, 25, of Baltimore, peers through safety goggles at a flat screen, her left knee bent and heel resting on her chair. Two years after earning a fine arts degree from Towson University with a specialty in interdisciplinary object design, she now spends her work days working with a personality-free machine with a name to match: a computer numerical control, or CNC, router. With automation poised to sweep through the economy, some fear that it will kill more jobs than it creates. But Cifarelli's experience is the opposite. She befriended automation, instead of fighting it, and she has a job because of it.

We saw Amazon's brief and disgusting teaser for its delivery drones, China becomes the biggest producer of solar energy in the world, Windows Cloud (unrelated) and how Elon Musk scratches his Minecraft itch. The country doubled its solar capacity last year. China might not have the image of a clean energy champion, with air pollution issues and a continued dependence on coal power, but it's also moving forward with renewable energy. The country's National Energy Administration has revealed that its solar energy production more than doubled in 2016, hitting 77.42 gigawatts by the end of the year. That said, it only covers just one percent of the country's total energy output.

Once January has passed, February is the month in which even the noblest New Year's resolutions live and die. If you're aiming to increase your bottom line (or reduce your waistline), these nine tips from the executives at Forbes Technology Council will show you how to harness emerging tech platforms to set achievable goals and stick to your business and personal resolutions. The idea that tech devices can hold us accountable can help us accomplish our resolutions. When we see progress or are reminded of what we could do better, we tend to stick with it. Now, add the ability to share that information with other people so they see what we should be doing, and that accountability goes up even more.

The 20-day poker tournament between four human pros and an artificial intelligence program concluded last night. The AI, named Libratus, was created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and bested its opponents by $1.76 million in chips. "The best AI's ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans," said Libratus co-creator Tuomas Sandholm in a press release. While the AI has so far only been applied to poker, CMU is eager to experiment with its abilities in other fields. "The computer can't win at poker if it can't bluff," said Frank Pfenning, head of the Computer Science Department at CMU. "Developing an AI that can do that successfully is a tremendous step forward scientifically and has numerous applications. Imagine that your smartphone will someday be able to negotiate the best price on a new car for you. There was intense speculation during the tournament about how Libratus was able to shift its strategy so dramatically from day to day. A number of poker pros weighed in to say that the researchers must be tinkering with it by hand at night. The event was surrounded by speculation about how Libratus was able to improve day to day during the competition. It turns out it was the pros themselves who taught Libratus about its weaknesses. "After play ended each day, a meta-algorithm analyzed what holes the pros had identified and exploited in Libratus' strategy," Sandholm said. This is very different than how learning has been used in the past in poker. Typically researchers develop algorithms that try to exploit the opponent's weaknesses. In contrast, here the daily improvement is about algorithmically fixing holes in our own strategy."

In the past human work was preferred over a machine's work because a human was more accurate than a machine. After all a human could look at all angles and make an informed decision, and a machine could not. But enter machine learning today, and a machine might be more useful than a human in shaping customer experiences. Today machine learning can help brands scale their engagement operations and provide increasingly relevant experiences. And the good news is now you don't have to be a software expert to use machine learning.

To manage complex web services with lots of calls to the cloud, many businesses have invested in Application Performance Management (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) tools. Together APM and NPM tools are essential aids in improving a business's infrastructure required to support an effective web experience... but they are missing a critical component - Internet visibility. Internet connectivity has always played a role in customer access to web presence, but in the past few years use of the Internet in the web experience has dramatically increased. The broadening use of Cloud Services sources means that web content is coming to the customer from all over the Internet in a multitude of paths. Relying solely on Network and Internet Service Providers will get you connected but at what cost to performance and cost.

Housed in the classic Denver Gas & Electric Building, 910 15th St., 910Telecom is a carrier-neutral telecom hotel located in the heart of Denver. Adjacent to CenturyLink, AT&T, and Denver Main, 910Telecom offers connectivity to all major carriers, Internet service providers, Internet backbones and exchanges. The 910Telecom Meet Me RoomTM facilities provide access to hundreds of customers as well as national and local carriers without incurring local loop fees. Passive and active panels support circuit connections from T1 to DS3, OC3-OC192, and GigE Ethernet. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020.

Perhaps the most positive technical theme of 2016 was the long-delayed triumph of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and in particular deep learning. In this article we'll discuss what that means and how you might make use of deep learning yourself. Perhaps you noticed in the fall of 2016 that Google Translate suddenly went from producing, on the average, word salad with a vague connection to the original language to emitting polished, coherent sentences more often than not -- at least for supported language pairs, such as English-French, English-Chinese, and English-Japanese. That dramatic improvement was the result of a nine-month concerted effort by the Google Brain and Google Translate teams to revamp Translate from using its old phrase-based statistical machine translation algorithms to working with a neural network trained with deep learning and word embeddings employing Google's TensorFlow framework. The researchers working on the conversion had access to a huge corpus of translations from which to train their networks, but they soon discovered that they needed thousands of GPUs for training and would have to create a new kind of chip, a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), to run Translate on their trained neural networks at scale.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undergoing a transformation from silo implementations to a utility function across many industry verticals as a form of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability. This capability is becoming embedded and/or associated with many applications, services, products, and solutions. Mind Commerce sees AI innovation in a variety of areas including personalized AI to both support and protect end-users. This research evaluates the growth of AI, its application across diverse sectors, and the associated impact upon Public Safety, Security, and Privacy. Topics addressed in the report include: Assessment of how AI impacts public safety, security, and privacy Case study analysis of select AI initiatives related to public safety and security Views on the rise of AGI and its application related to public safety, security, and privacy Analysis of AI initiatives in Government, Businesses, Professional Bodies, and Universities Forecasts for Cognitive System and Content Analytics Software, AI Software & Analytics, AI Public Safety Software, and AI Software for Fraud Detection, Risk Management, and Automated Planning 2017 – 2022 All purchases of Mind Commerce reports includes time with an expert analyst who will help you link key findings in the report to the business issues you're addressing.

What if artificial intelligence actually made a difference in our everyday lives? If you think about it, technology for processing information like humans do is still at an early stage. It shows up in chatbots and on speakers like the Amazon Echo. Yet, many of the services we use each day are still not AI-enabled, which is unfortunate. It's one thing to make a car we can't afford or to make a speaker smarter, but what about common products and services?