Amazon, Google, Salesforce And Leading Roboticists On The Golden Age Of AI

The 11th annual MIT Tech Conference, a student-led event organized by the MIT Sloan Tech Club, had "exponential technologies" as its theme this year. Here's what I learned from the event's morning sessions which covered artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, and biotechnology. Developing computer technology that does not require the use of eyes or hands is "extremely liberating," said Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa at Amazon. The absence of a computer screen forced Prasad and his team to tackle the most difficult problems of speech recognition. The inspiration for Alexa was cloud-based AI, "similar to the Star Trek computer," making it easy for users to walk around the house and get some type of question answered or action performed.