It was probably the HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, that introduced the concept of AIs to the general public. But that was almost 40 years ago, and examining the more recent times, we have to look no further than in our own pockets to find the AIs that paved the way for the current hype: smartphones' digital assistants. Sure, there has been things like Cleverbot around earlier, but nothing has been as widely spread as these digital assistants. The main difference between a chatbot and a digital assistant is that former responds (be default) only to written queries, and the latter is capable to understand (at least to some extend) more natural, spoken queries. Things like voice activated searches and speech recognition softwares have been around for quite some time, but these digital assistants take the concept a step further by engaging in dialogue, performing tasks such as booking flights or setting up location based reminders, and they can even tell you a joke if you ask one.

AlphaGo, Google's artificially intelligent computer program, beat a professional human Go player last October in 4 out of 5 matches. Go is a very complex board game to master and has been around since the 1000s. The game requires the players to think ahead a few moves and consider what the opponent might or might not do. Tasks that involve a lot of decision-making or snap decisions have typically been difficult for computers to achieve. AlphaGo is helping to break that barrier.

Poaching is one of the greatest threats in the conservation of wildlife, and even patrol rangers' extreme efforts are not enough to completely fend off poachers, especially in very large protected areas. "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active, and habitual," said Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at the University of Southern California, in a statement. With these in mind, researchers, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, have developed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based application employing game theory to efficiently map out patrol routes and areas. According to the press release of National Science Foundation, game theory uses mathematical and computer models of conflict and cooperation between rational decision-makers to predict the behavior of adversaries and plan optimal approaches for containment. The application, dubbed "Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security" or PAWS, uses mathematical models to effectively analyze data from previous patrols and evidence of poaching.

So, you bought into the current machine learning craze and went on to collect millions/billions of records from this promising new data source. Now, what do you do with them? Too often, the abundance of data quickly turns into an abundance of problems. How do you extract that "magic essence" from your data without falling into the common pitfalls? In her session at @ThingsExpo, Natalia Ponomareva, Software Engineer at Google, will provide tips on how to be successful in large scale machine learning.

Jia Yeuting may be a relative unknown in the rarefied world of Silicon Valley but the billionaire Chinese businessman in charge of the conglomerate LeEco -- which is also funding Faraday Future -- is not afraid to ruffle some pretty big feathers, taking aim at both Apple and Tesla in his first interviews with Western media. Jia called Apple "outdated," claiming the reason for Apple's slowing growth in the key Chinese market was down to a lack of innovation from the iPhone maker, pointing to the launch of the iPhone SE as an example. "From an industry insider's perspective, this is a product with a very low level of technology," Jia told CNBC. "We think this is something they just shouldn't have done." Not content with take aim at Apple, Jia, who last week launched LeEco's first self-driving car, also took aim at Tesla, saying his company would eclipse Elon Musk's electric vehicle efforts.

I'm impressed with Tyler Vigen for his work popularizing Spurious Correlations. He has found an effective way to convey an important message. Namely that correlation does not equal causation. Lots of things are correlated but that doesn't mean that they have anything to do with each other. To create his graphs Vigen indulges in "Data Dredging… a technique used to find something that correlates with one variable by comparing it to hundreds of other variables" (Vigen, 2015, page xii).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the buzzword in almost all industries. Decision-makers want to make use of massive data they get from various sources. This is where data analytics and artificial intelligence come into play. According to Reportbuyer, the AI market is estimated to grow to 5.05 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 53.65 per cent from 2015 to 2020. This growth can be attributed to factors such as diversified application areas, improved productivity and increased customer satisfaction. The AI market in APAC is expected to grow at the highest CAGR between 2015 and 2020.

The world's largest ad agency has hired its first artificially intelligent creative director – the rookie at McCann Erickson's Japan office is named AI-CD?. The move reminded me of an episode in the US TV series Mad Men. It is 1969, and the fictional ad agency installs its first computer, a room-filling IBM machine. "Why not let every client who sets foot in that door know that this agency has entered the future?" says one of the partners at the firm, proudly. The creative department stands grimly by, wondering if that future will include them. In 2013, Oxford economists released a widely cited projection that 47 per cent of jobs were at risk of automation.

Hanson Robotics touted their android, Sophia, at this year's SWXW in Austin, Texas. The android is arguably the most human like robot to date, capable of masking 62 different facial expressions. Fundamentally, Sophia was designed to be "as conscious, creative and capable as any human," according to to CEO of Hanson Robotics, David Hanson. In addition to her various facial expressions, Sophia can recognize people, hold eye contact, carry on intelligent conversations with speech recognition software and is even capable of learning. Sophia is clothed in a patented silicon skin called Frubber, an elastic form of rubber used in robotics.

Microsoft researchers have come up with a novel way of getting computers to tell stories about what's happening in multiple photographs by using artificial intelligence (AI). Today the company is publishing an academic paper (PDF) describing the technology, which could one day power services that are especially useful to the visually impaired. Microsoft is also releasing the photos, captions, and "stories" developed in the research. The new capability is significant because it goes well beyond just identifying objects in images, or even videos, in order to generate captions. "It's still hard to evaluate, but minimally you want to get the most important things in a dimension. With storytelling, a lot more that comes in is about what the background is and what sort of stuff might have been happening around the event," Microsoft researcher Margaret Mitchell told VentureBeat in an interview.