It's here – a world in which helper robots live with us, get us through the day, and yes, become our trusted friend. Science fiction is becoming science fact. As sci-fi writer William Gibson has apparently noted: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed." The demand for helper robots is booming, and academia, industry and the military are working overtime to meet the need as a whole new industry gains momentum. The demand is fuelled by the existence of those boring, dirty and dangerous jobs that nonetheless need doing.

At the recent LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions' InterAction Share event in London, I shared with delegates my insight and advice in relation to the rise of smart technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots in the legal ecosystem and how these technologies are being, and will be, deployed in the industry. By addressing all of the above, it naturally led to my tackling the challenging question "what is the next legal frontier?" It's important to realise and understand that it is inevitable that the roles of lawyers, general counsel, marketers, business development, social media and CRM specialists etc. are going to change in light of such overwhelming technological advances. The question that is hotly debated today is whether advanced technologies will support or replace lawyers. Well, the research speaks volumes.

IBM (NYSE:IBM) is a company in transition. On the one hand, there are reorganizations and layoffs as the blue giant is transforming itself into a cloud-services company. On the other hand, there are flagship research projects such as Watson or the Quantum Experience as a foreshadowing of things to come in the next few years. I recently had the opportunity to ask IBM some questions about these projects and other things on my mind. This article contains said questions and IBM's answers.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from Indiana University, "We define robustness as a viable configuration's tendency to return to its prior configuration in response to perturbations, and plasticity as a viable configuration's tendency to change to other viable configurations. These properties are demonstrated and quantified in the model, allowing us to map a space of viable configurations and their possible transitions. Combining robustness and plasticity provides a measure of viability as the average expected survival time under ongoing perturbation, and allows us to measure how viability is affected as the configuration undergoes transitions."

A lab at University of Colorado Boulder studies the fluid mechanics of fragrances, as part of a nationwide project to build a robot that can smell. Boulder smells of peppermint…and crisp snow. The frozen water smells pure, as if still trapped in the clouds hanging just overhead. The sun glints off the Rocky Mountains, their iron musk mixes with mountain pine. Before crossing the road to enter the University of Colorado Boulder, a truck dashes by, muffling these scents with sulfuric exhaust.

Apple is set to unveil a new and improved Siri, the personal digital assistant, and widen its reach, to Mac computers and third-party apps. Philips Hue is now compatible with Apple Home Kit, meaning you can use Siri to control your lights. LOS ANGELES -- Siri is expected to expand beyond the iPhone and iPad to third-party apps and Macs, a move designed to hike the usefulness and IQ of Apple's personal digital assistant. Analysts who cover Apple predict an expanded role for Siri will be one highlight of Apple's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins Monday in San Francisco. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Robots are helping to keep the lights on in China's Anhui province. The robots look remarkably like Disney's lovable "Wall-E." Don't let that fool you, though. The machines are hard at work. Humans tell the robots what to keep an eye on, but the inspector bots do their job on their own.

You can almost hear the whooshing sound as the technology industry is sprinting to the marketplace with new solutions to help the enterprise garner useful and intelligent insights from their data. Analytics, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) delivered in a simplistic form is what companies are demanding. To meet this mandate, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) has developed Haven OnDemand, which offers the latest technology in a simplified platform for developers. Jeff Veis, VP of Big Data Platform Solutions, HP Software, at HPE, spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover 2016 Las Vegas to discuss Big Data and the needs of the enterprise. Furrier began the interview by asking Veis about the driving force behind the need for machine learning.

National Science foundation has given a four-year grant to Researchers from University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mount Holyoke College. This grant has been awarded for analysing images and data on the chemical composition of rocks and dust collected by NASA's Curiosity rover. Since 2012, the rover has been exploring a crater on Mars and has been sending lots of information through a process called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy. In this process, a laser is shone on a rock, which is heated to high temperatures and then the radiations are picked up by a small camera, which is placed on the rover and sent back to Earth for further studies and analysis. NVIDIA plays an important part in this processing.

Recently, neural networks have become the tool of choice for a variety of tough computer-science problems: Facebook uses them to identify faces in photos, Google uses them to identify everything in photos. Apple uses them to figure out what you're saying to Siri, and IBM uses them for operationalizing business unit synergies. Can neural networks help you find the emoji when you really need it? This post will outline some of the engineering behind Dango, allowing us to automatically learn from hundreds of millions of real-world uses of emoji, and distill this down to a tool small and fast enough to predict emoji for you in real time on your phone. Dango is a floating assistant that runs on your phone and predicts emoji, stickers and GIFs based on what you and your friends are writing in any app.