Who's better, Lebron James or Stephen Curry? Which country is more powerful, the United States or China? How advanced is modern AI compared to humans? Of the three ridiculous questions above, which appears most underspecified? However misguidedly, we often discuss complex, multi-faceted issues as though they were easily reduced to single scalar quantities. In the past few years, modern AI techniques have made great strides, accomplishing a number of feats traditionally associated with human intelligence. In particular, machine learning systems using deep neural networks now perform human-level speech recognition and transcription.

Robots could eventually play integral roles in labor wards, according to findings from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Robots are currently employed in hospitals to carry out simple actions, like dispensing medication. But can they understand patient needs and make scheduling decisions? The researchers have been working for the past two years to determine whether robots can be more than just helpful companions. They've been conducting experiments to see if a robot can serve as an effective "resource nurse." That's the nurse in the labor and delivery unit that's in charge of assigning other nurses to care for patients.

Ever since Ken Jennings got toasted on Jeopardy by "IBM Watson" in 2011, a host of incredible things have been happening in the world of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and literally training super computers to learn. There have been a lot of "fits and starts" with artificial intelligence in the past 4 decades, but like it or not, it has only really arrived in the last 5 years. Computational power is off the charts compared to even a decade ago. Autonomous vehicles and robots did not exist on an actual road 5 years ago, with actual potential human driven cars; they were displayed in closely coordinated demonstrations, and up until last week, millions of miles were driven without a fatality. Bill Gates, who admittedly jumped the gun on AI in the 1990s, now believes, this is it in 2016.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator founded by a Hong Kong-born venture capitalist wants to bring Asia's best AI start-ups to the global stage. Dubbed Zeroth.ai, the AI accelerator was founded by Tak Lo, who most recently was a venture partner at Hong Kong venture capital company Mind Fund and a director at UK-based VC Techstars. "AI for me is something that will move the meter on technology in the next five to 10 years, there's no dispute about that," Lo said. The accelerator programme, which is currently accepting applications from AI start-ups in Asia, will officially begin in November this year. "I want to bring the wealth of experience and network from being a venture capitalist in New York and London to Asia and Hong Kong," Lo said.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Last week, the Dallas police killed a suspected gunman with a bomb-delivering robot. It was a desperate measure for desperate times: five law enforcement officers were killed and several more wounded before the shooter was finally cornered. Of course, the shooter needed to be stopped; preventing further murder and mayhem is always a priority. But the method, a robot bomb, was so unorthodox that it raises many ethical and policy questions, if not also legal ones.

Cisco announced a partnership Monday with bot-building platforms Gupshup and API.ai that allows thousands of bots to quickly join Cisco Spark and Cisco Tropo platforms. It also turns up the intensity in competition between enterprise team communication chat apps like Skype and Slack. The announcement was made during Cisco Live, a four-day Cisco event taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gupshup built an SMS social network of more than 50 million users, mainly in India, before becoming an enterprise messaging service company in 2010. Today, it processes four billion messages a month.

Killer robots sound like something out of a scary futuristic science fiction film. But, it seems, the future is here.

June was kind to macro hedge funds. They were up more than 3 per cent, in what was their best month since 2010, according to data from Hedge Fund Research, buoyed by long positions on the yen and -- for the most fortunate -- long on both the yen and the dollar, and short sterling. Currencies and currency-related trades have been among the few bright spots for hedge funds recently (along with gold, which has risen more than 30 per cent since the end of 2015, according to Credit Suisse). Riding the yen and dollar up and taking on derivative trades, such as shorting Chinese companies that have lots of US dollar debt and dollar costs, have been among the few clear trends to follow. But generally, these are challenging times for the industry both in the short and longer term.

A designer's guide to AI. Leveraging user centered design principles, the author rightly states that AI will enable designers to create bespoke experiences right out of the box for each user. Importantly, these experiences need to a) create emotionally-aware relationships with the user, b) respond to needs that haven't yet been explicitly expressed, c) prevent negative emotional responses when a user is upset with an AI-caused result and d) be sensitive to sociology. A list of further reading resources is included. There's been a resurgence of neuroscience-inspired AI architectures in the past few years, with Numenta being one of the leaders. Their VP of Research, Subutai Ahmad, argues that environmental sensory inference and behavior generation are intricately tied together, and critical for learning really general purpose representations.

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Well, that gun lobby rubbish was again disproved in Dallas. Twelve good guys -- law enforcement men and women trained to shoot -- were stopped by one bad guy. Five officers were killed and seven wounded. Two civilians also were injured before the bad guy was finally stopped by a bomb-carrying robot.