Microsoft's brain is now available for anyone to use in their apps. The company has open sourced the artificial intelligence framework it uses to power speech recognition in its Cortana digital assistant and Skype Translate applications. This means that anyone in the world is now free to view, modify, and use Microsoft's code in their own software. The framework, called, CNTK, is based on a branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which seeks to help machines do things like recognize photos and videos or understanding human speech by mimicking the structure and functions of the human brain. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Facebook have invested heavily in deep learning research for years, going so far as to hire many of academics who pioneered the field.

When a person's intelligence is tested, there are exams. When artificial intelligence is tested, there are games. But what happens when computer programs beat humans at all of those games? This is the question AI experts must ask after a Google-developed program called AlphaGo defeated a world champion Go player in four out of five matches in a series that concluded Tuesday. Long a yardstick for advances in AI, the era of board game testing has come to an end, said Murray Campbell, an IBM research scientist who was part of the team that developed Deep Blue, the first computer program to beat a world chess champion.

I have voraciously read endless pro and con scenarios about artificial intelligence since first writing about it years ago. At this point, there is no doubt that concerns about the dangers of runaway AI raised by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Bill Joy and others are genuine. There also is no doubt whatsoever that the new organizations aimed at mitigating the dangers -- OpenAI, The Future of Life Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute and others -- are extremely important developments. Clearly, no sane person or organization wants to see, let alone encounter, runaway AI. However, a base problem is that no one knows where the actual crossover point -- the edge or tipping point -- exists, and thus we mortals are unlikely to be able to prevent it from occurring. Said differently, there is a very high probability that we will misjudge where that crossover point is and will thus go beyond the key threshold.

MIT researchers have developed a machine-learning system that can comb through repairs to open-source computer programs and learn their general properties, in order to produce new repairs for a different set of programs. The researchers tested their system on a set of programming errors, culled from real open-source applications, that had been compiled to evaluate automatic bug-repair systems. Where those earlier systems were able to repair one or two of the bugs, the MIT system repaired between 15 and 18, depending on whether it settled on the first solution it found or was allowed to run longer. While an automatic bug-repair tool would be useful in its own right, professor of electrical engineering and computer science Martin Rinard, whose group developed the new system, believes that the work could have broader ramifications. "One of the most intriguing aspects of this research is that we've found that there are indeed universal properties of correct code that you can learn from one set of applications and apply to another set of applications," Rinard says.

Global technology leaders and senior executives from around the world spoke on a range of topics, including Digital India, Smart Cities, Make in India, Skill India and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing, drones, robotics, robotic surgeries and genomics, at the two-day EmTech India 2016 event, held in New Delhi on 18 and 19 March. The event was organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The speakers included R.S. Sharma, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc. and chairman of the US-India Business Council; Una-May O'Reilly, principal research scientist, AnyScale Learning For All Group, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and Harsh Mariwala, chairman of Marico Ltd. The full list can be accessed here. Here are edited excerpts from their speeches and discussions that followed. John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc and Chairman of US-India Business Council (USIBC), reiterated the reason for his bullishness on India in a chat with Mint's R. Sukumar, on the first day of EmTech India 2016. When most of us here read the India narrative, it is not uniformly positive. Yet, you are amazingly bullish on the country. What do you see that others don't? Sometimes when you see what is happening in other countries and other businesses around the world from the outside, you are able to gather data very quickly, and then you can connect the dots on the market transitions. I am very bullish on the country for that very simple reason--follow and connect the dots on transitions. The transition to digitization will be the biggest technology change ever. I don't go into a country unless the leader, he or she, really understands this. Second, I don't go to a country that does not have sustainable differentiation capabilities.

Throughout that history, technology has brought comfort, ease, and prosperity. And all along it has taken jobs, disrupted lives, and changed the way people live and think. Each new age of innovation has brought a revolution. First, there was steam, then mass production, and late last century information technology. Now, researchers and thought leaders have declared a Fourth Revolution: an age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), advanced automation, and sophisticated robotics.

In August 2001, I was a telecoms analyst visiting investors in Tokyo. In one of these meetings, a portfolio manager at a Very Large Fund asked me what would happen now that GPRS meant that all mobile voice calls would be packet-switched and that therefore mobile operators' voice revenue would disappear within the next 18 months or so. This was a surprisingly hard question to answer well. It was nonsense, but to explain why it was nonsense you had to work out quite which things the person asking it didn't know, and what completely incorrect narrative he'd arrived at to think that this was going to happen. He'd heard'packet' and'mobile' and added 2 2 to get 22.

As a species, we humans are awfully obsessed with the future. We love to speculate about where our evolution is taking us. We try to imagine what our technology will be like decades or centuries from now. And we fantasise about encountering intelligent aliens – generally, ones who are far more advanced than we are. Lately those strands have begun to merge. From the evolution side, a number of futurists are predicting the singularity: a time when computers will soon become powerful enough to simulate human consciousness, or absorb it entirely. In parallel, some visionaries propose that any intelligent life we encounter in the rest of the Universe is more likely to be machine-based, rather than humanoid meat-bags such as ourselves.

Mr Toyoda Toyota president announced that the car company would be launching a research company in silcon valley to develop artificial intelligence for use in cars and robotics. The Toyota research institute according to the company press release would make drive accessible to everyone regardless of inability. However the new company, which will have 200 employees and launch in 2016, will be looking to go "beyond" autonomous cars. Health, mobility and personal well being robotics to improve all aspects of human life. Toyota has previously said its first self-driving car will be out by 2020 and it has produced some robots which includes a series of nursing bots to help those with physical impairments.

Some of Japan's banks and insurance companies have started using artificial intelligence to handle customers' inquiries more efficiently over the phone and online. Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ's smartphone app features MAI, a virtual bank teller, who can respond to customers by understanding the nature of their queries. For instance, if a customer says, "I lost my ATM card," MAI will recognize the situation and tell the customer what to do. The Android version of the app has already been released. The iPhone version is expected to become available by the end of this month.