Every day new travel sites and apps are launched that promise to make trip planning easier. Some do and some don't. Here are two free tools optimized for smartphones that I tested and really liked: Lonely Planet's free Guides app for iOS and Android, and Destinations on Google, which makes it easy to aggregate information for your next travel adventure. The app includes more than 35 free importable guides to international and U.S. destinations, from Bangkok to London and Boston to San Francisco. I tested New York, Kyoto and Vancouver.

Boiteux, an assistant fire chief from Los Angeles, is helping train Greek first responders to use Emily. Boiteux, an assistant fire chief from Los Angeles, is helping train Greek first responders to use Emily. On a cold, rainy morning a few weeks ago, eight black inflatable rafts, loaded with migrants, bob in the waters off the northern shore of the Greek island of Lesbos. "This boat up there?" he says. So they ask for help from the coast guard." A Norwegian rescue boat with the European Union's border agency, Frontex, heads toward the distressed raft. Hantzopoulos walks along the rocky shore with John Sims, a fire captain from Sahuarita, Ariz. He's teaching members of the Hellenic Red Cross how to use a remote-controlled rescue device called Emily -- which stands for Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard. You might call Emily a buoy. You might call her a boat. She's about 4 feet long, weighs 25 pounds and looks like a cylinder wrapped in an orange-red life jacket. Sims steers Emily in the water with a remote control. She speeds toward the migrant rafts. "I'll keep her about 20-30 meters behind [them]," he says. The only thing that affects her sometimes over a wave is a little bit of wind. In a high wind situation we would actually fill the hull with some water to be able to weight her down some so, so, she wouldn't fly so bad off the top of the waves."

Under the slogan "Be the First Mover in the Era of Knowledge and Information," South Korea has emerged as one of the world's IT powerhouses in just six years. Incheon International Airport, the epitome of IT convergence, has been named the world's best airport for 11th consecutive years. The S. Korean financial industry, which had finished 86th behind Uganda, has risen to the world's 7th largest, easing regulations on the separation of industrial and financial capital and granting Kakao and KT preliminary licenses to run the nation's first online-only banks. The Go-playing AI AlphaGo had the brand value of Google leapfrogging over that of Samsung Electronics instantly. It was all the work of software.

Former top executives from IBM Watson, GE Digital, Infosys and MicroStrategy announced last week that they have joined forces with TPG Growth to launch Noodle Analytics, Inc., the Enterprise Artificial Intelligence company. Enterprise AI represents a major step forward in merging human learning and machine learning, all fueled by big data. Enterprise AI solutions combine expertise in human-centered design, business process engineering and artificial intelligence technologies. Today's artificial intelligence technologies include machine learning, predictive data analytics and data science. "Over the next three to five years, artificial intelligence technologies and big data will be the most significant competitive differentiators in business. We are excited to be a pioneer in Enterprise Artificial Intelligence, offering timely, valuable, and affordable solutions to clients. We have the right team, an optimized business model, and the right partners to create extraordinary value," says Stephen Pratt, CEO of Noodle.ai.

In 2011, IBM Watson beat Jeopardy! That started the clock for the distributed, natural language processing platform. Big Blue has aggressively harnessed Watson. It is now a main part of the company's business portfolio and marketing strategy. It remains to be seen if AlphaGo will play the same role for Google's DeepMind.

More than 1 million Syrians have fled to Lebanon since the start of the conflict and as many as one-fifth of them may be suffering from mental health disorders, according to the World Health Organisation. But Lebanon's mental health services are mostly private and the needs of refugees – who may have lost loved ones, their home, livelihood and community – are mostly going unmet. Hoping to support the efforts of overworked psychologists in the region, the Silicon Valley startup X2AI has created an artificially intelligent chatbot called Karim that can have personalised text message conversations in Arabic to help people with their emotional problems. As the user interacts with Karim, the system uses natural language processing to analyse the person's emotional state and returns appropriate comments, questions and recommendations. Related: How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence?

Some of the key players operating in the artificial intelligence market are IBM Corp. (U.S.), Microsoft Corp. (U.S.), Google Inc. (U.S.), IPsoft (U.S.), FinGenius Corp. (U.K.), Rocket Fuel Inc. (U.S.), Mobileye N.V. (Israel), Kensho Technologies, Inc. (U.S.), Sentient Technologies (U.S.), and Zephyr Health (U.S.). The artificial intelligence market is segmented on the basis of technology into machine learning, natural language processing, image recognition, and speech processing. The market for AI was dominated by the machine learning technology as it provides the computers with the ability to learn without being explicitely programmed. This involves the development of computer programs that are capable of updating themselves when exposed to new data. The artificial intelligence market for the media & advertising sector is expected to account for the largest share of the overall artificial intelligence market during the forecast period due to the rising adoption of AI technologies in the media & advertising sector to determine the consumer behavior to influence their buying pattern.

Today, we create a staggering amount of information: formulas, tweets, poetry, photos, videos and many more. Even our discoveries and diagnosis generate data. Can we draw meaning from it? That let's do things we've never done before. Overcome obstacles that used to stop us.

Lee Sedol, the South Korean Go champion who lost to a computer earlier this month, has said he would like a rematch. Lee, a top-ranking Go player who has 18 international titles under his belt, lost a five-game match to AlphaGo, a computer program developed by British artificial intelligence company DeepMind. However, Lee is ready to take on the machine once again. Speaking to Yonhap News, he said: "I will have to consider it carefully, but if AlphaGo wants a rematch, I'd like to face it again, on the condition it will take place in the near future." He also hinted that he may have discovered the program's secrets, saying: "I figured out AlphaGo to some degree during our last meeting."

Until now, medicine has been a prestigious and often extremely lucrative career choice. But with intelligent machines now used to diagnose diseases, in the near future, will we need as many doctors as we have now? Are we going to see significant medical unemployment in the coming decade? Dr Saxon Smith, president of the Australian Medical Association NSW branch, said in a report late last year that the most common concerns he hears from doctors-in-training and medical students are, "what is the future of medicine?" The answers, he said, continue to elude him.