AI has been with us since 70s or maybe some would say earlier than that. There were a lot of ideas on the field, but the progress was slow and the results far from what we had hoped. That changed about 10 years ago. Breakthroughs in computing and also the need to introduce "intelligent" products brought back the excitement for what AI is capable of. So we have been introduced to things like Siri or Alexa, Smart home devices, internet services and so many more that all use some kind of AI to make the experience even better.

As we prepare for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017, it seems like many clients have questions about artificial intelligence (AI). With AI as a theme for the event and a few sessions planned with CIOs in mind, Smarter With Gartner reached out to a few of our AI experts to learn what clients are concerned about when it comes to this technology. Client concerns about AI vary considerably. Many are focused on understanding how to apply AI to their business needs or what are the use cases for AI. Others are concerned about the lack of a documented explanation for the output of models created using deep neural networks.

Our understanding of the world depends highly on our capacity to produce intuitive and simplified representations which can be easily used to solve problems. We reproduce this simplification process using a neural network to build a low dimensional state representation of the world from images acquired by a robot. As in Jonschkowski et al. 2015, we learn in an unsupervised way using prior knowledge about the world as loss functions called robotic priors and extend this approach to high dimension richer images to learn a 3D representation of the hand position of a robot from RGB images. We propose a quantitative evaluation of the learned representation using nearest neighbors in the state space that allows to assess its quality and show both the potential and limitations of robotic priors in realistic environments. We augment image size, add distractors and domain randomization, all crucial components to achieve transfer learning to real robots. Finally, we also contribute a new prior to improve the robustness of the representation. The applications of such low dimensional state representation range from easing reinforcement learning (RL) and knowledge transfer across tasks, to facilitating learning from raw data with more efficient and compact high level representations. The results show that the robotic prior approach is able to extract high level representation as the 3D position of an arm and organize it into a compact and coherent space of states in a challenging dataset.

Impeccable hygiene also extends to the home, where people are expected to take off their shoes upon entering. Naturally, the tech-savvy nation has come up with a number of modern applications for funky-smelling folk. There's an app that tells you if your armpits kick. And soon, you'll even be able to buy a robotic puppy that smells your feet. The sniffer dog with an odor sensor for a nose is hardly subtle.

When Apple unveiled its new iPhone X that lets users unlock the device with facial recognition (called Face ID), many joked that this would allow their partners to snoop on their phones, and that they'd have to wear masks to sleep. To help upcoming iPhone X users protect themselves, online retailers are now selling masks, including one dubbed'anti-facial recognition headgear.' While Apple's premium anniversary device won't be released in China until November, several vendors on the country's e-commerce giant Taobao are now selling such'accessories' for those with untrustworthy partners. With the unveiling of the iPhone X's Face ID, many joked this would allow their partners to snoop on their phones and that they'd have to wear masks to sleep. To help upcoming iPhone X users protect themselves, online retailers are now selling'anti-facial recognition headgear' The green mask called'anti-facial recognition headgear' is selling on the site for 39 Yuan (or $5.95).

Netflix's next Marvel TV show is going to be a little different. While The Defenders all have super powers, Frank Castle is a little more ordinary. That means that many parts of the other Marvel shows will not crossover into "The Punisher." "We are stripping down every supernatural element," star Jon Bernthal told Entertainment Weekly. Frank is a character rooted in the most basic human emotions… He's a comic-book character, but he doesn't fly, he doesn't have X-ray vision.

One night in late July 2014, a journalist from the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly interviewed a 17-year-old Chinese girl named Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). The journalist, Liu Jun, conducted the interview online, through the popular social networking platform Weibo. LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don't you get mad? Xiaoice: You should ask my father. LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended?

More psychologists are now coming the tech space because they're trying to teach machines to become more social and sociable, according to BT's head of customer insight and futures, Dr Nicola Millard. "I'm not a technologist, I'm a psychologist – and it makes a lot of sense having me on-board because innovation in itself won't work unless people adopt it," she told CMO. "A psychologist in the team prevents us from getting carried away exclusively by the technology which often tech companies do." Leading the third largest innovation hum in the UK, Millard is responsible for tapping into the research and innovations that BT does for its global services clients. "I used to have a silly job title as a futurologist, and I hated that job title because everyone assumes you have a crystal ball," she said. "But I'm in global services so my clients are typically retailers, airlines and banks – big global corporates – and we often bring them around to our showcases of the retail store of the future, or the bank of the future, so they can have a play with our proof of concepts." While Astral Park in the UK is BT's main research hub, the company also has other centres dotted across the world including Abu Dhabi, Singapore University in Beijing and MIT in the US.

Meanwhile, many Chinese strategists recognize the trend towards unmanned and autonomous warfare and intend to capitalize upon it. The PLA has incorporated a range of unmanned aerial vehicles into its force structure throughout all of its services. The PLA Air Force and PLA Navy have also started to introduce more advanced multi-mission unmanned aerial vehicles. It is clear that China is intensifying the military applications of Artificial Intelligence and, as we heard at a recent hearing by the Senate's U.S. – China Economic and Security Review Commission (where CNA's China Studies Division also testified), the Chinese defense industry has made significant progress in its research and development of a range of cutting-edge unmanned systems, including those with swarming capabilities. China is also viewing outer space as a new domain that it must fight for and seize if it is to win future wars.

Samsung plans to become a major player in autonomous vehicles with the announcement of two major pieces of news. The first is the launch of the Samsung Automotive Innovation Fund, a $300 million (£225m) kitty to help self-driving technology start-ups and schemes. Samsung also revealed an initiative to develop connected-car technology with Harman, the auto parts maker it acquired for $8 billion (£6bn) in November 2016. Samsung has launched an Automotive Innovation Fund, a $300 million (£225m) kitty to help self-driving technology start-ups and schemes. In recent months, Samsung has secured licenses for autonomous driving pilot projects in South Korea and California.