Though we try, these moments tend to occur when we've taken an unexpected turn; when we've planned for option A, and another opportunity comes out of left field. Looking back at these crossroads, it's not always clear whether we found the path, or whether it found us. Just a month before the 2015 Graduate Studies Program (GSP) kicked off, Andrea graduated from the University of British Columbia (UBC) with a degree in mechanical engineering. Earlier in the year, she won Singularity University's Canadian Global Impact Competition (and the chance to attend GSP) by submitting a wearable device she developed to help predict meltdowns of individuals with autism spectrum disorder, before they occur. But Andrea hadn't always wanted to be an engineer or go to Singularity University.

Earlier this month, Google's Go-playing AI wiped the floor with the game's existing world champion. Now, a team of engineers from China plan to challenge AlphaGo with their own artificial intelligence system. Reuters reports that China's state-owned Shanghai Securities News announced the idea yesterday. The report explains that the scientists, who are part of the China Computer Go team, will lay down a challenge for Google before the end of the year. It's not clear what the challenge will be, but presumably it will, you know, involve playing Go.

A robot anesthesiologist designed by Johnson & Johnson is going off the market. Only three years after approval, the company has stopped production on the Sedasys machine due to poor sales. The Sedasys machine was designed to provide anesthetic to patients undergoing routine surgeries. The American Society of Anesthesiologists was especially alarmed because anesthesiology is one of the riskier aspects of many surgeries. The machine, which administered the drugs while monitoring the patient's vital signs, was originally considered for use on a number of surgeries.

It wasn't even April 1, but being the overachievers they are, Google had already started releasing its April Fools' Day announcements. Starting yesterday, we spotted a disco-clad pegman on Google Maps, a Google sock-finding app on Google's Australia blog, and a new "Flick" keyboard from Google Japan. There were also two Gmail hacks that rolled out: an emoji-powered smart reply feature and a "Send Mic Drop" option. The Gmail mic drop feature had a number of users up in arms after they unwittingly inserted a mic-dropping Minion gif into emails. By this morning, Google had disabled the prank and apologized for causing more headaches than laughs.

We are currently working with a client in the FMCG who is trying to unpack better customer segments or "clusters" in order to engage and market to them better. The problem is we are trying to solve is "How might we find customers that allow for better ROI on marketing initiatives?" Imagine however the ability to segment customers in a totally new way? Discover common needs or characteristics not humanly possible or conceivable? What if we allowed artificial intelligence to apply its own way to "segment" or "cluster" segments?

Mastering arcade games seems cute by comparison. Researchers at DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence lab, announced Wednesday they had achieved a breakthrough not thought possible for at least another decade: a computer program that defeats humans at Go, an enormously complicated strategy game. See Also: This robot can solve Rubik's Cube in one second This network was named by EContent Magazine to its "Trendsetting Products of 2014" list.

You wake up to the sound of an automated alarm from your smart house's artificial intelligence system. As you head towards the kitchen to grab a cup of Joe, coffee starts brewing on its own and the TV in the drawing room turns itself on to your favorite news channel. Once you're done with refreshments, your intelligent voice assistant briefs you on the day's many chores, general memoranda you needed to be reminded about at the start of day. You get out of your house and step into your self-driving smart car. Everything from your grandmother's bed to your infant's potty is automated, and you are ignorantly leading the life of a disabled meatsack.

Last week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced its latest "grand challenge," which asks teams to develop smart systems that leverage machine learning to optimize available wireless spectrum. With a finite amount of spectrum and a growing number of connected devices, the public and private sector are experiencing a crunch to utilize under-used spectrum and share the available spectrum. "The agency's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge will reward teams for developing smart systems that collaboratively, rather than competitively, adapt in real time to today's fast-changing, congested spectrum environment – redefining the conventional spectrum management roles of humans and machines in order to maximize the flow of radio frequency signals," said DARPA in an announcement Wednesday. The agency unveiled the challenge before some 8000 people at the International Wireless Communications Expo in Las Vegas. The DARPA competition aims to provide an alternative approach to the traditional spectrum allocation process, which pre-assigns exclusive access to designated frequencies.

According to Lee, the program was created as a "chatbot" to entertain 18-to-24 year olds and learn from interacting with humans. However, some Twitter users were able to manipulate the program to send out the offensive messages. "Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay," Lee explained. Alastair Bathgate, CEO of Blue Prism, a software company that develops robotic process automation systems, said the incident proves that Microsoft has not learnt to control its AI program. "You can be devious with these things because, essentially, they are not that intelligent," he told CNBC over the phone.

Yann LeCun invited me to speak at this week's inaugural symposium on "The Future of AI" at NYU. It's an amazing gathering of leaders in the field to discuss the state of AI and its continued advancement. Here's what I talked about -- how deep learning is a new software model that needs a new computing model; why AI researchers have adopted GPU-accelerated computing; and NVIDIA's ongoing efforts to advance AI as we enter into its exponential adoption. And why, after all these years, AI has taken off. For as long as we have been designing computers, AI has been the final frontier.