This year has been a pivotal one for artificial intelligence, which has gone from an abstract and esoteric concept understood primarily through it's portrayal in sci-fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator series (no wonder it's typically regarded as malevolent) to the centre-piece of todays zeitgeist as the singularity (the point when artificial intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human) draws near. Hyper personalisation and proactive intelligence have become expectations of software in 2016, and the big players in mobile and digital are striving for this through AI. The result is that we're tipping into another fundamental paradigm shift akin to the explosion of mobile. Let's take a look at some of the best of AI in 2016 and what we can expect in 2017 and beyond for industry, creativity and humanity. Greek mythology talks about mechanical humans, robots and artificial intelligences and it was all the way back in 1951 that the first AI capable of playing chess was shown off courtesy of the university of Manchester.

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The underwater search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 found an oil barrel and cable debris but no sign of the missing jet, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said Wednesday. The agency, which is leading the search for the Boeing 777-200, released sonar images of the man-made objects that are currently being examined by a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). "The underwater search continues with an AUV searching areas of challenging terrain and an ROV examining a range of sonar contacts which have been previously identified. Over the past week, ROV missions have revealed those contacts to be geological or man-made objects," ATSB said. "Dive 17 identified a contact cluster as geological comprising basaltic rock outcrops on a slope."

Has AI gone too far? This might seem like a nonsensical question to data scientists who strive every day to expand the capabilities of AI until you read the headlines created by this just released peer reviewed scientific paper: Automated Inference on Criminality Using Face Images (Xiaolin Wu, McMaster Univ. That's right, shades of The Minority Report (movie in which criminals are arrested before the crime occurs) and the 19th century studies of phrenology. These researchers claim 89.51% accuracy in making this classification on several sets of unlabeled validation images, each of about 1,500 facial images. I hope this has really taken your breath away.

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Las Vegas: Marvin is just a few inches tall, but he has a big mouth. "What do you think of that, human?" he sneers as he ties the scores 1-1. "Is that the best you can do?" he jeers as he takes a 2-1 lead. "Oh no, IBM will fire me if I lose," he says, as the score is tied 2-2. The decisive move comes up, and Marvin is beaten.

Japan plans to build a super-efficient computer that could vault it to the top of the world's supercomputer rankings by the end of next year. With a processing capacity of 130 petaflops, the planned computer would outperform the current world leader, China's Sunway TaihuLight, which delivers 93 petaflops. One petaflop is one million billion floating-point operations per second. Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) isn't just aiming to build the world's fastest supercomputers, it also wants to make one of the most efficient. It is aiming for a power consumption of under 3 megawatts -- a staggering figure, given that Japan's current highest entry in the Top500 supercomputer list, Oakforest-PACS, delivers one-tenth the performance (13.6 petaflops) for the same power.

Don't panic, but Google's AI is now smarter than human doctors Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Japan's major cancer research institution said Tuesday it plans to use artificial intelligence in diagnosing cancer and deciding the best courses of treatment for patients with the illness. The National Cancer Center said it will work with other organizations including the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology to make a system for cancer diagnosis and treatment for trial use within five years. The system will use a database created from massive data accumulated by the center, which includes genetic information and results of blood tests and diagnostic imaging, and also check relevant medical research papers, it said. The center plans to use the system for finding new markers for detecting cancer at an early stage and developing cancer drugs. Similar moves to utilize AI in the medical field are already under way at various institutions nationwide.

Is Artificial Intelligence the Future of Airline Customer Service? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.