It's not just the sci-fi community envisioning a world where machines take over. It's a concern among some prominent visionaries, including a group that just shelled out nearly $7 million for research into potential ill effects of artificial intelligence. The Future of Life Institute has awarded the money to 37 research teams that will be tasked with researching a range of topics related to the oncoming advancements of artificial intelligence, or AI, the organization announced on Wednesday. The funds come partly from the $10 million investment famed tech entrepreneur Elon Musk provided the group in January to determine the risks associated with AI. AI is a term used for the ability for a machine, computer, or system, to exhibit human-like intelligence.

The blocky look of Minecraft creations doesn't seem to bother these fellows. The popular construction game Minecraft is due to become a testbed for artificial intelligence software designed by startups and scientists alike. Minecraft, a game based on the notion of building blocks, is played by millions of people on consoles, PCs and phones. Developed by Stockholm-based Mojang, the game was snapped up by Microsoft in September 2014 for $2.5 billion, followed by the Redmond, Washington, software giant's acquisition of Teacher Gaming's MinecraftEdu line of teaching tools in January of this year. The game has now gone far beyond its roots as a simple building game, and through mods and additional development can also be used as a tool to instruct students on topics including conservation and resource management.

Apple's newest version of its mobile software iOS becomes available today for a public test drive. Is the beta for iOS 10 worth it? I've been using it for a long weekend, with a preloaded version on an iPhone 6S provided by Apple. As always, going with a beta OS is a bit of a risky journey on your everyday phone -- if you're curious, read Apple's FAQ and sign up, but I recommend you do it on a secondary device. That being said, it feels largely familiar at first, or second, or third use.

D-Wave Systems, the leading manufacturer of the world's first commercially available quantum computers, is the most well funded and far along player in the quantum chip race, but hasn't yet succeeded in convincing scientists that its machines are successfully achieving quantum speedup. In other words, we're not sure that its product is speedier than traditional, silicon-based machines. In fact, in certain situations, the $15 million D-Wave Two is still no faster than the computer on your desk right now. A research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reports that there is still a lack of definitive evidence that the D-Wave Two can perform functions any faster than traditional machines. The results of the test were published in the journal Science Thursday, though the work of head physicist Matthias Troyer has been widely circulated since January because the paper was available in pre-print.

Humans just got a step closer to being able to think a message into someone else's brain on the other side of the world: in a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of researchers has successfully achieved brain-to-brain transmission of information between humans. The team, comprising researchers from Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Starlab Barcelona in Spain, and Axilum Robotics in Strasbourg, France, used a number of technologies that enabled them to send messages from India to France -- a distance of 5,000 miles (8046.72km) "We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," said co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. "One such pathway is, of course, the internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'" Using a combination of internet-connected electroencephalogram and robot-assisted, image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (which, as the name suggests, uses electromagnetic induction to stimulate the brain from the outside), the team was able to communicate words from one human to another.

A PhD student from Britain's Imperial College has launched a video game that was co-written by an artificial-intelligence (AI) machine named Angelina. PhD student Michael Cook and Fellow Simon Colton of the Imperial College's Computational Creativity Group have been working since 2010 on Angelina -- an AI machine that automates the video-game creation process. She does this by learning and borrowing code from pre-existing games, then applying that knowledge to new games under development -- at the moment, two-dimensional arcade games and side-scrolling platformers are about as complicated as she can manage, but Cook and Colton are working on expanding her abilities to be able to develop her own game concepts. So far, the team of Cook, Colton and Angelina has released one game: the Christmas-themed A Puzzling Present for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. According to Cook, there are a few problems with a computer AI generating video games for a human audience.

As mentioned already on The Conversation and other websites, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of famed British mathematician Alan Turing. According to some, computer intelligence is on course to match human intelligence by 2045. The outline of his remarkable life and sad ending has by now become fairly well known. Turing laid numerous foundation stones of modern computing, ranging from the deepest mathematical nature of computing (using what are now called Turing machines, he provided the modern approach to incompleteness (PDF) and undecidability) to specific issues of practical design; he also contributed to mathematical biology (morphology) and much else. At the same time, he played a key role in the British government's breaking of the German Enigma code at the now-fabled, but then ultra-secret, Bletchley Park, thus arguably accelerating the end of the second world war.

MasterCard sales staff will begin using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to advise them on putting together and closing deals with potential clients, the company announced on Thursday. The U.S. credit and debit card company has teamed up with U.K. start-up Rainbird Technology, which has developed the AI software to be trialed with MasterCard's staff in Britain. Staff would talk to potential clients about their requirements for a product. They could then consult the AI system, which is software on a desktop that users can type into, and receive an answer about the next steps they should take in the deal. "We are in pilot which is around helping to capture the expertise of the way MasterCard's loyalty and internal sales function operate," Ben Taylor, chief executive of Rainbird, told CNBC by phone.

Professor Karen Spärck Jones was one of the pioneers in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). She worked in these areas since the late 1950s and made major contributions to the understanding of information systems. Her international status as a researcher was recognised by the most prestigious awards in her field, the ACM SIGIR Salton Award, the American Society for Information Science and Technologys Award of Merit, the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award, the BCS Lovelace Medal, and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, as well as by her election as a Fellow of the British Academy, of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and as a European AI Fellow. Karen Spärck Jones started her research career at the Cambridge Language Research Unit in the late 1950s, working on the use of thesauri for language processing. At this time she collaborated with Roger Needham, whom she married in 1958.

Compared with other medical fields, clinical toxicology is probably easier to formalise because few heuristics are used and lots of data can be managed in a database, such as storing information about drugs and toxicological classes. From the beginning of the analysis, we have intentionally separated data and knowledge. In SETH, data on drugs, toxicological classes and advice can be updated within the data base application. The maintenance of data on drugs and toxicological classes is performed with an electronic dictionary of French drugs available in our University Hospital and is updated every three months (20). Only reasoning and toxicological classes interaction updates have to be done in the knowledge base.