Industry leaders in the self-driving car race have teamed up to create an'ecosystem' to push the technology further. Intel and Toyota, among others, announced this week that they have joined forces to create the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium. The companies plan to share data to boost the creation of maps and improved driver assistance technology. Toyota's AI-enabled Concept-i prototype, which was unveiled at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Several firms just joined forces to create the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium. This includes Intel, DENSO, Ericsson, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), NTT DOCOMO and both the Toyota InfoTechnology Center Co. and Toyota Motor Corp.

In 1963, an American attorney named Reed Lawlor published a prescient article in the journal of the American Bar Association. "In a few years," he wrote, "lawyers will rely more and more on computers to perform many tasks for them. They will not rely on computers simply to do their bookkeeping, filing or other clerical tasks. They will also use them in their research and in the analysis and prediction of judicial decisions. In the latter tasks, they will make use of modern logic and the mathematical theory of probability, at least indirectly."

Back in December, I wrote that one of the best sectors to invest in this year is artificial intelligence (AI). And that has proven to be the case so far. You don't even have to look at the stock market to see the rising importance of this emerging technology. Every dinner party I go to... every barbecue I attend... every birthday party or chat over coffee, the subject ultimately turns to AI. We're even inundated now with TV commercials about AI. You've probably seen an ad for IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Watson or Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) "The Future of Artificial Intelligence" with The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons.

The Essential phone, designed to take on the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, has gone into full production, according to its creator. Android inventor Andy Rubin took to Twitter to make the announcement, fuelling speculation about when it might be ready for release. New pictures appear to show the assembly lines, where the titanium body of the handset is being milled. An announcement on where and when fans can buy the firm's first model, the PH-1, is expected next week. A new handset designed to take on the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy has gone into full production, according to its creator. Startup firm Essential says it has raised raised over $300 million (£231 million) in new funding and signed up retailers to sell its first device.

There has never been a better time to be a politician. But it's an even better time to be a machine learning engineer working for a politician. Throughout modern history, political candidates have had only a limited number of tools to take the temperature of the electorate. More often than not, they've had to rely on instinct rather than insight when running for office. Now big data can be used to maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.

I heard about The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human ... by Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern through a tweet by Kirk Bourne. I conduct a course at Oxford University on Data Science for IoT. I have also recently launched a course on AI for fintech. The Mathematical Corporation covers many issues that I have encountered in my teaching and consulting. In essence, Mathematical Corporation calls for new leadership traits in the world of AI.

There exist two main approaches to automatically extract affective orientation: lexicon-based and corpus-based. In this work, we argue that these two methods are compatible and show that combining them can improve the accuracy of emotion classifiers. In particular, we introduce a novel variant of the Label Propagation algorithm that is tailored to distributed word representations, we apply batch gradient descent to accelerate the optimization of label propagation and to make the optimization feasible for large graphs, and we propose a reproducible method for emotion lexicon expansion. We conclude that label propagation can expand an emotion lexicon in a meaningful way and that the expanded emotion lexicon can be leveraged to improve the accuracy of an emotion classifier.

Reprogramming matter may sound far-fetched, but we have been doing it with increasing power and staggering efficiency for at least 60 years, and for centuries we have been paving the way toward the ultimate reprogrammed fate of the universe, the vessel of all programs. How will we be doing it in 60 years' time and how will it impact life and the purpose both of machines and of humans?

In 2015, a poll of 200 senior corporate executives conducted by the National Robotics Education Foundation identified robotics as a major source of jobs for the United States. Indeed, some 81% of respondents agreed that robotics was the top area of job growth for the nation. Not that this should come as a surprise: as the demand for smart factories and automation increases, so does the need for robots. According to Nearshore Americas, smart factories are expected to add $500 billion to the global economy in 2017. In a survey conducted by technology consulting firm Capgemini, more than half of the respondents claimed to have invested $100 million or more into smart factory initiatives over the last five years.

The AI win stunned the gaming community, because bots are generally considered inferior to expert human players. This one from Open AI -- a nonprofit artificial intelligence research firm known mainly for its backing by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, of Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX fame -- is a different story, and possibly a cautionary one. Open AI says its mission is to promote "responsible" AI development. Or, as Musk puts it, to ensure that AI doesn't grow unchecked and become the death of humanity. Musk said Saturday via Twitter that AI is "more [of a] risk than North Korea."