LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 29: An iCub robot built by the Italian Institute of Technology tracks a ball in the Robotville exhibition at the Science Museum on November 29, 2011 in London, England. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most used technology today. You can find it in schools, offices, mobile applications and even financial firms. According to reports, banks will be using AI to handle compliance overload. According to the Wall Street Journal banks have added tens of thousands of compliance officers but are now turning to AI to handle the ever-changing regulatory landscape.

One day last week at 9.29am I hunched nervously over my keyboard and prepared to do battle with an entity called Emma. We were each primed to write about the official UK employment data at 9.30am and file our stories to my editor. I was sure Emma would be quicker than me, but I really hoped I would be better. Her creator, a start-up called Stealth, calls her an "autonomous artificial intelligence" designed to deliver professional services such as research and analysis. Since it is fashionable to predict that AI will supplant white-collar workers including journalists, I wanted to put it to the test.

Robots and artificial intelligence have come an extended manner since a Roomba entered your home to vacuum your floor and Siri gave you recommendation on the simplest Italian restaurants in your parents' neighborhood. According to a 2013 University of Oxford study, half of yankee jobs can be automatic among ensuing 20 years. The study identified transportation, logistics and body jobs as the most liable to automation. Others assert it is only a matter of your time before robots replace academics, travel agents, interpreters and a host of other professions. Their predictions of what this would appear as if usually focus on 2 scenarios: a dystopia wherever humans now not have jobs or incomes, leading to increased financial gain difference and social upheaval, or a utopia where governments offer incomes to their voters, who can then be in a position to lead additional productive, creative and entrepreneurial lives.

These last few months have presented some complicated security stories, and this week we took steps to untangle them. We looked at the many, many ways in which the FBI hacks people, revelations of which have been trickling out for decades. And we broke down just how hackers were able to lift 81 million from a Bangladeshi bank in a matter of hours--well short of their billion-dollar goal, but still a hefty sum, cleverly obtained. In the world of software, Google has finally offered end-to-end encryption in its messaging products. It's Allo and Duo, new chat and video apps that use the stalwart end-to-end encryption known as Signal. On Allo, end-to-end kicks in only when you're in incognito mode, which we guess is better than nothing.

By rights, Yuval Noah Harari should be an anonymous academic buried in an obscure university department somewhere toiling away on his somewhat dusty discipline – medieval military history. He's a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and there is almost nothing in his background to suggest that he would write a book that has become one of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year – Sapiens. Or that he'd join the globetrotting TED-ocracy: the academic superstars who travel the world delivering keynotes on zeitgeisty topics, in Harari's case, the not inconsiderable subject of the history of the whole of mankind. When I meet him, he's just been the star turn at Penguin Random House's global sales conference. In May, he packed out Hay. Earlier this month, he delivered a TED talk.

Oussama Khatib held his breath as he swam through the wreck of La Lune, 100 meters below the Mediterranean. The flagship of King Louis XIV sank here in 1664, 20 miles off the southern coast of France, and no human had touched the ruins – or the countless treasures and artifacts the ship once carried – in the centuries since. OceanOne, a humanoid robotic diver from Stanford, allows new underwater exploration capabilities. With guidance from a team of skilled deep-sea archaeologists who had studied the site, Khatib, a professor of computer science at Stanford, spotted a grapefruit-size vase. He hovered precisely over the vase, reached out, felt its contours and weight, and stuck a finger inside to get a good grip.

It's Moogfest season here in Durham, so there's been a lot of the discussion in the office around music, data lakes, and the heat map we're building for the festival. But the conversation took a different turn, thanks to a tweet. Many months ago when I was at IBM Insight, I tweeted a snide remark about computer-generated jokes. Fast-forward to this week, when former "Monk" and Letterman writer Joe Toplyn responded with a link "proving" that computers could generate jokes that were funny ... at least to the easily amused. Amid the discussion, someone drove by playing crappy autotune pop music. This got me thinking about whether you could generate hit pop songs.

The most spectacular example of this was the Hortonworks IPO – a success by any measure. As we look forward to 2015, it is clear that while big data technologies still have a long ways to go in terms of enterprise adoption, its ultimate adoption is no longer in question. Enterprises have bought into the promise of big data – leaving the innovators in storage, analytics and visualization to deliver the results. The following represent some thoughts on what to expect in the intervening twelve months – and what lies just beyond. Innovative companies have been using Machine Learning in a variety of use cases for several years now – but for the most part they have been technology companies developing systems for themselves and for specific cases.

Human communication goes beyond words. It is complex, rich in nuances and frequently includes non-verbal signs. Yet despite our technological limitations it is not impossible for some aspects of communication to be emulated by a machine with surprising effect. This has been part of the challenge in developing Harlie (Human and Robot Language Interaction Experiment), a smartphone chatbot app developed by researchers at the CSIRO and University of Queensland. It's primarily aimed at people who may have trouble conversing including those with neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease and dementia, or even autism. The following dialog excerpt took place between a human who has autism, let's call him Chris (pseudonym), and Harlie.

Editor's note: This is the first of two articles exploring the role of the IT channel in robotic process automation. Part one provides an overview of how IT services firms expect to benefit from software robots, while part two examines deployment models, labor issues and the technology's future. This expert handbook explores opportunities in enterprise mobility market, delving into detail on those with the greatest potential return for VARs, systems integrators and IT consultants. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent.