THE world reeled when Lee Sedol – one of the great modern players of the ancient board game Go – was beaten by Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) program, AlphaGo. The AI managed to outmaneuver Lee at his own game, one which rewards players' strategic judgment and creative analyses. To achieve this, DeepMind provided AlphaGo with the basic framework of the game, recordings of previous games and made it play itself continuously. The software mimics the processes of human learning – and as it went along, AlphaGo learned to be a better player over time. The day of the face-off, AlphaGo beat Lee four games to one and was awarded the highest Go game-master ranking.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used as an unbiased judge, for matters ranging from insurance to economic efficiency. But can it ever truly be unbiased? When Remy Descartes first wrote the phrase cogito ergo sum –'I think therefore I am'– in the 1600s, he could not have been aware of the philosophical questioning that would erupt with the onset of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 20th and 21st century. Every Google search, every video suggested on YouTube and every Siri recommendation is built on machine learning algorithms designed to learn everything about your online habits, in a bid to offer targeted content that you might like. Even outside of consumer-level decisions, AI and algorithms are increasingly being used to root out hidden meanings in billions of lines of genetic code, in the hope of finding a cure to a disease or building machines that can talk for themselves.

Uber has suspended its self-driving car operations after one of its vehicles was involved in a crash in Arizona. The accident left one of the company's driverless Volvos on its side, but fortunately led to no serious injuries. A picture of the crash scene shows two other damaged cars sitting next to the Volvo, one of which has smashed windows and particularly bad dent marks, suggesting the accident happened at some speed. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning. Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as "Solti," after his favorite conductor. He couldn't see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. So he stood up from his half-eaten lunch and sprinted across MPK 20, the Facebook building that's longer than a football field but feels like a single room. "My desk is all the way at the other end," he says.

In the era of self-driving cars, a scary but otherwise uneventful car crash can be huge news. This was the case in Tempe, Arizona, on Friday, when an Uber self-driving car was hit so hard that it rolled onto its side. There were no serious injuries reported. Uber has grounded its fleet of self-driving cars in Arizona as a result, a spokeswoman for the company told me. "We are continuing to look into this incident, and can confirm we had no backseat passengers in the vehicle," an Uber spokesperson said in a statement provided to The Atlantic.

Fei Fei Li, chief scientist of AI/ML for cloud services at Google Inc., speaks at Cloud Next '17 in front of an image of one of sister company Waymo's driverless cars. Deep learning has become the technology du jour of late and few companies have advanced the field as much across as many areas or integrated the technology as completely into their operations as Google and its Alphabet affiliates. In keeping with Google's push to externalize its innovations, the company's Next '17 cloud conference featured a number of AI-related announcements and a general theme of democratizing access to the world's most powerful deep learning systems. In recent years Google and its sister companies have become synonymous with advancing the AI revolution at a frenzied pace and infusing deep learning across the company's services. Perhaps most famously, last year Deep Mind's AlphaGo became the first machine to beat a top Go player, while Waymo's driverless cars have become symbols of the autonomous driving revolution.

DataRobot has raised $54 million in the first close of a Series C round led by New Enterprise Associates. The latest round brings the total amount raised by the Boston, Massachusetts-based company to $111 million, with "significant" additional funding expected in the second close of the round. Data scientists Jeremy Achin and Thomas DeGodoy founded DataRobot in 2012 on the belief that automated machine learning will not only increase productivity for data scientists, but will also open up the world of data science to non-data scientists. The DataRobot platform features hundreds of open-source machine learning algorithms, allowing users to quickly build predictive models. Chris Devaney, COO at DataRobot, told ZDNet that a data scientist would typically look at a set of data, prepare that data, and then train a predictive model -- a process that can take weeks or even months.

Amazon's Echo and Dot connected speakers are sold out, and 35 new products will have Alexa built-in this year. Did Alexa win over Siri, Cortana and Hey Google? LOS ANGELES -- Alexa is much better at Siri at so many things. But now that Amazon's Alexa personal digital assistant has joined Siri on the iPhone, we come to a sudden and unexpected realization. Siri, which has been maligned and criticized over the last five years, is actually more useful than Alexa on the phone.

This is the third installment of a new series called Deep Learning Research Review. Every couple weeks or so, I'll be summarizing and explaining research papers in specific subfields of Deep Learning. This week focuses on applying Deep Learning to Natural Language Processing. The last post was about reinforcement learning and the post before was on generative adversarial networks. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is all about creating systems that process or "understand" language in order to perform certain tasks. The traditional approach to NLP involved a lot of domain knowledge of linguistics itself. Understanding terms such as phonemes and morphemes was pretty standard, as there are whole linguistic classes dedicated to their study.

It's March of the Machines this week, so we had a look at some surprising companies hiring in emerging technologies such as IoT, AI and machine learning. It has never been a more exciting time to work in artificial intelligence (AI) or the internet of things (IoT). There are so many career options available to those who want to pursue these emerging technologies, and successful candidates can make a real difference in how society uses technology. But, while you might know that you want to work in AI or machine learning, you might be left wondering where exactly to start your job search. What companies are hiring in that sector?