Intel envisions a future where your PC will simply anticipate your habits and act accordingly. But it's not clear when that future will arrive, how realistic that vision will be, or whether consumers will tolerate a computer that predicts your every move. What we know is this: Intel's building a future version of its tiny desktop PCs, the NUCs, with Amazon's Alexa assistant built in. The Intel "Bean Canyon" NUC--Bean for "coffee bean," or the "Coffee Lake" chip built inside of it--will arrive later this year. Meanwhile, Intel is adapting its Movidius chips into "AI chips" that will power these intelligent, future experiences.

"Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floors, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights."1 Obtaining clean water is a critical problem for much of the world's population. Testing and confirming a clean water source typically requires expensive test equipment and manual analysis of the results. For regions in the world in which access to clean water is a continuing problem, simpler test methods could dramatically help prevent disease and save lives. To apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to evaluating the purity of water sources, Peter Ma, an Intel Software Innovator, developed an effective system for identifying bacteria using pattern recognition and machine learning.

Last year, Movidius announced its Fathom Neural Compute Stick -- a USB thumb drive that makes its image-based deep learning capabilities super accessible. But then in September of last year, Intel bought Movidius, delaying the expected winter rollout of Fathom. However, Intel has announced that the deep neural network processing stick is now available and going by its new name, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick. "Designed for product developers, researchers and makers, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick aims to reduce barriers to developing, tuning and deploying AI applications by delivering dedicated high-performance deep-neural network processing in a small form factor," said Intel in a statement. The Compute Stick contains a Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit that uses only around one watt of power.