Experts from across the AI world came together in New York for the O'Reilly AI Conference in New York 2016. Below you'll find links to highlights from the event. Building reliable, robust software is hard, says Peter Norvig. It's even harder when we move from deterministic domains, such as balancing a checkbook, to uncertain domains, such as recognizing speech or objects in an image. Watch "Software engineering of systems that learn in uncertain domains."

Artificial intelligence is learning to take on an increasing number of sophisticated tasks. Google Deepmind's AI is now able to imitate human speech, and just this past August IBM's Watson successfully diagnosed a rare case of leukemia. Rather than viewing these advances as threats to job security, we can look at them as opportunities for AI to fill in critical gaps in existing service providers, such as mental healthcare professionals. In the US alone, nearly eight percent of the population suffers from depression (that's about one in every 13 American adults), and yet about 45 percent of this population does not seek professional care due to the costs. There are many barriers to getting quality mental healthcare, from searching for a provider who's within your insurance network to screening multiple potential therapists in order to find someone you feel comfortable speaking with.

We got lucky with the weather in Washington State. It's a clear afternoon with a few scattered clouds, low wind speeds--ideal flying conditions. Mike Dubbury's calm briefing helps, too. Honeywell's senior test pilot talks me through the upcoming trip in the Beechcraft King Air C90, which I'll be piloting. I can't quite relax, though.

Hitachi Ltd. says it has developed camera technology that can capture video images without a lens and adjust its focal position afterwards, becoming the first Japanese firm to do so. The technology using a special thin film will allow cameras to be lighter and thinner than conventional units, Hitachi said Tuesday. The company aims to commercialize it around 2018. Hitachi said the technology can be used in cars and robots, and in situations like autonomous driving, as the industrial conglomerate is putting its focus on the internet of things, a concept under which everything from electronic devices to cars and factories is connected. The technology captures images through a film on which a concentric circle pattern is printed.

The app boom is over. There are now more than 4.2 million apps available for Android and iOS, but three-quarters of American smartphone users download a grand total of zero new apps per month. They might be mostly free and easy to access, but apps are struggling to make it on to our phones and tablets. According to comScore, we spend the majority of our screen time using just three apps, with the average American spending almost half their time in just one. With the eyeballs of the world glued to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Skype, developers have started turning once-simple chat apps into complex ecosystems. And at the centre of this change is a horde of subservient bots. You've just walked into your kitchen after a long week. "Play Etta James," you say.

Campaign rhetoric will calm down. People will return to their daily lives and America will go back to focusing on its future. Trump's victory, largely led by the voices that got ignored by the previous administrations, provides a clear mandate for the Trump administration. The minor problem: when it comes to technology, the Trump mandate is mostly silent. The major problem:technology strategy by the Trump administration can be at odds with the low-to-medium skilled job creation promise on one hand or lead to decline in American competitiveness on the other hand.

A team of researchers has failed to develop a robot smart enough to get into Japan's top university. The team, with members from the National Institute of Informatics, said Monday it was abandoning the effort began in 2011 to make a robot able to score well enough on entrance exams to achieve admission into the University of Tokyo, or Todai as it is commonly known. The researchers had hoped to create by March 2022 an artificial intelligence program capable of making the grade. The AI program dubbed Todai Robot had steadily improved its academic performance, but the team found a limit in its ability to understand various exam questions. "AI is not good at answering a type of question that requires the ability to grasp meaning in a broad spectrum," said Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics.

Just in time for Halloween, researchers at Data61 and MIT Media lab have created a deep learning algorithm to generate disturbing imagery. There are two parts to the Nightmare Machine project – Haunted Places and Haunted Faces – which are each terrifying and impressive in equal measure. For Haunted Places the team used algorithms to learn what it called a'nightmarifying' process, learning a variety of spooky artistic styles that can then be applied to idyllic imagery. "We use deep learning algorithms to learn first how haunted houses, then ghost towns, and more recently toxic cities look," explains principal research scientist at Data61, Manuel Cebrian. "Then, we apply the learned style to famous landmarks. It's surprising how well the algorithm can extract the element from the "scary" templates and plant it into the landmarks."

The driverless car called Snuber, front, is test driven during a demonstration at the Seoul National University's campus in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016. Seoul National University professor Seo Seung-woo said that a self-driving car developed by his team will start roaming Seoul streets early next year thanks to a revised law that took effect Tuesday.

KUSHIRO, HOKKAIDO – A 20-year-old man who pleaded guilty to the murder of a beautician in Hokkaido last year wanted to replicate killings he had simulated in video games, prosecutors said Tuesday. The man pleaded guilty in the Kushiro District Court to the murder of 31-year-old Erika Konno and the destruction of her body in August last year in Hokkaido's Tokachi region. His name is being withheld because he was 19 -- a minor -- at the time of the incident. The prosecutors said in their opening statement that he started taking an interest in death and dead bodies when he was in high school. "He committed the crime after deciding that he wanted to kill someone with a knife the way he would in video games to see how he would change as a person," they claimed.