German automaker BMW, which is already in that list, is likely to announce an expansion of its efforts Friday. The luxury vehicle maker will hold a joint press conference with technology companies Intel Corp. and Israel-based Mobileye. A press release issued by Intel late Wednesday said only that the "three companies have something exciting to share" during the Friday conference. Analysts widely expect the announcement of a collaborative effort to develop autonomous driving technology. A possible cooperation between the three companies would bring together a premium car manufacturer, one of the world's leading chip makers and a software company that specializes in driver assistance systems.

For many, the thought of playing board games evokes childhood memories of rainy-day Monopoly marathons or Scrabble showdowns. But board games are undergoing a modern renaissance. Players are seeking out a rare form of entertainment that doesn't involve staring at digital pixels, while game creators are tapping into online crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter to finance their work. While the market remains minuscule compared to the 23.5 billion video game industry, sales of "hobby games" are up approximately 20% in 2015, according to one estimate. Among the foremost beneficiaries of the board gaming boom is Matthew Leacock.

You might do a double take when you see this particular robot - and if you did you would not be alone. Visitors to a recent exhibition in China were greeted by Jia Jia, a humanoid robot who is not only scarily lifelike, but intelligent and quick-witted too. The female robot has been called a'robot goddess' by her hoards of online fans, and some who met her at a recent exhibition were taken aback by her lifelike appearance. You might do a double take when you see this new interactive robot, and visitors to a recent exhibition in China did the same. It took the team three years to complete the robot, which can speak, show micro-expressions, move its lips and body, yet seems to hold its head in a submissive manner.

Technology allowing a pre-programmed robot to shoot to kill, or a tank to fire at a target with no human involvement, might only be years away. And a new report from the UN warns of the dangers if terrorists got their hands on these kind of'killer robots'. The report, which was a result of a week-long meeting on such weapons, held in Geneva earlier this year, said swarms of autonomous weapons would be capable of carrying out attacks. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as'killer robots,' are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction (like the plot of Terminator, pictured) toward reality Experts from dozens of countries gathered in Geneva earlier this year to consider the implications of'Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems' (LAWS).

Natural Language Processing seems to have become somewhat of a commodity in recent years. More than a few companies have sprung up that offer basic NLP capabilities through a cloud API. If you'd like to know whether a text carries a positive or negative message, or what people or companies it mentions, you can just send it to one of these black boxes, and receive the answer in less than a second. Superficially, all these NLP APIs look more or less the same. Textrazor, AlchemyAPI, Aylien, MeaningCloud and Lexalytics all offer similar services (named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, topic identification, etc.), and do so through similar interfaces.

Pathologists have been largely diagnosing disease the same way for the past 100 years, by manually reviewing images under a microscope. But new work suggests that computers can help doctors improve accuracy and significantly change the way cancer and other diseases are diagnosed. A research team from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and recently developed artificial intelligence (AI) methods aimed at training computers to interpret pathology images, with the long-term goal of building AI-powered systems to make pathologic diagnoses more accurate. "Our AI method is based on deep learning, a machine-learning algorithm used for a range of applications including speech recognition and image recognition," explained pathologist Andrew Beck, HMS associate professor of pathology and director of bioinformatics at the Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess. "This approach teaches machines to interpret the complex patterns and structure observed in real-life data by building multi-layer artificial neural networks, in a process which is thought to show similarities with the learning process that occurs in layers of neurons in the brain's neocortex, the region where thinking occurs."

What kind of skills does a company most need these days? Those are probably a lot closer to the mark. But here is one that no one is expecting: philosophers. Do businesses really need a bunch of pointy heads sitting around scratching their beards and quoting Kant or John Stuart Mill halfway through a board meeting? Commerce is about action, not talking, right?

Since taking office, President Obama has sent U.S. troops into action on land or in the skies of seven countries on two continents. Obama's administration has authorized Navy SEALs to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and approved the fatal drone strike on an American cleric in Yemen. Here is a look at targeted killings under the Obama administration. Mansour was killed when a drone strike hit his vehicle as he traveled in Baluchistan, Pakistan. Mansour, known for his mercurial leadership, had been in the U.S. military's crosshairs for years.

At the first Asia ICT Innovation Forum held in Singapore recently, a slew of international thought leaders spoke on their views on "Building a Better Connected World". Not surprisingly, the core issues were around connectivity and how to get internet access to the billions still not connected. But this was balanced by a number of speakers stressing the importance of data analysis and the move to cognitive systems to get the best out of being connected.Getting value from big chunks of data has delivered companies like Facebook, Google, Uber and Airbnb massive valuations – they understand how to turn data into value and traditional companies are starting to figure that out also. Alan Marcus, Head of ICT Agenda at the World Economic Forum (WEF), focused his presentation on the value of Big Data and moving from IT to DT (Data Technology). He prefaced his talk by stating that the WEF believes we are entering the fourth industrial revolution – the convergence of technologies that build upon the digital revolution.

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence--which was released 15 years ago today--was an unprecedented collaboration between two titans of cinema: Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. The film, based on the 1969 short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long, is set in the late 21st century and tells the story of a robot named David (Haley Joel Osment) who is programmed to feel human love for his parents, Henry and Monica. After Henry and Monica's human son Martin is brought back to life from suspended animation, his jealousy leads him to get David cast off into the wilderness with Teddy, his robotic teddy bear friend. David and Teddy soon befriend a robotic prostitute named Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), and David's quest to become a "real boy" begins in earnest. In 1983, 18 years before A.I. made it into theaters, Stanley Kubrick bought the movie rights to author Brian Aldiss' short story, Supertoys Last All Summer Long.