Google Photos is the best photo-management tool you can put on your phone, but it won't do you any good if your favorite photos are all in a shoebox. With a new app built to scan your prints, eliminate any glare you'd get from taking a picture of them, and keep them all straightened out in digital form, Google's latest mobile app is good news for anyone with a bunch of packed Fotomat envelopes. The new PhotoScan is a standalone app for both Android and iOS, and scanning a picture is a clever combination of manual shooting and computational photography. Once you take an initial photo of… a photo, the app recognizes the four corners of the frame and displays circular overlays on each corner of the scanned image. You then point your phone camera at each circle, create a robust scan of the image, and PhotoScan gets to work from there.

On its own front, Microsoft has been keen to get more folks developing AI, enough to recently open-source the deep learning tools it used to build Skype Translate and Cortana for users to train their own AI. It's also opened its arms to other tech companies, partnering with Google, Amazon, IBM and Facebook in a coalition to trumpet the benefits of AI and agree on best practices. The initiative left out the Elon Musk and Peter Thiel-backed OpenAI, a research project dedicated to democratizing artificial intelligence. But today, the nonprofit announced a separate team-up with Microsoft to run large-scale experiments on the software giant's Azure cloud platform. Azure's open-sourced tools appealed to the nonprofit, as well as its computation-boosting Batch and machine learning capabilities, Microsoft said in a blog post.

Federal highway safety regulators are gently rebuking a California plan that would compel automakers to show how they are addressing privacy, safety and a host of other questions about their self-driving cars -- a novel technology that could transform the U.S. transportation system. The plan from California's Department of Motor Vehicles would make it mandatory for manufacturers to complete a 15-point report on safety and other issues before testing automated vehicles or allowing them on public roads. It has been criticized by the automotive industry as being overly burdensome and a threat to innovation. The idea for the report came from a set of guidelines from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration that was released in September. But the suggestions were never meant to be mandatory or prescriptive, NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind told members of Congress in a committee hearing Tuesday.

Google is finally going ahead with its plans to build a "landscraper" headquarters in London's King's Cross, more than three years after the project was first announced. The development, which will be Google's UK headquarters, was reportedly thrown into turmoil in 2015 when bosses in California threw out the original plans, by London-based architects AHMM, for being "too boring", and brought in a Thomas Heatherwick, designer of a new London bus, the Olympic cauldron, and the Garden Bridge. Further questions were raised in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the European Union about whether or not the search engine would want to base up to 7,000 employees in London. But in a speech on Tuesday at Google's current campus in King's Cross, chief executive Sundar Pichai confirmed the plans were going ahead. "Here in the UK, it's clear to me that computer science has a great future with the talent, educational institutions, and passion for innovation we see all around us," he said.

Back in August, we talked about machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recently, 60 Minutes spoke with the CEO of IBM, Virginia Marie "Ginni" Rometty. The information shared by Rometty further supports the belief that machines/computers like Watson, an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and sophisticated analytical software is a "question answering" machine. The supercomputer is named after IBM's founder, Thomas J. Watson. It will not replace people/workers, but rather, it will allow for a faster evaluation of millions of data points that humans could not do as quickly as a computer with machine learning and AI complexities.

EyeEm is a photography community and marketplace of over 18 million photographers. It also publishes a magazine, also called EyeEm. For its fourth issue, Machina: A Curation of Real Photography by a Machine, the company turned to an artificial intelligence powered by computer vision, EyeEm Vision, to curate the magazine, selecting the photographs it feels are the best aesthetically and most impactful. Now, before the inner smartphone photographer in you rolls your eyes, understand that it is pretty neat that a machine can, in some ways, learn to identify photographic aesthetics like a human. Sure, an A.I. cannot truly exercise a similar series of complex calculations of why an image might be great or resonant, but it's certainly intriguing to see where humans are in imbuing machines with mental processes.

IBM's latest Power servers come with an AI twist. Optimized for deep learning, a new so-called PowerAI toolkit will "help train the systems to think and learn in a more human-like way, at a faster pace," as announced at SC16, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. I spoke with Hillery Hunter, IBM Research's director of Systems Acceleration and Memory and Memory Strategist, about her team's contribution to the software behind the world's fastest deep learning servers. Hillery Hunter: In this case, AI refers to a collection of deep learning frameworks and algorithms. Today's launch represents our first public offering in hardware-software co-optimization for deep learning.

Among the many areas that IBM is pushing forward with its Power architecture is in deep learning. Today IBM announced a new tool called PowerAI that aids in helping organizations learn things faster in a bid to generate advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. "PowerAI contains the major machine, deep-learning open-source software that we have optimized and compiled for our POWER8 with NVIDIA GPU servers," Gupta told ServerWatch. "We are optimizing and getting the best performance out of the Power8 NVLink server and also from a cluster of these servers." The Power8 NVLink capabilities were first announced in September and provides improved I/O capabilities that come from NVIDA.

The danger with toys is that too often they're not taken seriously. This is the case with Snap's new Spectacles. Buried deep in the excess of the plastic and PR lies a camera system that tells us a lot about the future of commerce, security and communication. With rumors that Apple could design smart-glasses, and Mark Zuckerberg's call for "camera-first" photo-sharing, it's clear that some companies have already started to realize the immense business opportunity offered by cheap cameras coupled with smart machine learning. Imagine a pill bottle that you don't want falling into the wrong hands.

One of the big trends we've seen over the last five years is automation. At the same time, we're also seeing more intelligence built into tools we already have, like phones and computers. Where do you see this process in five years? In the future, I believe that there will be a co-existence between humans and artificial intelligence systems that will be hopefully of service to humanity. These AI systems will involve software systems that handle the digital world, and also systems that move around in physical space, like drones, and robots, and autonomous cars, and also systems that process the physical space, like the Internet of Things. You will have more intelligent systems in the physical world, too -- not just on your cell phone or computer, but physically present around us, processing and sensing information about the physical world and helping us with decisions that include knowing a lot about features of the physical world.