Government usually isn't the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia's chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation's push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens. "We want the government to be as lean as possible," says the wiry, bespectacled Velsberg, an Estonian who is writing his PhD thesis at Sweden's Umeå University on how to use AI in government services. Estonia's government hired Velsberg last August to run a new project to introduce AI into various ministries to streamline services offered to residents.

Computer scientists have found a way around Google's reCAPTCHA tests, tricking the system into thinking an artificial intelligence program is human. But there's a catch, although the AI system can fool the bot test it doesn't live-up to the promise its creators give it. CAPTCHAs are the tests used by websites to battle back against bots, asking website visitors to prove they're human before proceeding. The leading system is Google's reCAPTCHA, which has previously asked website visitors to prove their humanity by checking words scanned from books or photographs of street signs. That was replaced with behavioural analysis, requiring humans to simply tick a box proclaiming "I'm not a robot".

IBM has come up with a way to use quantum computers to improve machine learning algorithms, even though we don't have anything approaching a quantum computer yet. The tech giant developed and tested a quantum algorithm for machine learning with scientists from Oxford University and MIT, showing how quantum computers will be able to map data at a far more sophisticated level than any classical computer. Somewhat ironically, the testing was minimized based on the current hardware capabilities, using only two qubits of quantum computing capacity, which can be simulated on a classical computer.. There are no fully working quantum computers because qubits can't stay in an entangled state for more than a few hundred microseconds, even in carefully controlled laboratory conditions. They break down into decoherence and can no longer be used to perform calculations in parallel, the feature of quantum computing that will give it awesome processing power.

AI has a data quality problem. In a survey of 179 data scientists, over half identified addressing issues related to data quality as the biggest bottleneck in successful AI projects. Big data is so often improperly formatted, lacking metadata, or "dirty," meaning incomplete, incorrect, or inconsistent, that data scientists typically spend 80 percent of their time on cleaning and preparing data to make it usable, leaving them with just 20 percent of their time to focus on actually using data for analysis. This means organizations developing and using AI must devote huge amounts of resources to ensuring they have sufficient amounts of high-quality data so that their AI tools are not useless. As policymakers pursue national strategies to increase their competitiveness in AI, they should recognize that any country that wants to lead in AI must also lead in data quality.

An organization is only as good as its people, and therefore, effective human resource management is vital for the success of a business. This is the reason why millions upon millions of dollars are poured into HR efforts each and every year. Everyone wants the best piece of the talent cake. However, nothing comes without a struggle, and with the changing job market, alongside a widening skills gap, employers are starting to call for better and more effective ways to attract, acquire, and retain top talent. Artificial intelligence (commonly dubbed as AI) is here to answer that calling.

In medicine, diseases can be detected at a much earlier stage, and we can support the elderly to live a more independent life, simply by identifying deviations from their usual behaviour and body movements. The UK Government recently announced that AI could help the National Health Service predict those in an early stage of cancer, to ultimately prevent thousands of cancer-related deaths by 2033. The algorithms will examine medical records, habits and genetic information pooled from health charities, the NHS and AI. Virtual nurses could transform patient care, being available round the clock to answer questions, monitor patients and provide quick answers. Beyond healthcare, AI could inform a better allocation of resources in energy, logistics and transport, as well as support the digital advertising industry with more efficient marketing.

Artificial intelligence is your new insurance claims agent. For years, insurance companies have used "InsurTech" AI to underwrite risk. But until recently, the use of AI in claims handling was only theoretical. The advent of AI claims handling creates new risks for policyholders, but it also creates new opportunities for resourceful policyholders to uncover bad faith and encourage insurers to live up to their side of the insurance contract.Most readers are familiar with Lemonade, the InsurTech start-up that boasts a three-second AI claims review process. However, as noted in a Law360 article last year, Lemonade deferred any potential claim denials for human review, so the prospect of AI bad faith is still untested.

Machine learning algorithms process vast quantities of data and spot correlations, trends and anomalies, at levels far beyond even the brightest human mind. But as human intelligence relies on accurate information, so too do machines. Algorithms need training data to learn from. This training data is created, selected, collated and annotated by humans. And therein lies the problem.

On Monday, Apple is expected to announce something altogether different from its typical new products that consumers can touch and feel: A subscription service that in some ways resembles Amazon Prime and will include Apple's own films and television shows with Hollywood stars including Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and Steven Spielberg. Usually, when Apple holds big, splashy press events, it unveils a new product like the iPhone or the MacBook. For years, Apple's business has centered around the iPhone, but sales of that once-revolutionary but now commonplace device have slowed. And the entire world of computers has been flipped on its head. Apple has been diversifying beyond hardware, selling iCloud storage to its customers, a $10 a month music streaming service and movies and television shows through iTunes.

In the first days after a fleet of 25 delivery robots descended on George Mason University's campus in January, school officials could only speculate about the machines' long-term impact. The Igloo cooler-sized robots from the Bay Area start-up Starship Technologies -- which were designed to deliver food on demand across campus -- appeared to elicit curious glances and numerous photos, but not much else. It was clear, officials said at the time, that more time and more data would be necessary to understand whether the robots would actually change the campus culture or become a forgettable novelty. Today, some of that data emerged for the first time. In the two months since the robots arrived at the Fairfax, Va.-based school, an extra 1,500 breakfast orders have been delivered autonomously, according to Starship Technologies and Sodexo, a company that manages food services for GMU on contract and works closely with the robots.