It's almost a given that you'll ride in an autonomous car at some point in your life, and when you do, the AI controlling it just might have honed its skills playing Minecraft. It sounds crazy, but open-world games like Minecraft are a fantastic tool for teaching learning algorithms--which power the next generation of advanced artificial intelligence--how to understand and navigate three-dimensional spaces. Achieving that is a major stepping stone toward creating AI that can interact with the real world in complex ways. It's easy to consider videogames mindless escapism, but because they generate such vast amounts of information--think of the expansive world players create in Minecraft--they are exceptionally well suited to teaching an AI how to perceive the world and interact with it. "It's hard for a human to teach AI," says Xerox researcher Adrian Gaidon, because they are "worse than the worst toddlers in the world--you have to explain everything."

Alex Gianturco was a successful corporate lawyer based in Washington, D.C. Then, in 2011, he gave up his day job at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and focused all his efforts on his other passion: being a space pirate. Known as The Mittani within the virtual world of "Eve Online," Gianturco commands an army of 40,000 space pilots loyal to his Imperium coalition. He has a trusted band of lieutenants and uses propaganda, espionage and deception to retain his position as the game's most powerful player, describing himself as the Vladimir Putin of the "Eve" universe. He has even leveraged his position to earn a living from "Eve Online," setting up his own website and even renting out his army of mercenaries to other video games.

During the Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit in London last week we hosted the'Shaping Tomorrow' startup session to showcase innovative startups applying cutting-edge deep learning algorithms and tools to advance healthcare and medicine. Daria Danilina, an MBA student from London Business School, attended the event and kindly summarised the startup presentations. Key take-away: Humans are trained to identify certain patterns. However, we tend to overlook things which we do not expect to see or are not trained to detect. In addition to this, anomalies exist that are impossible to identify for human eyes, such as tumours composed of soft tissue.

At Facebook's F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company's head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask for help shopping, or the latest headlines. The chatbots aren't very good, but that doesn't mean Facebook isn't proud of them anyway: "I guarantee you're going to spend way more money than you want on this," Marcus chuckled on stage. But even though Facebook might want to sell itself as the pioneer of chatbots, the real leaders in the field aren't working in the AI research teams of silicon valley; they're collaborating at events like last week's BotSummit in the V&A, or this weekend's Art of Bots exhibition in Somerset House. Move over chatbots: it's time to meet the artbots. BotSummit, now in its fourth year but held outside the US for the first time, is the creation of internet artist Darius Kazemi, whose medium he describes as "bots and generators and other weird internet stuff".

The "Artificial Intelligence Market" report provides analysis of the global artificial intelligence market for the period 2014–2024, wherein the years from 2016 to 2024 is the forecast period and 2015 is considered as the base year. The report precisely covers all the major trends and technologies playing a major role in the artificial intelligence market's growth over the forecast period. It also highlights the drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected to influence the market growth during this period. The study provides a holistic perspective on the market's growth in terms of revenue (in US Bn), across different geographies, which includes Asia Pacific (APAC), Latin America (LATAM), North America, Europe, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). Moreover, the report provides the overview of various strategies and the winning imperatives of the key players in the artificial intelligence market and analyzes their behavior in the prevailing market dynamics.

Demis Hassabis has a modest demeanour and an unassuming countenance, but he is deadly serious when he tells me he is on a mission to "solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else". Coming from almost anyone else, the statement would be laughable; from him, not so much. Hassabis is the 39-year-old former chess master and video-games designer whose artificial intelligence research start-up, DeepMind, was bought by Google in 2014 for a reported 625 million. He is the son of immigrants, attended a state comprehensive in Finchley and holds degrees from Cambridge and UCL in computer science and cognitive neuroscience. A "visionary" manager, according to those who work with him, Hassabis also reckons he has found a way to "make science research efficient" and says he is leading an "Apollo programme for the 21st century". He's the sort of normal-looking bloke you wouldn't look twice at on the street, but Tim Berners-Lee once described him to me as one of the smartest human beings on the planet. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, of course, every time we interrogate Siri or get a recommendation on Android. And in the short term, Google products will surely benefit from Hassabis's research, even if improvements in personalisation, search, YouTube, and speech and facial recognition are not presented as "AI" as such. "It's just stuff that works.") In the longer term, though, the technology he is developing is about more than emotional robots and smarter phones.

The MSLGROUP goes to SXSW every year with digital specialists from all over the world – Germany, France, India, Singapore, Brazil, the US, etc. – to network, witness new trends, collaborate and share ideas. MSL Germany's Adrian Rosenthal, Head of Digital & Social Media, and Heiko Geibig, Head of Consumer Practice, joined the world's biggest conference on digital technologies this year. They had a closer look at the communication trends and give an overview about the meta trends of the SXSW 2016: 1. Virtual Reality 2. Social Messaging 3. Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Get in touch with us for any further inquiries: Adrian Rosenthal – Head of Digital & Social Media 030 820 82-522 adrian.rosenthal@mslgroup.com Heiko Geibig – Head of Consumer Practice 030 820 82-579 heiko.geibig@mslgroup.com

Stocks turned lower on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Friday, pressured by selling on a rally after the recent sharp advance. The 225-issue Nikkei average lost 63.02 points, or 0.37 percent, to end at 16,848.03. On Thursday, the key market gauge jumped 529.83 points to a two-week high. The Topix index of all first-section issues finished down 9.95 points, or 0.73 percent, at 1,361.40, after advancing 38.91 points the previous day. Tokyo stocks got off to a weaker start after the Nikkei average shot up more than 1,100 points, or over 7 percent, during the previous three days.

The government plans to propose basic rules for the research and development of artificial intelligence at a Group of Seven meeting of ministers in charge of information and communication technology later this month, sources said Friday. The envisioned proposal is expected to seek the establishment of eight principles, including the importance of respecting human dignity and protecting privacy when developing computer science that gives machines humanlike intelligence. Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Sanae Takaichi is expected to present the eight principles at the two-day G-7 meeting starting on April 29 in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, and call for deeper discussions involving international organizations such as the OECD. Artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where Google's AI program AlphaGo was recently able to defeat a Go grandmaster for the first time. AI technologies are expected to generate an economic return of around 121 trillion in Japan by 2045, according to an estimate that the government plans to present to the G-7 meeting.

Watching 3D films is already an immersive experience but a new projector promises to make it more of a physical activity too. XGIMI's Z4 Aurora projector features sensors that detect movement, allowing users to turn up the volume with a twirl of a finger or skip forward or backwards with the wave of a hand. The device features built-in Harman Kardon speakers to produce stereo quality sound and can stream movies sent to it from your phone or laptop using AirPlay and Miracast. The Z4 Aurora (pictured) claims to be the world's first gesture-controlled projector with a built in stereo. China-based XGIMI has designed the projector so it looks more like a turntable, meaning it can blend in more easily in the average living room.