Virtual assistant technology is rapidly spreading on smartphones and other devices, but there's a new player in the field that has caught the attention of Silicon Valley. Dag Kittlaus, one of the masterminds behind Siri, now the ubiquitous helper available on Apple products, is looking to push the boundaries of what a virtual assistant can do with his new product, dubbed "Viv" and powered by artificial intelligence. For eight months, a CNET team tested more than 40 smart home products in a first-of-its-kind "living laboratory." "So at its essence, most of the assistants that we use today do a few dozen things, so we want to open the system up and let developers build hundreds and thousands of times the number of capabilities," Kittlaus said. "So really it's an opening up of the system and letting the world teach it."

Popular search engines are great at finding answers for point-of-fact questions like the elevation of Mount Everest or current movies running at local theaters. They are not, however, very good at answering what-if or predictive questions--questions that depend on multiple variables, such as "What influences the stock market?" In many cases that shortcoming is not for lack of relevant data. Rather, what's missing are empirical models of complex processes that influence the behavior and impact of those data elements. In a world in which scientists, policymakers and others are awash in data, the inability to construct reliable models that can deliver insights from that raw information has become an acute limitation for planners.

Boštjan Kaluža, PhD, is a researcher in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Boštjan is the chief data scientist at Evolven, a leading IT operations analytics company, focusing on configuration and change management. He works with machine learning, predictive analytics, pattern mining, and anomaly detection to turn data into understandable relevant information and actionable insight. Prior to Evolven, Boštjan served as a senior researcher in the department of intelligent systems at the Jozef Stefan Institute, a leading Slovenian scientific research institution, and led research projects involving pattern and anomaly detection, ubiquitous computing, and multi-agent systems. Boštjan was also a visiting researcher at the University of Southern California, where he studied suspicious and anomalous agent behavior in the context of security applications.

Google is starting to piece together a cloud platform strategy beyond just being a lower-cost option than the competition, but it's a considerable risk, banking on a set of services many enterprises likely won't use for years to come. Machine learning and deep analytics are the latest trend to gain attention in the cloud market, and Google has latched on wholeheartedly -- it sees these tools a way to differentiate in the market, by externalizing what has driven it to be one of the largest corporations in the world. The most full-throated endorsement of this strategy emerged at the GCP Next user conference back in March. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., talked in broad strokes about creating an Internet operating system, adding that in five years every major IPO will be for companies using machine learning. "The platform is not the end, it's the bottom and above it is machine learning," Schmidt said.

By now you've probably heard the story of Tay, Microsoft's social AI experiment that went from "friendly millennial girl" to genocidal misogynist in less than a day. While Tay promised to learn from her interactions with people online, Microsoft apparently hasn't learned anything from the countless headlines about how Twitter users like to talk to visible women – everything from gleefully anarchic trolling to threats and abuse – otherwise it would have seen this coming. At first, Tay's story seems like a fun one for anyone who's interested in cautionary sci-fi. What does it mean for the future of artificial intelligence if a bot can embody the worst aspects of digital culture after just 16 hours online? If any AI is given the vastness of human creation to study at lightning speed, will it inevitably turn evil?

Quantum computing refers to exponential increases in processing power made possible in part by exploiting the probabilistic nature of physics, Rubin said yesterday at Bloomberg's Tech Conference in San Francisco. "If you have computing that is as powerful as this could be, you might only need one [machine]," he said. "It might not be something you carry around; it just has to be conscious." Rubin (pictured above) has a stake in bringing his theoretical ideas to life. His investment fund, Playground Global, is helping to fund companies trying to turn his quantum predictions into reality.

IBM has teamed up with an electric vehicle company to put its Watson artificial intelligence into a driverless electric bus. Dubbed Olli, the autonomous vehicle will be used to take passengers around Washington DC, and is the brainchild of Local Motors, the Arizona-based automaker. It said its bus is the first vehicle to use IBM Watson's car-focused cognitive learning platform, Watson Internet of Things (IoT) for Automotive. Local Motors unveiled the bus at its new facility in National Harbor, Maryland, 12 miles from the US capital. The bus itself is 3D-printed and can carry up to 12 people and is powered by an electric motor.

A 25-year-old Erik Spoelstra used to sit in a storage room in the old Miami Arena, evaluating hours of game film to review player performance as an entry-level NBA video coordinator. Eventually, he climbed out of the audio visual muck to become head coach of the NBA's Miami Heat, where he would go on to win two championships. It's a classic story of rags to riches--rising from junior video coordinator to head coach in about 13 years--and it may now be unlikely to ever happen again, as computers take over the position that gave Spoelstra his start. "If an AI were fed videos of a huge number of past NBA games, and were smart enough to understand the events occurring in the games, then it could do a better job at making tactical basketball decisions like choosing starting lineups," said Ben Goertzel, a prominent futurist and lead researcher in the OpenCog AI lab at Hong Kong's Polytechnic University. "As AIs with robust video understanding become widespread, I'd expect that we could see AI sports assistants start to play a serious role," he said.

Kaname Hayashi is known as the "Father of Pepper." Hayashi is the "father of Pepper," the charming humanoid robot from Japanese carrier SoftBank Mobile and French company Aldebaran Robotics. Pepper, with its circular doe eyes and welcoming smile, is billed as a robot that can read your emotions. It's available for sale and has even enrolled in school. Like any proud parent whose kids leave home, Hayashi had a void to fill.

Local Motors, well known for the crowdsourced Rally Fighter off-road coupe, has been diversifying lately. After starting some 3D-printed projects, it has gone in yet another direction, announcing the Olli, an electric minibus that looks like a large phonebooth that's been tipped on its side. Local Motors refers to the vehicle as a shuttle it will transport up to 12 people from location to location along a pre-set route. The plan is to allow an Olli to be summoned using an app or a kiosk. It uses lidar, cameras, and GPS to move along its route, making adjustments as needed to avoid collisions.