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, head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an AI boom. "Just teaching companies how to use AI will be a big business." This kind of change is what keeps Silicon Valley going. When personal computers displaced mainframe computers, it opened the door not just for Apple, but for companies making PC software for business, games and publishing. In the networking and Internet revolutions, venture capitalists invested in these new computing styles, and another generation of companies was born.

As of February 1st, Nvidia has announced five finalists to compete for its 2016 Global Impact Award, a yearly 150,000 research grant that goes to any researcher or institution that has used Nvidia GPU technology to make a positive social or humanitarian impact. This year's finalist teams come from Stanford University, Imperial College London, George Mason University, Duke University and Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology. Stanford finalist: "GPUs Help Map Worldwide Poverty" One of the five selected finalists this year is machine learning expert Stefano Ermon, who partnered with food security specialists David Lobell, Marshall Burke and some Stanford engineering students for their work in using GPU-accelerated deep learning to turn regular Google Earth images into statistical poverty models. The team trained a neural network to accurately predict poverty levels in sub-Saharan Africa from satellite image features like roads, farmlands and homes. "There are countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which the most recent data we have is 20 years old, so we're still extrapolating from early '90s estimates," says Ermon.

It's a claim that Tesla was quick to trash, saying that while it's easy to build a system for a "known stretch of road," a real self-driving car is a much harder proposition. Still, if the folks at Horowitz are opening their bank accounts, even slightly, then they must feel differently.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic, fuelled by growing media interest and numerous investments made by big technology firms. AI is already being used in everyday life with applications including spam filters and speech recognition technologies, such as Siri and the Netflix recommendation engine. But in a business context how useful and practical is AI and is it something your business should consider? With the dawn of the information age, the effectiveness of customer engagement and services provided can damage an organisation or raise it from obscurity. The pivotal role that technology plays in this area cannot be understated.

" A revolution will happen when tools like Siri can truly serve as your personal assistant and you start relying on such an assistant throughout your day. To get there, these systems need more knowledge about your life and preferences, more knowledge about the world, better conversational interfaces and at least basic commonsense reasoning capabilities. I have interviewed Alon Halevy, Executive Director at Recruit Institute of Technology. What is the mission of the Recruit Institute of Technology? Alon Halevy: Before I describe the mission, I should introduce our parent company Recruit Holdings to those who may not be familiar with it.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

If you use Google Photos regularly, you're probably already aware of its impressive machine-learning skills. Searching for keywords such as "cactus," "Golden Gate Bridge," or "baseball" in your photo roll will bring up eerily appropriate images. It doesn't matter if you don't tag your shots; the results are driven by machine learning, not by metadata. The same search functionality exists in Google Drive. If you store or share images with Drive, the same text-based searches will bring up results there, too.

A government-sponsored committee is recommending standards that could clear the way for commercial drone flights over populated areas and help speed the introduction of package delivery drones and other uses not yet possible, The Associated Press has learned. The Federal Aviation Administration currently prohibits most commercial drone flights over populated areas, especially crowds. That ban frustrates a host of industries that want to take advantage of the technology. "Every TV station in the country wants one, but they can't be limited to flying in the middle of nowhere because there's no news in the middle of nowhere," said Jim Williams, a former head of FAA's drone office who now advises the industry for Dentons, an international law firm. Cellular network providers also want to loosen restrictions so drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, can inspect cell towers, which often are in urban areas.

The LG G5 is now available and after using one for most of March, I shared my thoughts with Kevin on MobileTechRoundup show #369. Kevin also now works for Google and was able to share the news with all of us.

GCP (Google Cloud Platform) Next 2016 conference was held in San Francisco, which gave some insights into the upcoming GCP roadmap, and acted as a reminder that Google needs to be taken seriously in the Public Cloud Provider space. The geographic expansion raised probably the most excitement: Google has committed to add two additional data centers this year to the current 3, following by yet another 10 new datacenters in 2017. This will be an impressive geographical coverage ramp up in two years, and will act as genuine competition against the other big providers. It looks like Google has a well cooked "recipe" for building cloud data centers, and in fact they have not kept this as a secret to themselves, but released it for public consumption with all the standard best practises, along with other papers such as its highly scalable network load balancer design. While the platform is geographically expanding, the focus is also on technology innovations and the Google team are releasing Machine Learning and Big Data offerings one after the other at a fast pace.