The Japan Patent Office's recent guidance on examination of artificial intelligence-related inventions could provide a useful framework for other patent offices struggling with how to treat new technologies

Robotic process automation (RPA) company UiPath may debut its own platform for creating AI agents or bots both for customer-facing services and to carry out backend processes, chief product officer Param Kahlon told VentureBeat in a recent interview in San Francisco. UiPath, a company that raised $225 million last fall at a valuation of $3 billion, added Microsoft Bot Framework functionality as well as an integration with Google's Enterprise Dialogflow last summer. Microsoft Bot Framework and Dialogflow bots are available alongside hundreds of industry-specific automated workflows and machine learning integrations in the UiPath Marketplace. UiPath is currently evaluating customer feedback and its own assessments about bots currently available on its platform before making a choice. "Initially our point of view was that we don't want to go create our own sort of conversational experience, because there's enough that exist out there. Some of our customers have said that, 'Hey we don't have our own and we want to get an end-to-end solution from you,' so we may decide to build some things that can own the end-to-end experience as well," Kahlon said.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener's 1950 popularization of his highly influential book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), investigates the interplay between human beings and machines in a world in which machines are becoming ever more computationally capable and powerful. It is a remarkably prescient book, and remarkably wrong. Written at the height of the Cold War, it contains a chilling reminder of the dangers of totalitarian organizations and societies, and of the danger to democracy when it tries to combat totalitarianism with totalitarianism's own weapons. Wiener's Cybernetics looked in close scientific detail at the process of control via feedback. Because he was immersed in problems of control, Wiener saw the world as a set of complex, interlocking feedback loops, in which sensors, signals, and actuators such as engines interact via an intricate exchange of signals and information. The engineering applications of Cybernetics were tremendously influential and effective, giving rise to rockets, robots, automated assembly lines, and a host of precision-engineering techniques--in other words, to the basis of contemporary industrial society.

Self-driving cars usually benefit from having detailed road maps, but creating those maps can be agonizingly slow when it requires cars loaded with exotic hardware. Toyota researchers and Carmera might have an easier solution: use off-the-shelf cameras to get the job done. They're planning a "proof of concept" project where they'll use both Toyota Safety Sense-based cameras and run-of-the-mill dashcams to generate map data in downtown Tokyo. The months-long experiment will mix visual and existing digital map data to spot road markings, curbs and other details an autonomous vehicle would need to recognize while plotting its route. It's not clear what will happen after the project is over, but Toyota characterized this as a "first step" toward an automated mapping system that would work with everyday cars.

Researchers, companies and countries around the world are racing to explore – and exploit – the possibilities of artificial intelligence technology. China is working on an extremely aggressive multi-billion-dollar plan for government investment into AI research and applications. The U.S. government has been slower to act. The Obama administration issued a report on AI near the end of its term. Since then, little has happened – until a Feb. 11 executive order from President Donald Trump encouraging the country to do more with AI.

The Chinese tech giant Huawei has pleaded not guilty to U.S. charges that it stole trade secrets from T-Mobile. A company representative entered the pleas Thursday in federal court in Seattle, where a 10-count indictment was unsealed in January. Charges include conspiracy to steal trade secrets, attempted theft of trade secrets, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors say Huawei stole the technology behind a robotic device that Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile used to test smartphones. Huawei has also been charged in New York with bank fraud and sanctions violations.

The future is fast, according to the experts. But it feels like it is arriving a little slowly. Phone and network experts have spent the week trying to make the world excited about 5G and the possibilities it offers for data connections – though when the promised 10 times faster speed will arrive, and how, is a little more complicated than they would like to make it sound. The Mobile World Congress is the annual event where the phone and carrier industry gather together in a huge Barcelona conference centre and talk about the future. And everything they had to say about that future sounded mostly the same: 5G, the new data connections that are about to disrupt just about every industry, according to its proponents.

The year 2019 has started with some great support from the VC community. Not even two months down the lane, Indian AI and data companies are already celebrating the large funding from investors. A few days ago, we covered an article on how Rubrik turned into the fastest and youngest unicorn startup with the most recent round of funding it witnessed. But it turns out that Rubrik is not the only startup that has witnessed large funding. There is a slew of AI and analytics companies/startups that have joined the bandwagon, indicating that 2019 may be one of the best times for analytics startups to strive.

The FoodVisor app harnesses the image recognition power of deep learning convolutional neural networks to recognize the food on a plate. "CAUTION" my iPhone warns me, highlighting the word for good measure in a bright red circle. No, I wasn't about to overuse my data plan, or even try to make sense of a Donald Trump tweet. Instead, I had, like some Instagram-obsessive, just taken a photo of my breakfast for the first time, and an artificial intelligence (AI) resident on my phone didn't like what it saw. My poached eggs and toast also included … a sausage.

More times than almost any other field of innovation, artificial intelligence has weathered recurring cycles of overinflated hope, followed by disappointment, pessimism, and funding cutbacks. But Sophie Vandebroek, IBM's vice president of emerging technology partnerships, thinks the AI winters are truly a thing of the past, thanks to the huge amounts of computing power and data now available to train neural networks. In this episode Vandebroek shares examples of real-world applications enabled by this shift, from image recognition to chatbots. And she describes the mission of the new MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a $240 million, 10-year collaboration between IBM researchers and MIT faculty and students to focus on the core advances that will make AI more useful and reliable across industries from healthcare to finance to security. This episode is brought to you by Darktrace, the world leader in AI technology for cyber defense. Darktrace is headquartered in San Francisco and Cambridge, UK, and has nearly 2,500 customers around the world who use its software to detect and respond to cyber threats to their businesses, users, and devices. Darktrace has built innovative machine learning technology can spot unusual activity using an approach modeled on the human immune system. In the second half of the show, Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan explains how Darktrace's technology works and why companies need to bring new defenses to today's cyber arms race. Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau: From MIT Technology Review, I'm Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace. This episode is brought to you by Darktrace, the world leader in AI technology for cyber defense. Later in the program I'll speak with the CEO of Darktrace, Nicole Eagan.