Are our kids prepared to face the challenges of a computerized world? And what role will artificial intelligence play in their lives? Investors believe it is "inevitable" that artificial intelligence will destroy millions of jobs and that governments are unprepared for it, a new survey revealed, pointing to the technology's negative side-effects. Until Thursday, the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, is home to computer nerds and geeks from around the world. Artificial intelligence and self-driving vehicles feature prominently at this year's Web Summit.

At the Privacy Week conference in Vienna I gave a talk called;Privacy and Data Security of Chatbots.; I wanted to point out that you should consider what data to share with a bot and in which steps the data is processed when talking to a bot: How secure are the messenger apps themselves, the connection the data is transferred over, the natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning tools used, and, last but not least, the backend of the bot itself and its database?

Some people will see abundant possibility; others, the period at the end of humanity's story, as they conflate AI with killer robots and super-intelligent machines that will come to regard us as pets--or worse. A Stanford University-hosted project is under way to look past all that--past the pop-culture takes on AI, the warnings from tech thinkers, and the breathless hype about assistive AI tools in our phones and other devices. The project was set up to take the long view of AI--a very, very long view. The study is an ongoing endowed project, and its goal is for a standing committee of scientists to regularly commission reports that take expansive looks at how AI will touch different aspects of daily life. The first of those reports, the 28,000-word "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," has just been released.

Information extraction involves classifying data items that are stored in plain text, and is a major area of research for machine learning scientists. Last week, a research team from MIT introduced a new approach to information extraction for machine learning systems at the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, and won a best-paper award. Instead of feeding their system as much data as possible, the team's winning approach takes a different route and focuses on a much smaller data set, a similar process used by human beings – if you're reading a paper that you don't understand, you're likely to do a search on the web and find articles that you are able to understand. This new system approach does something similar; if the system's confidence score is low in assessing a particular text, it will query for more information, pulling up a handful of new articles from the web that correlate with a specific set of terms. In future, this model could be applied to sparse data and save much time in reviewing databases.

The UK's national security boss, Robert Hannigan, should come clean on surveillance and stop attacking technology companies, privacy experts have said. Intelligence agencies must use the debate sparked by Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations to overhaul their attitude to privacy and oversight, said the group speaking at Dublin's Web Summit in November. "What's urgently required is a real cultural shift amongst our politicians and among our civil servants in Whitehall as to the value of privacy: the fact that it's a public and social good, and it's a collective good as well," said Bella Sankey, policy director at civil liberties organisation Liberty. Sankey, speaking alongside the former MI5 intelligence officer and whistleblower Annie Machon, criticised Hannigan for his attack on technology companies, in which he claimed were "in denial" about the misuse of the internet by terrorists, and that "privacy has never been an absolute right". "Given everything we've learnt in the past 18 months, he chose not to address at all the very serious things that GCHQ stand accused of: blanket surveillance of the UK population with public knowledge and without parliamentary knowledge, [and] receiving warrantless bulk intercepts from the NSA on US and people around the world," said Machon.

Earlier this year there was an unprecedented collaboration between ING, Microsoft and TU Delft, with the willing participation of Dutch museums Mauritshuis and Rembrandthuis, to teach an artificial intelligence to paint a Rembrandt. Not to duplicate an existing Rembrandt, but to paint an original one, with a unique composition and using a person who never existed as the subject. The idea was that the AI could analyze and learn Rembrandt's style and then produce, on request, an original portrait based on certain parameters ("Thirtysomething male, black hat, white collar, looking to the right.") Here's how they did it, and here's the frighteningly convincing image that the computer reproduced--on a 3D printer, no less, to simulate the height of brushstrokes: It was called the Next Rembrandt project, and I have very mixed feelings about it. While it is unquestionably an impressive technological achievement, ought we be moving AI into those non-numerical areas of human creativity?

Last week I mentioned to one of my U.S.-based colleagues that I would be out of office for three days at the Irish National Digital Week (NDW16), taking the opportunity because the event was being held in Skibbereen, just a few kilometres down the road from my home office. He asked, "Surely an event of that type would be held in Dublin?" And I replied, "Well there's a story here that needs to be told; one that will have profound implications for business in Ireland and probably internationally". Skibbereen is a small market town in the South West of Ireland. The population is approximately 2000, although there's perhaps several times that number in the immediate hinterland.

Hinton was only technically an intern at Google. He arrived that summer for what he describes as a trial run -- he was hesitant to leave Toronto, where he has lived with his family for most of the past quarter-century -- and the short-term stint didn't have any other obvious job title. But in the manner of an intern, Hinton still seems chuffed to find himself quite where he is. On a recent morning at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, the first thing he did was enumerate the riches of one of many well-stocked "micro-kitchens." His job is to rove among one of the company's most highly valued teams, seeding the work underway with ideas.

Infosys has invested about $2 million in UNSILO, a Danish artificial intelligence startup focused on advanced text analysis. India's second largest software services firm said it has made the investment from its Innovation Fund. UNSILO is Infosys Innovation Fund's first investment in Europe, according to a stock exchange filing. "UNSILO have built an impressive semantic search engine with best-in-class text intelligence, which powers a range of advanced business processes. We will partner with UNSILO to bring their artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to our global clients. They join and expanding portfolio of innovative young companies from around the world that Infosys works with to help enterprises drive their digital transformation," said Ritika Suri, executive vice president & global head of corporate development & ventures, Infosys.

A child can learn from a picture book to associate images with sounds, but building a computer vision system that can train itself isn't as simple. Using artificial intelligence techniques, however, researchers at Disney Research and ETH Zurich have designed a system that can automatically learn the association between images and the sounds they could plausibly make. Given a picture of a car, for instance, their system can automatically return the sound of a car engine. A system that knows the sound of a car, a splintering dish, or a slamming door might be used in a number of applications, such as adding sound effects to films, or giving audio feedback to people with visual disabilities, noted Jean-Charles Bazin, associate research scientist at Disney Research. To solve this challenging task, the research team leveraged data from collections of videos. "Videos with audio tracks provide us with a natural way to learn correlations between sounds and images," Bazin said.