E: I kicked around the idea of Cosmify for about 4 months after I left Yahoo. I lack some of the data analysis background to pull what I wanted to build off, so I asked around and met with a long list of scientists in the Bay Area, Japan, China, and Russia. A friend and famous Python guru (the Python language is one of pillars of exploratory data analysis; R is the other) introduced me to Ana - she has tremendous programming chops and is a well known scientist specialized in reproducible research. She liked the idea of creating an unstructured data analysis system that anybody could use. Turned out too that we have common friends working at Trinity College in Dublin, where she earned her PhD and where I lectured a few times as a guest speaker about advanced large systems programming.

Quentin Hardy recently wrote in the New York Times, "As the oracles of Silicon Valley debate whether the latest tech boom is sliding toward bust, there is already talk about what will drive the industry's next growth spurt. The way we use computing is changing, toward a boom (and, if history is any guide, a bubble) in collecting oceans of data in so-called cloud computing centers, then analyzing the information to build new businesses. The terms most often associated with this are'machine learning' and'artificial intelligence,' or'A.I.' And the creations spawned by this market could affect things ranging from globe-spanning computer systems to how you pay at the cafeteria. 'There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there's going to be so much information people have to work through quickly,' said Diane B. Greene, the head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an A.I. boom.

Satya Nadella believes he's found The Next Big Thing. Nadella, the stylish and analytical CEO of Microsoft, is preaching the power of bots. And not just any bots -- bots powered by artificial intelligence that can carry meaningful conversations and handle tasks for you. "It's about taking the power of human language and applying it more pervasively to all of our computing," Nadella said in his cerebral introduction to Microsoft's annual developers conference, which kicked off on Wednesday. "By doing so, we think this can have as profound an impact as the previous platform shifts have had, whether it be GUI [graphical user interface], or the web, or touch, or mobile."

The gaming industry often gets a bad rap for its depictions of violence and female objectification, but Games for Change, a New York-based development company, hopes to slowly change that. Founded in 2004, G4C creates and distributes games that focus on social impact, human rights, poverty and other issues. The customary gun-toting badasses are gone, replaced instead by characters with a strong sense of moral responsibility and a mission to educate players worldwide. Watch the video above to learn more about the company's efforts to create a new niche in the gaming market.

Microsoft wants people to have more intelligent conversations with their computers. The giant software company is promoting new tools for software developers to build intelligent "bots" or commercial programs that will work with Cortana, its voice-activated digital assistant, to perform tasks like booking a hotel room, ordering a meal or arranging a delivery. Microsoft recently shut down an experimental messaging bot after some Twitter users taught it to make offensive statements. CEO Satya Nadella said the episode showed the importance of designing technology to be "inclusive and respectful." Nadella touted the power of "conversational" computing at the company's annual Build conference for software developers in San Francisco, where Microsoft also announced some updates to its flagship Windows 10 software.

Ilya is a software engineer at Uber Technologies in Louisville. He works on computer vision and machine learning problems to improve map data for Uber services. He graduated from Moscow State University with an MS in Physics in 2005. In 2008 he moved to Colorado to work in Parascript LLC on OCR and medical imaging. In 2011 I joined Google where heworked on automatic map creation using aerial imagery. In 2015 he started to work in Microsoft Bing Maps which was acquired by Uber in August. He's been using several in-house deep learning libraries in Microsoft and Google, in Uber we use open source libraries like Caffe and recently TensorFlow.

A team of Nevada scientists have been using a drone to control the weather. Engineers and meteorologists say they have created the first autonomous cloud seeding platform that could increase rainfall by 15 per cent. Cloud seeding involves spraying fine particles of silver iodide into a cloud system in an effort to boost the amount of rain that falls. A team of Nevada scientists have been using drones to control the weather. Microscopic particles of silver iodide are shot into existing clouds using land based generators or aircraft.

The Times has assembled a panel of distinguished and diverse writers who will regularly contribute to the Books section. The 10 authors who make up the Los Angeles Times Cultural Critics At Large have published works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. They have won dozens of prizes. A majority have deep connections to Southern California, even though they hail from four different nations. They will help expand the literary conversation, challenging ideas and broadening readers' understanding of literature and culture within the contemporary moment.

Amazon thrilled comic book fans recently when it announced it was moving forward with its revival of "The Tick," a new live-action series based on the comics by Ben Edlund that have already spawned an animated series, a short-lived live-action series (both on Fox) and a video game. Rumors have swirled for several years, and the streaming content provider announced March 10 that it had ordered a pilot for a new take on the comics, featuring an all new cast. Stepping into the considerable footsteps of Patrick Warburton, who served as the voice of the animated Tick and embodied the live-action version of the character, is British actor Peter Serafinowicz ("Guardians of the Galaxy," "Shaun of the Dead.") Say what you will about "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" (and people have said plenty), at 2 hours and a 33 minutes -- packing in three of the comic-book realm's biggest icons, a psychotic supervillain, a giant alien monster and more plot threads than you can shake a kryptonite-tipped spear... Say what you will about "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" (and people have said plenty), at 2 hours and a 33 minutes -- packing in three of the comic-book realm's biggest icons, a psychotic supervillain, a giant alien monster and more plot threads than you can shake a kryptonite-tipped spear... In news that may leave fans questioning the direction of the latest reboot of "The Tick," creator Ben Edlund says the new series would have a slightly different tone than expected.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, speaks at the keynote ceremony of the Microsoft Build Developers conference. SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come." Onstage demos hammered home those ideas.