There is a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence (AI) and how to create computers capable of intelligent behavior. After years of steady but slow progress on making computers "smarter" at everyday tasks, a series of breakthroughs in the research community and industry have recently spurred momentum and investment in the development of this field. Today's AI is confined to narrow, specific tasks, and isn't anything like the general, adaptable intelligence that humans exhibit. Despite this, AI's influence on the world is growing. The rate of progress we have seen will have broad implications for fields ranging from healthcare to image- and voice-recognition.

Harold Cohen, artist and pioneer in the field of computer-generated art, died on April 27, 2016 at the age of 87. Cohen is the author of AARON, perhaps the longest-lived and certainly the most creative artificial intelligence program in daily use. Cohen viewed AARON as his collaborator. At times during their decades-long relationship, AARON was quite autonomous, responsible for the composition, coloring and other aspects of a work; more recently, AARON served Cohen by making drawings that Cohen would develop into paintings. Cohen's death is the end of a lengthy partnership between an artist and an artificial intelligence.

Google may have DeepMind, but Baidu, China's homegrown Google, has Deep Speech. Deep Speech, which debuted in December 2015, is a speech recognition system that uses an artificial neural network to translate audio input directly to transcribed output. By contrast, most speech recognition systems, including Siri, use multiple, engineer-crafted steps to make translations. The system has learned how to recognize and transcribe both English and Mandarin, and according to a Baidu paper released in February 2016, it has a recognition rate that is more accurate than most native Mandarin speakers. Baidu announced earlier in April that it will begin rolling out the deep speech technology in collaboration with Peel, a smart remote app that will be available in both English and Mandarin for Android, followed by iOS.

About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

In his first letter to company shareholders, Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, said that devices will become a thing of the past, and that computing will be driven by artificial intelligence. He said that the next wave is all about machine learning. The letter outlines how the search giant plans to win with artificial intelligence. Now that Pichai is running the Mountain View Internet firm, the founders are letting him write their letter, too. Re/code noted that while the letter does not really contain anything mind-blowing or new, it reveals areas of focus for the famously unfocused tech firm.

Google and Fiat Chrysler engineers will work together to fit Google's autonomous driving technology into the Pacifica minivan. Some engineers for both companies will work together at a facility in Southeast Michigan, where Fiat Chrysler has its major North American engineering centre, the companies said. Google said it is not sharing proprietary self-driving vehicle technology with Fiat Chrysler, however, and the vehicles will not be offered for sale to the public. The agreement between Google and Fiat Chrysler comes as rival technology and auto companies are accelerating efforts to master the complex hardware and artificial intelligence systems required to allow vehicles to pilot themselves. General Motors Co in March agreed to acquire San Francisco self-driving car startup Cruise Automation .

The next NASA Mars rover boasts an important mission – finding traces of previous life – but it has a budget about 1 billion less than its predecessor, Curiosity. Despite the limited cash flow, NASA intends to improve various aspects of the new rover, including its robotic arms and landing mechanisms. Sierra Nevada Corporation's (SNC) Space Systems announced Monday it had been awarded a contract to build these new parts for the budget rover, marking the 13th time SNC has supplied equipment and parts for a mission that will reach the red planet. "Sierra Nevada has been a terrific partner on our planetary robotic missions for a long time now," said Matt Wallace, Mars 2020 deputy project manager, in a phone interview with The Christian Science Monitor. "They were the obvious first choice."

It's no secret that quantum computers could render many of today's encryption methods useless, and now the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology wants the public to help it head off that threat. The federal agency recently published a report focusing on cryptography in a quantum world that outlines a long-term approach for avoiding the problem before it happens. "There has been a lot of research into quantum computers in recent years, and everyone from major computer companies to the government want their cryptographic algorithms to be what we call'quantum resistant,'" said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody. "So if and when someone does build a large-scale quantum computer, we want to have algorithms in place that it can't crack." Encryption often relies on the challenge of factoring large numbers to ensure security, but researchers at MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria recently demonstrated what they said is the first five-atom quantum computer capable of cracking such encryption schemes.

Alphabet's Google Self-Driving Car Project has teamed with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to work directly for the first time with an automaker on developing autonomous vehicles. Under a deal announced Tuesday, Google said it plans to more than double its fleet of self-driving vehicles with the addition initially of about 100 new 2017 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans. The Internet company said it hopes that the first few minivans will be on the road by year end. In a market that was increasingly appearing as one in which Google and other tech companies would take on the traditional automakers, the deal between Google and FCA involves a collaboration between engineering teams that Google said "will help both teams better understand how to create a fully self-driving car that can take you from A to B with the touch of a button." Google did not disclose the financial terms of the deal or whether it could lead to a long-term partnership.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV agreed to incorporate Alphabet's self-driving technology into 100 Chrysler minivans, significantly expanding the tech giant's test fleet of driverless vehicles and marking its first partnership with a major auto maker. Alphabet and Fiat Chrysler engineers will collaborate in Michigan to redesign the 2017 Pacifica Hybrid minivan to integrate Alphabet's computers, sensors and software, the companies said. The minivans, like Alphabet's other self-driving cars, will be solely for testing. Alphabet aims to have the first driverless minivans on the road by year's end but declined to provide a timeline for all 100 vehicles. By expanding the test fleet, the agreement will help Alphabet's quest to automate the world's vehicles.