Artificial intelligence is becoming big news in Big Law. The move towards increased automation of legal services continues to gather momentum, with another top law firm turning to (AI) in an attempt to lower costs and improve efficiency. Travers Smith, a London-based firm known for its strength in corporate and private equity, has begun trialing due diligence technology developed by U.K. software company RAVN Systems. The news follows last week's announcement that magic circle firm Slaughter and May had signed a deal with Luminance, a new technology company that launched with the backing of investment fund Invoke Capital. Slaughters had been working with Luminance for several months to help it develop its AI software, which is able to read hundreds of pages of legal documentation every minute and is designed to speed up the due diligence process.

Developing new drugs to help cure diseases is a challenge some of the world's sharpest minds are focused on. It's also something that's enormously expensive and time-consuming -- with new drugs sometimes taking years, and costing hundreds of millions of dollars, to bring to market. That's where a United Kingdom-based company called BenevolentAI wants to help -- and it's using the world's most advanced deep learning supercomputer to do so. The first company in Europe to use Nvidia's state-of-the-art DGX-1 computer, the idea is to utilize cutting-edge chemical modeling algorithms to come up with ways to treat serious diseases faster than was previously thought possible. "We're taking giant corpuses of data, hundreds of millions of documents and structured data sources, and using it to discover relationships between chemicals, diseases and information about the body," Derek Wise, vice president of engineering at BenevolentAI, told Digital Trends.

Developing a computer that can be as decisive and intelligent as humans is on IBM's mind, and it's making progress toward achieving that goal. IBM's computer chip called TrueNorth is designed to emulate the functions of a human brain. The company is now running tests and benchmarking TrueNorth to demonstrate how fast and power efficient the chips can be compared to today's computers. The results of the head-to-head contest are impressive. IBM says TrueNorth can engage in deep learning and make decisions based on associations and probabilities, much like human brains.

It's certainly an exciting time be involved in Natural Language Processing (NLP), not only for those of us who are involved in the development and cutting-edge research that is powering its growth, but also for the multitude of organizations and innovators out there who are finding more and more ways to take advantage of it to gain a competitive edge within their respective industries. With the global NLP market expected to grow to a value of 16 billion by 2021, it's no surprise to see the tech giants of the world investing heavily and competing for a piece of the pie. More than 30 private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have been acquired in the last 5 years by corporate giants competing in the space, including Google, Yahoo, Intel, Apple and Salesforce. It's not all about the big boys, however, as NLP, text analysis and text mining technologies are becoming more and more accessible to smaller organizations, innovative startups and even hobbyist programmers. NLP is helping organizations make sense of vast amounts of unstructured data, at scale, giving them a level of insight and analysis that they could have only dreamed about even just a couple of years ago.

A simple cryptography method can produce the unusual language-like features of a mysterious manuscript from the Middle Ages. The finding suggests that the famous Voynich manuscript may be an elaborate hoax, not a secret language to be decoded. The manuscript has baffled cryptographers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. It contains hundreds of pages of fine calfskin parchment, which scientists have dated to the first half of the 15th century. Pages of indecipherable text are accompanied by illustrations of exotic unidentified plants, naked nymphs and plant-based pharmaceuticals, astrological diagrams, and other material that no one has been able to identify.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

On the island of Santorini, Greece, a group of AIs has been facing off in an epic battle of Doom. This is VizDoom, a contest born from one man's idea: To improve the state of artificial intelligence by teaching computers the art of fragging. That simple notion then spiraled into a battle between tech giants, universities and coders. Over the past few months they've all been honing their bots (known as "agents"), building up to one, final death match. Okay, it was a lot more than one match.

A women walks past the artwork'Golem' by Joshua Abrabanel during a press presentation for the'Golem' exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016. The myth of artificial life, from homunculi and cyborgs to robots and androids, is the focus of an exhibition about the Golem at the Jewish Museum Berlin. The exhibition runs from Sept. 23, 2016 until Jan. 29, 2017.

IBM Research is to collaborate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop machine-vision systems. The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension's (BM3C) will work on the development of cognitive computing systems that can emulate the human ability to comprehend visual and audio inputs. BM3C will address technical challenges around both pattern recognition and prediction methods in the field of machine vision that are currently impossible for machines alone to accomplish. For example, online retailer Ocado has talked to Computing about the need for such systems in order to automate the packing of supermarket items for delivery so that potatoes are packed before tomatoes. The BMC3 collaboration will bring together brain, cognitive, and computer science specialists to conduct research in the field of unsupervised machine understanding of audio-visual streams of data, using insights from next-generation models of the brain to inform advances in machine vision.

There has been a lot written about the transformational power of artificial intelligence. If you are a regular reader of this column, you have gained the perspectives of eight of the leading thinkers on the topic. Nick Bostrom is perhaps the most influential thinker on safety concerns associated with the march toward artificial intelligence. He calls artificial intelligence "the single most important and daunting challenge that humanity has ever faced." Bostrom is an extraordinary polymath, having earned degrees in physics, philosophy, mathematical logic, and neuroscience.