THAT a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities. Last year they spent some 8.5 billion on research, deals and hiring, says Quid, a data firm. That was four times more than in 2010.

Technology is often described as an enabler, but technology trends and concepts can also shape how we view the world. Depending on your point of view, you might see the workplace as a complicated human-powered machine that needs to be maintained for peak performance. Or you might think of it as an organism that needs to be shaped as it grows and changes so it can thrive. When social software emerged and reached the mainstream both inside and outside the workplace, the workplace was viewed as a hyper-connected network of people to be influenced. These perspectives influence how we manage and, in the context of technology, determine what we see as the role of a particular solution.

Microsoft pitched developers to join its ecosystem as it showed off its very latest technologies and platforms at the Microsoft "Build 2016" event in San Francisco.

In the growing race to emerge the leader in self-driving technology, Yamaha hopes the third time is the charm as it attempts to break into the car market and to incorporate self-driving technology into motorcycles. However, the firm's CEO acknowledges that it will most likely take close to a decade to bring the autonomous technology to two-wheelers on a commercial basis. Yamaha launched these efforts with moderate investments of near 20 million in Silicon Valley, where it established a company last summer, in order to discover the latest technologies in autonomous vehicles, robotics and drones. It invested 2 million in a US startup, Veniam, back in February, attracted by the startup's connected vehicle expertise. "It's not a sense of crisis, but I want to make sure we stay ahead of the race," CEO Hiroyuki Yanagi explained.

Recently, another chapter of man vs. machine played out. Google's Deep Mind project team tried out their state of the art algorithm on the game of Go. The Korean pro, Lee Sedol, a world champion several times over and arguably the best player of the game right now, was its opponent. To put it simply, this was the equivalent of Deep Blue v. Gary Kasparov, and as with the IBM Chess playing machine before it, AlphaGo took home the prize, four wins to one loss. Go has been thought to be the one game that computers could not beat a human at because a computer could not brute force the move trees.

At the Build 2016 conference, which kicked off on March 30, developers got a sneak peak at Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) vision of all pervasive artificial intelligence (AI). CEO Satya Nadella calls this "conversations as a platform," in which human language is the preferred user interface. If Microsoft achieves its vision, it will be a breakthrough that will change the way we interact with our computing devices. One of the staples of science fiction has been artificial intelligence smart enough to have a natural conversation with. Such an advanced capability has been elusive, but in recent years, cloud based speech recognition services from Microsoft, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) have gotten closer to the fictional dream.

"Mayo Clinic is embracing cognitive computing because we realize this technology is transformational and necessary for the continued evolution of health care delivery," says Nicholas F. LaRusso, M.D. Ask people what they know about Watson, IBM's cognitive computing system, and many might answer, "Didn't it cream those all-star contestants on Jeopardy a few years ago?" The answer is yes, it most certainly dealt Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter an ego-bruising defeat in 2011. So how did Watson do it? And how can this technology improve health care? Watson is artificial intelligence in action.

Why is it so hard to install deep Learning / Neural Network libraries? I switched to Linux because a lot of different sources indicate that a installation on windows/osx is even harder. First I tried to install Caffe. But after a while I had to give up. After that I convinced myself that I could live without c and tried a python environment.

Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker's semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show. 'It can't find the lane markings!' Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. 'You need to paint the bloody roads here!' Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say. Boston Consulting Group estimates that initial semi-autonomous features add 4,000 to a car's price.

A team from China plans to challenge Google's AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence (AI) programme that beat a world-class player in the ancient board game Go, the state-owned Shanghai Securities News reported on Thursday. Scientists from the China Computer Go team will issue a challenge to AlphaGo by the end of 2016, said attendees at an event in Beijing organised by the Chinese Go Association and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, according to the report. It did not elaborate on the nature of the challenge. Scientists from the China Computer Go team will issue a challenge to AlphaGo by the end of 2016, said attendees at an event in Beijing. Google's AlphaGo computer recently beat champion Lee Sedol (pictured right) 4-1 in a 1milllion ( 706,388) challenge. The first game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952.