Under, behind and inside many of the apps we use every day, a revolution is underway. It's a revolution that started decades ago but today is empowering companies to deliver better, smarter services with greater ease and on broader scales than ever before. At Singularity University's inaugural Global Summit, Neil Jacobstein, chair of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, provided a primer showing how artificial intelligence literally transforms everything it touches. First of all, it's critical to define the scope of artificial intelligence (AI), which can be categorized into four areas: techniques in pattern recognition, software agency (that is, software that acts like real users), an exponential technology that is accelerating other exponential technologies, and a vision of a future superhuman intelligence (that fortunately hasn't happened yet). Anyone who has seen a science fiction film is likely familiar with this last area, but it's the other three areas where AI is making huge strides at a revolutionary pace.

Imagine it's 2018 and some scientists from NASA are at the White House to see President Clintrump. There's a piece of space coming toward us; it is rocky, and icy, and big, and the risk of it hitting the Earth is much larger than anyone is comfortable with. Even if there's time to act, there won't be much of it. Where did it come from? How come we didn't spot it until now? What's the best course of action to take?

Let's face it, data analysis can be a costly and time-consuming affair and can sometimes take weeks or months of scouring through troves and troves of data from a number of channels, like sales, surveys, customer reviews and social media, to even interpret how consumers might be responding to a certain brand or product. Then, of course, there's always the chance that human error or bias could lead to the wrong interpretation or understanding of the data as well. But what if there was a faster, cheaper, quicker and more efficient way to crunch all that data to find out exactly how consumers think or feel about a brand? That's exactly what Revuze, an Israeli-based startup, is aiming to do by using an AI powered by neural networks and machine learning to cut the human element and timely and costly data crunching out of brand and product management by offering up almost-immediate insight into how a brand's products and services are being experienced by the consumer. "Industries … have previously relied on manually intensive solutions, such as analytics, social listening and monitoring," according to Revuze.

Baidu, the Chinese-based internet services conglomerate, has made several major announcements about its upcoming IoT projects. The company's plans center on a revamped artificial intelligence (AI) platform, which the company hopes will enable it to effectively increase its presence in the world of the IoT. Baidu plans to use this revamped AI platform to develop a voice assistant similar to Amazon's Echo, reports Bloomberg. It will be working with speaker manufacturer Harman Industries to develop the device, which it hopes will allow users to order food, summon a ride, or control smart home products via voice commands. The Echo's surprising success has prompted Google, Samsung, and Apple to try and develop competitors, and Baidu, too, is seeking to replicate the success Amazon has seen. The company is partnering with chipmaker Nvidia to develop an AI platform for driverless cars and taxis, according to Fortune.

Any business that sells goods or services online is vulnerable to attack by fraudsters. This can be using stolen credit card details for purchases online, creating false accounts and even voucher code abuse. The cost of this fraud can be calculated in the multi millions, with chargebacks and related costs plaguing online businesses. In the UK it is the most common crime of all, with 2.47M offences in 2015/16 alone. The traditional approach to tackling this problem is to use heuristic rules and business logic to try to'predict' whether a new transaction that the business is seeing is fraudulent or not.

Artificial intelligence--the kind where robots understand a wide number of human concepts--has been a military focus for decades, and scientists in Japan may have just made a college-ready AI. For the first time, a Japanese artificial intelligence program has scored above average on a national standardized college entry exam, performing well enough to have an 80 percent likelihood of getting into 33 national universities, according to the National Institute of Informatics, or NII. The AI program scored 511 points out of 950 on the National Center Test for University Admissions (similar to the SATs), with a particularly strong performance in math and history, and well above the national average of 416. It was a first for the program, which performed less well in 2013 and 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal. NII announced the breakthrough on Saturday.

The Royal Navy has tested an unmanned speedboat near Tower Bridge in advance of a naval drone exercise off the UK coast this autumn. To the delight of tourists, Tower Bridge swung open to let through the sleek, low-slung craft, known as Mast (Maritime Autonomy Surface Testbed). Accompanied by the patrol craft HMS Archer, the 32ft-long Mast spent an hour on Monday weaving between pleasure boats and goods barges at a moderate pace, heading up the river towards Westminster before returning downriver. Although it is capable of navigating and avoiding collisions autonomously and can be operated via remote control, Mast had a coxswain on board to take control if needed because of Port of London bylaws, which also limited the speeds at which it could travel. Mast is being developed with research funding from the Ministry of Defence's science and technology laboratory, to explore how well such vessels function autonomously.

The mobile marketing attribution analytics company AppsFlyer, and Chinese internet giant Tencent have announced a partnership to make AppsFlyer's analytics platform available for marketers to track the effectiveness of app install campaigns on Tencent Social Ads. "The app economy is quickly becoming a global economy, and this partnership with Tencent Social Ads, one of the biggest and most important distribution platforms in the world, opens up myriad possibilities for app marketers and developers looking to grow in China, while enabling us to expand our footprint in Asia and globally as well," said Elad Masiach, VP Partner Development at AppsFlyer. Google has added automatically generated insights of data into the Android and iOS versions of Google Analytics. This new feature is quite similar to the insights in plain English that are provided by products like BeyondCore, which was acquired by Salesforce very recently. Machine learning and artificial intelligence is used to convert raw data into credible information which "lets you see in 5 minutes what might have taken hours to discover previously", said Google in a company blog post. Salesforce announced the expansion of its Wave Analytics portfolio with new Salesforce Wave Apps for B2B Marketing and Financial Services, as well as 19 apps from ISV partners.

No company is immune to cyber criminal activity. In 2013, Target was hacked despite receiving as many as 10,000 security alerts per day. While Target is a Fortune 100 retailer, even medium-sized companies have to sift through hundreds of thousands of alerts each year. Alerts are investigated before being categorized as false positives and ultimately ignored, but most alerts are idiosyncratic to a product or application with little context of the overall business impact. To prevent financial and reputational loss, security teams are driven to find the most critical needles in an ever-growing haystack of security information.

When Randy Bilyeu disappeared, he was hunting for the Fenn Treasure, a chest allegedly filled with gold, precious stones, and jewelry, supposedly hidden in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2010, millionaire art dealer (and Former Vietnam fighter pilot) 79-year-old Forrest Fenn filled a bronze chest with rare metals, jewels, and artifacts, and then hid it in the mountains. Later that year, he published his autobiography, The Thrill of the Chase, which included a 24-line poem that he says contains the clues necessary to track down the treasure chest. Since then, he's become something of a global celebrity; in 2013, he appeared on NBC's Today Show to issue some new clues about the place where the chest had been hidden. Bilyeu happened to catch the episode on TV and became obsessed with finding the Fenn treasure--against all odds and his friends and family's better judgement.