Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not one big, specific technology. Rather, it is comprised of one or more building block technologies. So, to understand AI, you have to understand each of these nine building block technologies. Now, you could argue that there are more technologies than the ones listed here, but any additional technology can fit under one of these building blocks. Knowledge engineering is a process to understand and then represent human knowledge in data structures, semantic models, and heuristics (rules).

The Chatbots Are Taking Over! Wouldn't it be great if there were tiny robots that kept track of what you were thinking, then helped you implement your plans automatically? Well, if you're an admin responsible for monitoring infrastructure, they exist. They're called chatbots, and they are the key to leveraging ChatOps in order to optimize your monitoring and incident management workflow. This post explains what chatbots and ChatOps do and why they're so valuable for organizations that are adopting DevOps practices. Defining Chatbots A "chatbot" can mean different things to different people.

Challenging Thinking is a series of Think Pieces--essays, videos, and other content--that ask and answer bold questions about leadership. While the leadership-related topics vary widely, each piece will inspire novel thinking. What if you had a resource--a personal advisor shared with no one else--one with great listening skills and that is available 24/7? One that knows you extremely well because of the personal information you have shared. One that can be completely trusted with no hidden agendas, that literally remembers every word you say and how you say it, and that has immediate access to a vast array of information, knowledge, and best practices on leadership and management from the cyber universe.

Artificial intelligence is hot, and you can tell that because both giant companies and tiny startups are excited about it. Nvidia, which had $6.9 billion in revenues last year, is in touch with more than 2,000 AI startups around the world. And this week, the graphics chip maker and AI company took a step in figuring out which ones are the best. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, hosted a Shark Tank style event called Nvidia Inception to find the best AI startups. Huang and a panel of judges listened to pitches from 14 AI startups across three categories.

TOKYO, JAPAN - King Felipe VI shakes hands with an ASIMO robot during their visit to the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Tokyo, Japan. If you were a bank teller in the '90s, there's a good chance you were terrified. ATMs were sprouting up everywhere, allowing people to withdraw cash without talking to a soul. Bank tellers, it was thought, would go the way of milkmen, lamplighters, and switchboard operators. But automation didn't kill the bank teller.

Last week a team of poker players in China were resoundingly defeated by "Lengpudashi". Meaning "cold poker master", Lengpudashi is the new, even more improved version of the Libratus AI (Artificial Intelligence) programme that I wrote about back in January. Not surprisingly, this latest AI victory has been big news: people have worried for years that robots equipped with AI will take over human jobs. Now not even poker is safe. Though computer programmes long ago proved their superiority in the classic skill game of chess, until now the bluffing and intuitive elements of poker – its very human elements – had made it hard for a machine to master.

Have you ever wondered if life is not exactly what it's cracked up to be? OK, let's take that thought a little further. Have you ever suffered from an identity crisis? One in which you suspected that you're not a real person, but instead an extremely sophisticated computer simulation of a real person produced by an immensely more developed civilisation than that which we take to be our own? It's just possible that I lost you on that last point, but stay with me, because the reality we take for granted is coming under increasing technological and theoretical threat. Earlier this month in an office block in Euston, I put on a virtual reality (VR) headset and began playing a prototype of a game developed by a company called Dream Reality Interactive.

Mobvoi, the Chinese artificial intelligence startup backed by Google and Volkswagen, launched a chatbot on Tuesday that can connect with voice-activated smart home devices, as the company ramps up its efforts to turn from a niche player to being the future Amazon Alexa or Google Home in China. The Beijing-based startup founded in 2012 by a group of former Google engineers sees smart homes as one of the top priorities to leverage its voice recognition and natural language processing technology after receiving a US$180 million investment from German auto maker Volkswagen earlier this month. Smart homes are seen by technology giants around the world as one of the key directions for the application of artificial intelligence in people's everyday life. In the United States, Alexa, the robotic voice assistant behind Amazon's Echo has already allowed people to dim bedroom lights and play song lists through speech. In China, online search giant Baidu recently acquired a Chinese start-up that developed an artificial intelligence-based voice assistant to push further into smart home devices.

The future of war lies in part with what the military calls "autonomous weapons systems" (AWS), sophisticated computerized devices which, as defined by the U.S. Department of Defense, "once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator." Whether that's a good idea or a bad one is debatable, but it isn't a question of if, but how soon autonomous, artificially intelligent machines will fight side by side with human soldiers on the battlefield. United States Army General Robert W. Cone (now deceased) predicted in 2014 that as many as one-quarter of all U.S. combat soldiers might be replaced by drones and robots within the next 30 years. In the U.S., both the Army and Marine Corps are already testing remote-controlled devices like the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System (MAARS), an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) designed primarily for reconnaissance that can also be equipped with a grenade launcher and a machine gun: The latter are known as lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS for short, or more pithily, "killer robots," as critics have dubbed them). Though they may conjure up futuristic, dystopian images redolent of The Terminator (the Arnold Schwarzenegger film about an armed super-robot from the future) or Robopocalypse (Daniel Wilson's 2011 science fiction novel about AI weapons turning on their creators), the dangers they pose are firmly rooted in reality.

The notion of cars that drive themselves is one that becomes more and more real with each passing day. Acquisitions seem to be happening left and right, and almost every major auto manufacturer is devoting resources to bring us a self driving car. Companies like Google, Uber, and Tesla are all devoting significant investments to the self driving car with the universal target date of "2020" for commercialization being forecasted by nearly all of these players. Mobileye, about the only pure-play self driving car stock out there, recently announced a partnership with Delphi and a target date of 2019. While all eyes remain fixed on the big names in this game, there are some new entrants to this space that you may never heard of but that are getting closer and closer to making the self driving car a reality.