It's been six months since German automaker BMW, U.S. technology giant Intel and Israeli computer vision systems company Mobileye came together to collaborate on self-driving cars, and the partnership seems to finally be bearing fruit. During a joint press conference at the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the companies announced they will start testing autonomous vehicles later this year. "A fleet of approximately 40 autonomous BMW vehicles will be on the roads by the second half of 2017, demonstrating the significant advancements made by the three companies towards fully autonomous driving," the companies said in a joint statement. The vehicles will be BMW 7 series cars, and the trials will take place in the U.S. as well as in Europe. "This year our fleet of vehicles will already test this joint technology globally under real traffic conditions. This is a significant step towards the introduction of the BMW iNEXT in 2021, which will be the BMW Group's first fully autonomous vehicle," Klaus Fröhlich of BMW said in the statement.

This is computer-generated wordplay and an example of how the boundaries of artificial intelligence are shifting. If a computer can crack jokes, what other human activities could they start to replicate? What jobs could it take? Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly big issue for education - not least because many tech companies and publishers are circling around the huge commercial opportunities. But could students really get their answers from a robot rather than a teacher?

A Japanese insurance company has decided to get rid of 34 jobs and instead get artificial intelligence to take over assessing medical insurance claims over the phone. Starting from January 2017, Tokyo-based Fukoku Life Insurance Mutual Company is handing over the roles of 34 human insurance agents to IBM Watson Explorer, which is a cognitive search and content analysis platform that uses machine learning and language processing to analyse data for trends and patterns. According to a press release, Fukoku Life is using IBM Watson Explorer to classify and categorise diseases, injuries and surgical procedures. When insurance policy holders call the company's hotline to make an insurance claim, the IBM Watson supercomputer is able to analyse the customer's voice and detect keywords. As part of making the claim, the policyholder has to submit a medical certificate showing what condition they have, and IBM Watson can detect the name of the injury or disease listed, as well as dates such as the hospital admission date and surgery date.

At the end of the exchange, the app will advise a patient on how to proceed, an alternative to the advice of 111 call-handlers who are able to send ambulances, book an out-of-hours doctor or suggest other treatment. The trial is seen as a potential solution to the strain on the 111 service. Interactions with the app are significantly cheaper and quicker than speaking over the phone. It is hoped that the database of medical information that Babylon has could mean more effective advice than the 111 staff who are not medical professionals, although many users may have misgivings about the effectiveness of medical advice from a chatbot.

Not a day goes by when we don't hear of something related to artificial intelligence in the news. But AI (sometimes confused with machine learning, which is simply a technique within AI) wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for one seminal event in 2016: AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol. In March last year, an AI program that trained itself to play the ancient game of Go beat the 18-time world champion. The reason it was such a feat for AI, was because Go is about feel, strategic judgment and winning multiple battles across the board – and a computer cannot simply memorise all possible combinations of board pieces, assess the situation, construct and execute a strategy to win, like chess. So the programmers of AlphaGo, from Google DeepMind, set up the basic heuristics of the game, allowed AlphaGo to analyse previous games and then split its brain so it could play itself millions of times.

AN ALGORITHM that analyses facial expressions and head movements could help doctors diagnose autism-like conditions and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There is no simple test for autism or ADHD, but clinicians usually observe someone's behaviour as part of the assessment. "These are frequently co-occurring conditions and the visual behaviours that come with them are similar," says Michel Valstar at the University of Nottingham, UK. His team used machine learning to identify some of these behaviours. The group captured video of 55 adults as they read and listened to stories and answered questions about them.

LONDON, UK, 3 January 2017 – Digital Catapult is proud to announce that it is the advocate UK partner involved in the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a $5m competition challenging teams to demonstrate how humans can collaborate with AI to tackle the world's grand challenges, such as poverty, health and sustainable energy. As part of its wider strategy to support market-led technology and innovation, Digital Catapult will support IBM Watson AI XPRIZE via its technical experts as resources and mentors for competing teams. Digital Catapult will also form a hub for UK teams by hosting events, meet-ups and take a lead in helping to showcase the best competitors to come out of the UK. XPRIZE offers competitors a rare chance to work on applications using AI, machine learning, predictive technologies, robotics and other advanced technologies to develop powerful cognitive applications. Teams have the freedom to define their own goals and have the unique opportunity to potentially attract investment and compete for the main prize in the final at TED 2020.

Nvidia rolled out a Shield TV console, arming it with 4K and HDR capabilities for vastly improved gaming and video streaming. The Android-based Shield also has new tricks: it will double up as a smart-home hub and a voice-activated assistant. It'll bring Google Assistant to TVs and work with Samsung's SmartThings platform to operate smart devices and appliances in a home. The Shield is powered by the Tegra X1 processor. A model with 16GB of storage will ship later this month for US$199.99,

Kolibree, a smart oral care company, has unveiled what it claims is the first toothbrush embedded with AI at CES 2017. The Ara is clearly no ordinary mouth scrubber. Just read how Kolibree founder and CEO Thomas Serval describes Ara's tech: "Patented deep learning algorithms are embedded directly inside the toothbrush on a low-power processor," he said in a release. "Raw data from the sensors runs through the processor, enabling the system to learn your habits and refine accuracy the more it's used." Ara picks up precisely where you're brushing, and will log information, such as frequency, duration and location, in either on or offline mode.

BlackBerry QNX is off to a great start at CES 2017. Today they announced what they are calling their "most advanced and secure embedded software platform for autonomous drive and connected cars," which is also known as QNX SDP 7.0. "With the push toward connected and autonomous vehicles, the electronic architecture of cars is evolving – from a multitude of smaller processors each executing a dedicated function, to a set of high performance domain controllers, powered by 64-bit processors and graphical processing units. To develop these new systems, our automotive customers will need a safe and secure 64-bit OS that can run highly complex software, including neural networks and artificial intelligence algorithms. QNX SDP 7.0 is suited not only for cars, but also for almost any safety- or mission-critical application that requires 64-bit performance and advanced security. This includes surgical robots, industrial controllers and high-speed trains."