Chatbots and voice assistants powered by artificial intelligence are starting to gain traction in the workplace of large organisations, according to a report from tech firm Spiceworks. The report, based on a survey of 500 IT professionals in organisations across North America and Europe, found that within the next 12 months, 40 percent of large businesses – those with more than 500 employees – expect to implement one or more intelligent assistants or AI chatbots on company-owned devices, compared to 25 percent of mid-size companies and 27 percent of small businesses. The findings indicate that although adoption is on the rise, some organisations are holding back due to a lack of use cases in the workplace and privacy concerns. Across all company sizes, Microsoft Cortana is the most commonly used intelligent assistant in the workplace, likely due to its native integration into Windows 10. Among organisations that have implemented intelligent assistants or chatbots on company-owned devices and services, the results show 49 percent are currently using Microsoft Cortana for work-related tasks, followed closely by Apple Siri at 47 percent.

According to a new report from The New York Times, Apple has hired Google's chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea. Tim Cook made the announcement in an email to employees, noting that Giannandrea will officially be the head of "machine learning and A.I. strategy." Giannandrea will report directly to Tim Cook. He originally joined Google after the company acquired a startup called Metaweb, where he served as chief technology officer. Google acquired Metaweb in 2010.

From advanced robotics in R&D labs to computer vision in warehouses, technology is making an impact on every step of the manufacturing process. Lights-out manufacturing refers to factories that operate autonomously and require no human presence. These robot-run settings often don't even require lighting, and can consist of several machines functioning in the dark. While this may sound futuristic, these types of factories have been a reality for more than 15 years. Famously, the Japanese robotics maker FANUC has been operating a "lights-out" factory since 2001, where robots are building other robots completely unsupervised for nearly a month at a time. "Not only is it lights-out," said FANUC VP Gary Zywiol, "we turn off the air conditioning and heat too." To imagine a world where robots do all the physical work, one simply needs to look at the most ambitious and technology-laden factories of today. For example, the Dongguan City, China-based phone part maker Changying Precision Technology Company has created an unmanned factory. Everything in the factory -- from machining equipment to unmanned transport trucks to warehouse equipment -- is operated by computer-controlled robots. The technical staff monitors activity of these machines through a central control system. Where it once required about 650 workers to keep the factory running, robot arms have cut Changying's human workforce to less than a tenth of that, down to just 60 workers. A general manager for the company said that it aims to reduce that number to 20 in the future. As industrial technology grows increasingly pervasive, this wave of automation and digitization is being labelled "Industry 4.0," as in the fourth industrial revolution. So, what does the future of factories hold? Manufacturers predict overall efficiency to grow annually over the next five years at 7x the rate of growth seen since 1990.

Is the world ready for cows armed with artificial intelligence? No time to ruminate on that because the moment has arrived, thanks to a Dutch company that has married two technologies -- motion sensors and AI -- with the aim of bringing the barnyard into the 21st century. The company, Connecterra, has brought its IDA system, or "The Intelligent Dairy Farmer's Assistant," to the United States after having piloted it in Europe for several years. IDA uses a motion-sensing device attached to a cow's neck to transmit its movements to a program driven by AI. The sensor data, when aligned repeatedly with real-world behavior, eventually allows IDA to tell from data alone when a cow is chewing cud, lying down, walking, drinking or eating.

Is the world ready for cows armed with artificial intelligence? No time to ruminate on that because the moment has arrived, thanks to a Dutch company that has married two technologies -- motion sensors and AI -- with the aim of bringing the barnyard into the 21st century. The company, Connecterra, has brought its IDA system, or "The Intelligent Dairy Farmer's Assistant," to the United States after having piloted it in Europe for several years. IDA uses a motion-sensing device attached to a cow's neck to transmit its movements to a program driven by AI. The sensor data, when aligned repeatedly with real-world behavior, eventually allows IDA to tell from data alone when a cow is chewing cud, lying down, walking, drinking or eating.

Driven by new technology, there are some big changes coming in entertainment, though by all accounts, the massive exhibition at this year's National Association of Broadcasters Show was nevertheless quieter in comparison with recent years. One booth that attracted many from the Hollywood crowd was that of Sony, where delegates -- whether that be tech leaders or cinematographers -- took a keen interest in the images produced by Sony's Crystal LED video wall, which was featured in the center of the booth in an 8K x 4K (and 32 ft. Sony, as well as Samsung, have both proposed their LED panels, offering modular configurations, as a replacement to cinema projection. It's a radical concept when one considers that cinema projection has been around since the birth of the artform. Meanwhile there are still plenty of issues to address, from how to handle sound to the cost.

Driven by new technology, there are some big changes coming in entertainment, though by all accounts, the massive exhibition at this year's National Association of Broadcasters Show was nevertheless quieter in comparison with recent years. One booth that attracted many from the Hollywood crowd was that of Sony, where delegates -- whether that be tech leaders or cinematographers -- took a keen interest in the images produced by Sony's Crystal LED video wall, which was featured in the center of the booth in an 8K x 4K (and 32 ft. Sony, as well as Samsung, have both proposed their LED panels, offering modular configurations, as a replacement to cinema projection. It's a radical concept when one considers that cinema projection has been around since the birth of the artform. Meanwhile there are still plenty of issues to address, from how to handle sound to the cost.

Artificial intelligence holds a unique place in our collective psychology. Endless imaginings of superintelligent machines and their impact on the human race have been created in films, books and even songs. Some of these versions are incredibly dark – the short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream tells of a frustrated hyper-intelligent machine that endlessly and brutally tortures the few remaining humans for consigning it to perpetual boredom. Marvin the Paranoid Android, of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, finds itself in a similar predicament, though expresses it in a somewhat more passive way. Films like I, Robot present a more practical story about the troubled relationship that people might have with intelligent machines.

The world is living under the threat of nuclear war and a terrifying simulation reveals what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off in a major city. As well as looking at the destruction, scientists used the computer model to work out how people would behave if the worst-case scenario struck. An entire city block was obliterated instantly and buildings blasted for a mile in almost every direction. Researchers found people who did nothing were most likely to die with nearly 280,000 people killed in just 48 hours. In the dystopian-like version of The Sims, researchers simulated a nuke exploding in Washington DC (pictured).

Bayesian approaches have been used extensively in scientific and engineering research to quantify uncertainty and extract information. However, its model-dependent nature means that when the a priori model is incomplete or unavailable, there is a severe risk that Bayesian approaches will yield misleading results. Here, we propose a universal model-free information extraction approach, capable of reliably recovering target signals from complex responses. This breakthrough leverages on a data-centric approach, whereby measured data is reconfigured to create an enriched observable space, which in turn is mapped to a well-adapted manifold, thereby detecting crucial information via a reconstructed low-rank phase-space. A Koopman operator is used to transform hidden and complex nonlinear dynamics to linear one, which enables us to detect hidden event of interest from rapidly evolving systems, and relate it to either unobservable stimulus or anomalous behaviour. Thanks to its data-driven nature, our method excludes completely any prior knowledge on governing dynamics. We benchmark the astonishing accuracy of our method on three diverse and challenging problems in: biology, medicine, and engineering. In all cases, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, of both Bayesian and non-Bayesian type. By creating a new reliable information analysis paradigm, it is suitable for ubiquitous nonlinear dynamical systems or end-users with little expertise, which permits the unbiased understanding of various mechanisms in the real world.