People get up to weird things in New Zealand. At the University of Auckland, if you want to run hours upon hours of experiments on a baby trapped in a high chair, that's cool. You can even have a conversation with her surprisingly chatty disembodied head. BabyX, the virtual creation of Mark Sagar and his researchers, looks impossibly real. The child, a 3D digital rendering based on images of Sagar's daughter at 18 months, has rosy cheeks, warm eyes, a full head of blond hair, and a soft, sweet voice. When I visited the computer scientist's lab last year, BabyX was stuck inside a computer but could still see me sitting in front of the screen with her "father." To get her attention, we'd call out, "Hi, baby. Look at me, baby," and wave our hands. When her gaze locked onto our faces, we'd hold up a book filled with words (such as "apple" or "ball") and pictures (sheep, clocks), then ask BabyX to read the words and identify the objects.

Passengers' baggage is collected by robots, they relax in a luxurious waiting area complete with an indoor garden before getting a face scan and swiftly passing through security and immigration - this could be the airport of the future. It's a vision that planners hope will become reality as new technology is rolled out, transforming the exhausting experience of getting stuck in lengthy queues in ageing, overcrowded terminals into something far more pleasant. The changes also represent major challenges that could upend decades-old business models at major airports, with analysts warning operators may face a hit to their revenues to the tune of billions of dollars. Facial scanning in particular is generating a lot of buzz. Changi in the affluent city-state of Singapore, regarded as among the world's best airports, is set to roll out this biometric technology at a new terminal to open later this year.

Chatbots are about to change the world in more ways than we can imagine. Already, bots around the globe can complete a diverse set of varying tasks. From ordering pizza online to mashing faces together in Project Murphy, chatbots are about to become a normal element in everyday life. As the scope of chatbots becomes broader every day, there are new applications popping up constantly. Education has traditionally been known as a sector where innovation moves slowly.

A team of international researchers is urging people to share their selfies in order to help teach computers how to read faces and identify people with rare diseases. The Minerva and Me project - being led by Oxford University with the help of international researchers like WA Health clinical genetist Gareth Baynam - is seeking to use technology to spot rare diseases faster and more accurately. The crowd-sourced research initiative wants to build a database of photographs so the researchers can develop facial recognition software using machine learning algorithms that can identify rare diseases. The software would be able to suggest a disease condition and prompt further tests that could be used to help settle on a diagnosis - potentially reducing the instances of incorrect diagnosis. "We think computers can be used to help diagnose individuals who have particular diseases. To do this we are training computers to look at photographs of peoples' faces to try to identify combinations of subtle changes that might together be indicators of a specific disease," the researchers say.

A computer is being developed that rates how much pain someone is in by detecting small changes to their facial expressions. Such a system could help doctors determine how to treat patients and may save the prescription of painkillers. Study author Dr Jeffrey Cohn from the University of Pittsburgh, said: 'These metrics might be useful in determining real pain from faked pain.' People experience and express pain differently, which makes it difficult for doctors to gauge the extent patients are suffering based on self-reported scores. The researchers hope the system could one day be available as an app that doctors have on their smartphones.

Callaghan Innovation will establish the Digital Energy Hub, an initiative to encourage early adoption and commercialisation by the energy sector of the next wave of digital technologies – namely Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Blockchain, Cloud Analytics and Internet of Things. The scale and speed of the disruption from such technologies presents challenge and opportunity for many businesses in the energy sector – from start up to established – and for those in adjacent sectors such as Information Technology, transport and manufacturing. More to on this to follow. In an interview with Idealog, Stu Christie explains that he sees the biggest opportunities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies being in agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure and transportation. Stu is investment manager at NZ Venture Investment Fund and now Chair of the recently launched AI Forum.

When Nicole Stark set about writing a new video game, she took inspiration from an unusual subject: her autistic teenage daughter who was battling bullies. "I was fed up with power fantasies for male teenagers," says Stark, one half of Noosa-based family studio Disparity Games. Sick of seeing female protagonists who behaved "exactly like the male character but with large boobs", Stark, with help from her daughter, created Gemma, a 16-year-old ninja pizza delivery girl who must navigate a dystopian world of sky-high slums, exploitative mega-corporations and the cruelest of adversaries: her own peers. "It was important to make Gemma look like a 16-year old," says Stark, recalling her career as an artist when she would routinely make the breasts smaller on female characters – only for male colleagues to routinely make them bigger. Launched in 2015, Ninja Pizza Girl received favourable reviews.

From virtual assistants to driverless cars, technology imitating human intelligence is on the rise. But at what ethical cost and how do boards future-proof their organisations in the face of rapid change? Earlier this year, a Japanese insurance company made headlines for doing something that company executives and directors around the world have been anticipating - and fearing - for years. Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance made 34 of its staff redundant and replaced them with artificial intelligence (AI) system IBM Watson. Japanese newspaper The Mainichi reported the company will be using Watson to determine payout amounts and check customer cases against their insurance contracts. Other Japanese insurance companies have announced they are looking at or are already using AI for similar purposes and The Japan Times reported in April that the country's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry was planning to trial AI to help government workers write draft answers for questions put to Cabinet ministers.

In recent years we have seen a surge in the way companies have leveraged technology to drive new revenue streams and create a unique competitive advantage in the marketplace. The companies that have been the most successful are the ones using Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is already being used by hundreds of companies all over the world. We have seen retailers being able to predict what their customers will order based on their previous order history, car manufactures using vehicle data to provide a better driving experience and even locally in Australia we have seen Domino's using AI to help grow their sales and store numbers. But what does this have to do with cybersecurity…….? Whether you are an organisation not yet using AI, or you are already experimenting with it, is important to protect the intellectual property that provides your organisation with the competitive edge.

The last few years have seen huge amounts of research and development invested in machine learning and AI. This will continue to be a focus for businesses of all sizes- from emerging startups to major IT companies. More and more of these early adopters will bring this technology into use for their consumer-facing services.