In collaboration with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the leading research institute SINTEF, Telenor will establish a lab focused on artificial intelligence and big data at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. As the second initiative, Telenor will develop and launch a dedicated, next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) network in several Norwegian cities. Norwegian startups and students will get cost-free access to the IoT network in order to develop and test their products and services. The first pilot will be located in Oslo, in collaboration with StartupLab. "We need to build critical competencies within artificial intelligence and we want to give Norwegian startups the resources they need to succeed. This is imperative for our ability to seize digital opportunities and contribute to creating new jobs. Startups play a key role in net job creation. We aim to stimulate productivity in Norway by developing new competencies and supporting the startup community," says Sigve Brekke, President and CEO, Telenor Group.

When Google's AlphaGo computer defeated a human champion in the insanely complex board game "Go" in March, experts were surprised by the computer's ability to recognize patterns and make quick, instinctive decisions – otherwise known to humans as intuition. Intuition, or gut instinct, is one of many hallmarks of business decision-making. Steve Jobs had no concrete evidence that the iPhone would be a success, but he saw patterns in the market, and in his mind, that convinced him that consumers would want it. AlphaGo's programmers set out to imitate that sense of intuition by first loading 150,000 prior matches between good players into the computer. Then they had AlphaGo play against itself endlessly.

Computer scientists, public figures and reporters have gathered to witness or take part in a decades-old challenge. Some of the participants are flesh and blood; others are silicon and binary. Thirty human judges sit down at computer terminals, and begin chatting. To determine whether they're talking to a computer program or a real person. The event, organized by the University of Reading, was a rendition of the so-called Turing test, developed 65 years ago by British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing as a way to assess whether a machine is capable of intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

Growing up in his grandmother's staunchly Catholic home in Cali, Colombia, Anthony Rivera never dreamed he'd become king of the Latin American nudie business. Soft-spoken and timid, Rivera was more comfortable working on computer science assignments than approaching girls. "I'd get stressed about meeting women," he recounts from his 12th-floor apartment in Medellín's posh El Poblado neighborhood. Even today, his role running a major adult webcam company seems incongruous with his diffidence -- but that might also be the key ingredient to his success. Rivera, born and partially raised in New York, has been instrumental in taking Colombia's webcam industry from the shadows to the second-largest webcam model market in the world, after Romania.

Artificial Lawyer caught up with Noah Waisberg, Co-Founder & CEO of Kira Systems. We discussed how Kira Systems got started, how it is different to other AI systems and where it's going. Co-founder of Kira Systems, Noah Waisberg, used to be an associate at Weil Gotshal & Manges, starting there as a junior associate in 2006. A lot of his work focused on M&A and he says he found himself spending a lot of time reviewing contracts during due diligence (DD). According to Waisberg, DD often amounts to between 30% and 60% of the legal bill law firms gave to their clients.

The young British coder whose simple "robot lawyer" chatbot has overturned more than 170,000 unlawful parking tickets in the UK and America has set his sights on solving homelessness by providing people with basic legal advice. An update to his DoNotPay bot works by asking users a simple set of questions about their circumstances, before advising them on the best course of action--often helping them draft an effective form letter to apply to their local councils for emergency housing. Councils have to take every letter seriously, and using Freedom of Information requests, he's researched the best ways to prompt them into acting on his bot's clients' behalf. The bot's creator, Joshua Browder, a 19-year-old Brit studying at Stanford University in California, told Ars that since the update launched last Wednesday "almost every local government in the UK has signed up for the website." "I can see on the back end that they are actively trying out the service for themselves," he added.

Scientists in Japan reportedly saved a woman's life by applying artificial intelligence to help them diagnose a rare form of cancer. Faced with a 60-year-old woman whose cancer diagnosis was unresponsive to treatment, they supplied an AI system with huge amounts of clinical cancer case data, and it diagnosed the rare leukemia that had stumped the clinicians in just ten minutes. The Watson AI system from IBM matched the patient's symptoms against 20m clinical oncology studies uploaded by a team headed by Arinobu Tojo at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science that included symptoms, treatment and response. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York has carried out similar work, where teams of clinicians and data analysts trained Watson's machine learning capabilities with oncological data in order to focus its predictive and analytic capabilities on diagnosing cancers. IBM Watson first became famous when it won the US television game show Jeopardy in 2011.

"In order for a program to improve itself substantially it would have to have at least a rudimentary understanding of its own problem-solving process and some ability to recognize an improvement when it found one. There is no inherent reason why this should be impossible for a machine. Given a model of its own workings, it could use its problem-solving power to work on the problem of self-improvement. The present programs are not quite smart enough for this purpose; they can only deal with the improvement of programs much simpler than themselves. Once we have devised programs with a genuine capacity for self-improvement a rapid evolutionary process will begin.... Whether or not we could retain some sort of control of the machines, assuming that we would want to, the nature of our activities and aspirations would be changed utterly by the presence on earth of intellectually superior beings. "The audience is tense with excitement as the hero in the film play struggles frantically with the control apparatus of a submarine that is fast sinking to the ocean bottom.

Canadian video game star Elliot Carroza-Oyarce won the gold medal Tuesday in the first-ever EGames contest, held amid the Olympics festivities in Rio de Janeiro. Organizers hoped the hours-long "Super Smash Bros." competition would show how the growing number of competitive video gamers across the world could have their own recurring celebration in the years to come. The e-sports community has been divided over whether video games should be in the Olympics, commemorated with their own global championships, or continue as is, with disparate worldwide contests and leagues. Video game players "don't necessarily want to be boxed in with traditional athletes," said Neil Duffy, executive vice president at the British nonprofit behind the EGames. "But the level of skill and practice and effort that this competition requires really is comparable with that of a football or basketball player."

Xbox and EA Sports are now offering Xbox One S FIFA 17 bundles packed with a bunch of special offers that will guarantee players with the ultimate football sports gaming experience. Plus, with the new bundles, players can actually get access to "FIFA 17" five days before the highly anticipated video game hits the market. Earlier today, Microsoft dropped a bombshell at Gamescom 2016 when it announced the new Xbox One S FIFA 17 bundles, which are going to be available starting Sept. 22, IGN has learned. On its official Twitter account, Xbox also shared the good news about the bundles, tweeting: "Own every moment on the pitch with the #XboxOneS #FIFA17 [E] 500GB Bundle." Xbox One S is Microsoft's upcoming gaming console, and what better way to purchase one than to buy a bundle that also includes a highly anticipated video game and other special offers?