Nvidia has made some early entries into the self-driving car and artificial intelligence market, but now, the hardware company has joined up with a notable partner: Baidu. Chinese search giant Baidu announced Wednesday it will work with Nvidia on initiatives focused on artificial intelligence. While both companies have worked together on smaller initiatives in the past, Wednesday's agreement marks a formal partnership between Baidu and Nvidia. In a statement, Ian Buck, vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia, said the companies are a strong match for further development in AI. "NVIDIA and Baidu have pioneered significant advances in deep learning and AI," Buck said. "We believe AI is the most powerful technology force of our time, with the potential to revolutionize every industry. Our collaboration aligns our exceptional technical resources to create AI computing platforms for all developers -- from academic research, startups creating breakthrough AI applications, and autonomous vehicles."

The following excerpt has been selected exclusively for StartupNation readers from "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future" by Kevin Kelly, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. In Chapter 2 of "The Inevitable," titled Cognifying, Kelly discusses the concept of artificial intelligence. In the excerpt below, he introduces the three recent breakthroughs that will make artificial intelligence more prominent in the years to come. Thinking is an inherently parallel process. Billions of neurons in our brain fire simultaneously to create synchronous waves of computation.

Google's high-profile artificial intelligence unit has a new Canadian outpost. DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 for roughly $650 million, said Wednesday that it would open a research center in Edmonton, Canada. The new research center, which will work closely with the University of Alberta, is the United Kingdom-based DeepMind's first international AI research lab. DeepMind, now a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet (goog), recruited three University of Alberta professors from to lead the new research lab. The professors--Rich Sutton, Michael Bowling, and Patrick Pilarski--will maintain their positions at the university while working at the new research office.

Recycling facilities use robotic sorting stations and object-recognition technology to identify and put garbage in its proper place. Filled with intricate mazes of high-speed conveyor belts carrying yesterday's garbage, high-tech recycling centers use sophisticated sensors to sort plastic from paper from aluminum. While this technology may streamline sorting, it's not smart or nimble enough to finish the job. Behind the scenes, recycling workers continue to sort the materials, making sure cereal boxes don't mix with soda cans. But the future of smart recycling is looking brighter.

No doubt you've heard (or read) quite a lot about artificial intelligence (AI) lately. Some herald it is as a business and technology revolution, while others, notably Elon Musk, view it as an existential threat to humanity. Of course, the truth lies somewhere in between, and most of us have yet to even experience AI in a substantive way. Last month at Interop ITX, we sat down with James McCaffrey, a senior research scientist at Microsoft Research and expert on neural networks, to talk about what exactly AI means and where it is heading. According to McCaffrey, AI and associated technologies like machine learning and deep learning are nothing new.

NVIDIA has already forged self-driving alliances with big car manufacturers like Audi, Toyota and Volvo, but its latest is a particularly big deal -- at least if you live in China. The chip designer has unveiled a partnership with Chinese internet giant Baidu that will see the two work together to boost the use of AI. Most notably, NVIDIA's Drive PX tech will find its way into Baidu's Apollo self-driving car platform and autonomous vehicles from "major" Chinese firms. The automotive pact is important enough that Baidu chief Robin Li traveled to the event in one of his company's driverless rides -- even though it was against the law. The pact will also make NVIDIA's deep learning Volta GPUs available to Baidu Cloud customers, optimize Baidu's deep learning platform (PaddlePaddle) for those Volta processors and use Baidu's conversational AI, DuerOS, for voice commands on NVIDIA's Shield TV.

The logic around artificial intelligence is fuzzy. Some people might argue that the heuristic algorithms used in antivirus to recognize potential threats are artificial intelligence. Others got a glimmer of hope -- outside of the security field -- with the landmark success of AlphaGo. In 2016, the DeepMind software won four out of five matches of the complex Chinese Go board game when it out-strategized top professional player Lee Sedol. The win astounded viewers and saved Alphabet Group, which acquired the London-based DeepMind in 2014, a million dollars of prize money.

Is AI on your software development roadmap? With technologies like advanced machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and business rules, AI is poised to disrupt both how developers build applications and the nature of those applications. The risks--unrealistic expectations, integration with traditional applications, and more--can't be ignored as your organization strives for the rewards of an accelerated development cycle and a new generation of self-learning applications. Uncover this shifting digital landscape and how your business can take advantage of it in the Forrester Research report, "How AI Will Change Software Development And Applications." Fill out the form at right to read the free report.

The purpose of this essay is to understand some technologies that will impact the hospitality industry in the near future – the year 2020 is arbitrary, I had first titled the article as'Hospitality Technology 2025' but the pace of technological developments shifted the horizon! Each of these is elaborated in the next paragraphs. Caveat: This is a very quick overview. Each of these technologies is complex and is associated with a number of'human' and moral questions. For example, who is responsible for a death if the vehicle causing the accident is a self-driving car?

There is a lot of hype and plenty of fear around artificial intelligence and its impact on the future of healthcare. There are many signs pointing towards the fact that AI will completely move the world of medicine. As deep learning algorithms and narrow AI started to buzz especially around the field of medical imaging, many radiologists went into panic mode. In his presentation at the GPU Tech Conference in San Jose in May 2017, Curtis Langlotz, Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University, mentioned how he received an e-mail from one of his students saying he was thinking about going into radiology but does not know whether it is a viable profession anymore. But the assumption that the radiologist profession is dying, is just plain wrong.