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.

Much of the buzz around artificial intelligence has surrounded companies focused on general purpose artificial intelligence, as opposed to companies applying AI algorithms like machine learning and deep learning in specific industries. "From healthcare to finance to e-commerce, we're focused on changing people's lives." Taking a look at the core AI companies like Sentient -- companies focused on general-purpose AI applicable across a variety of industries -- a few have already received 50M or more in equity funding. These include Sentient, Ayasdi, Digital Reasoning, Vicarious (whose backers include angels Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Marc Benioff) as well as DataRobot. We used CB Insights data to look at the most well-funded core AI companies, below.

Neural Machine Translation (MT) has reached state-of-the-art results. However, one of the main challenges that neural MT still faces is dealing with very large vocabularies and morphologically rich languages. In this paper, we propose a neural MT system using character-based embeddings in combination with convolutional and highway layers to replace the standard lookup-based word representations. The resulting unlimited-vocabulary and affix-aware source word embeddings are tested in a state-of-the-art neural MT based on an attention-based bidirectional recurrent neural network. The proposed MT scheme provides improved results even when the source language is not morphologically rich. Improvements up to 3 BLEU points are obtained in the German-English WMT task.

Wang Jun spent 16 years expanding the world's understanding of what living things are made of -- sequencing genomes including those of the giant panda and potatoes. Now he's attempting to build on that: using DNA as one component to create online avatars that could act as health-care test dummies for people. Asia's biggest internet company believes he's onto something. Wang's iCarbonX wants to construct a "digital you" containing biological samples such as saliva, proteins and DNA; bolstered by environmental measurements such as air quality; and lifestyle factors such as workout regimes and diet. The Shenzhen, China-based company is developing algorithms to analyze the data, with the intention of recommending tailored wellness programs, food choices and possibly prescription medicines.

As yet another deadly attack on Tuesday tore through Turkey's biggest airport, Mark Cuban is demanding action. The billionaire businessman, appearing on Megyn Kelly's Fox Business show the same night, called for both presumptive presidential candidates to do more than just say'this is bad.' Cuban proposed that the country look to technological innovations for a solution. "How do you deal with immigration? How do you deal with radical Islamic terrorists trying to come into the country? You're going to need to use tech," said Cuban, in a Bloomberg interview earlier this week. Both the Republican and Democrat would-be nominees are technologically illiterate, he said to Bloomberg's Cory Johnson, which is the reason they are blind to technological solutions to the country's biggest issues.

In June of 1975, the Office of the White House Press Secretary announced President Gerald R. Ford's picks for the National Medal of Science. One went to the Austrian-born mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. Nicknamed Mr. Why by his parents, Gödel was known to a subset of his constituents as, simply, God. He received fan mail from all over the world, archiving it into files of "autograph requests," "inquiries from students and amateurs," "letters of appreciation," and "crank correspondence." A self-described "dunce fool of Mathematics" in West Bengal wrote seeking Gödel's "Guruship," and a svelte math teacher in California confessed that she'd taken the liberty of enlarging a photo of Gödel to make a poster for her classroom.

During the recent Consumer Goods Forum global summit here in Cape Town, I had the opportunity to briefly chat with Vivienne about some of the issues confronting the digital disruption of this industry sector. [The original transcript has been edited for clarity and space.] Named one of 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine, Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur. She co-founded Socos, where machine learning and cognitive neuroscience combine to maximize students' life outcomes. Vivienne is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where she pursues her research in neuroprosthetics. In her free time, Vivienne has developed a predictive model of diabetes to better manage the glucose levels of her diabetic son and systems to predict manic episodes in bipolar suffers. She sits on the boards of StartOut, The Palm Center, Emozia, and the Bay Area Rainbow Daycamp, and is an advisor to Credit Suisse, Cornerstone Capital, and BayesImpact. Dr. Ming also speaks frequently on issues of LGBT inclusion and gender in technology. Every once in a while I have the opportunity to discuss wide-ranging topics with an intellect that stimulates, is passionate and really cares about the bigger picture. Those opportunities are more rare than one would think. Although set in a somewhat unexpected venue (the elite innards of consumer capitalism) her observations on the inescapable disruption that the new wave of modern technologies are prescient and thoughtful. Ed: In a continent where there is a large focus on putting people to work, how do you see the challenges and disruptions resulting from AI, robotics, IoT, VR and other technologies playing out? These technologies, as did other disruptive technologies before them, tend to replace human workers with machine processes. Vivienne: There is almost no domain in which artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation will not have a profound and positive impact. Medicine, farming, transportation, etc. will all benefit. There will be a huge impact on human potential, and human work will change. I think this is inevitable, that we are well on the way to this AI-enabled future.

Justine Cassell has taken her virtual assistant Sara on a road trip. They're in Tianjin, China, where Carnegie Mellon University's associate dean of technology strategy and impact traveled to offer a glimpse of tomorrow at this week's Annual Meeting of New Champions. Sara, for "socially aware robot assistant," has spent the past several days greeting hundreds of people coming to the event, hosted by the World Economic Forum, at a station showcasing the office of the future. A life-size face and torso on a big-screen TV, Sara served as the front end to the event app. That presentation might make you think of Max Headroom, the stuttering AI character from the 1980s show.

A factory in China replaced 60,000 of its human workers with robots. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes that artificial intelligence must "respect human autonomy," but Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana told Bloomberg BNA that this robot workforce is "coming faster than anybody realizes." With robots primed to swoop in and take about 5 million jobs by 2020, it's about damn time we braced ourselves for our new workforce. A draft report from the European Parliament suggested a few tips on how us mere humans can get ready for the ever-increasing automated workforce, CNN reported. In the event that "advanced robots" begin to displace us in "large numbers," CNN reported, the European Parliament report suggests that the European Commission make the owners of the aforementioned roboworkers pay taxes or give to Social Security.

MedyMatch Technology, a startup from Israel that specializes in medical imaging analysis for emergency medicine, has its first U.S. hospital partner. Capital Health, a two-hospital system in New Jersey, will deploy MedyMatch's artificial intelligence-based analytics in the emergency department and help the Tel Aviv-based vendor develop a clinical decision support tool for stroke care. To accomplish the latter, Capital Health, based in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, has agreed to provide MedyMatch with anonymized data from patients, the organizations said Monday. "The data Capital Health will provide will allow us to move closer to providing this decision support tool which can help ensure appropriate diagnosis, critical for treatment," MedyMatch Chairman and CEO Gene Saragnese said in a prepared statement. Saragnese was CEO of Philips Imaging before joining the startup a year ago.