For two straight quarters, deal activity in artificial intelligence has hit record highs. Dennis Mortensen is one of the biggest winners in all the craze. His startup x.ai is the creator of Amy Ingram, an AI-driven personal assistant that can schedule meetings for you. After testing Amy in beta for two years, Mortensen announced last week 23 million in Series B funding to bring Amy to market. Dennis Mortensen: AI used to be for academia only and decades-long research.

A recent study by researchers at Oxford University and consultants Deloitte may have given finance professionals pause for thought. It found that, based on the nature of their work and the expected advance of machine intelligence, it is 95% likely that charted accountants will be replaced by some form of automation over the next 20 years. That is a startling figure, but it should come as no surprise that the work of the finance department is ripe for automation. Since 2004 the median number of full-time employees working in the function at big companies has declined by 40% to about 71 people for every US 1bn of revenue, down from 119 people, according to Hackett Group, a consulting firm. This is due, in part at least, to the increased use of automation within the finance department, the researchers say.

Even the savviest city residents get lost sometimes. According to one estimate, 33% of New Yorkers have no idea which way is north at any given time. And anyone who has used Google Maps knows that GPS can be wildly unreliable. Could there be a better way to find your place on a map than by relying on satellite positioning and Wi-Fi triangulation? As highlighted on Prosthetic Knowledge, researchers at the University of Cambridge have created a promising neural network called PoseNet. From a single snapshot from wherever you stand, it can localize your position in just 5ms--that's about 60 times faster than it takes you to blink.

Major players in the tech industry including Google and Microsoft have bet big money on the rise of internet bots as a form of communication between man and machine. While not the eerily humanoid robots in sci-fi movies (yet), the advancement and refinement of the bots' mechanical psyche parallel to the development of robotic parts is one step closer to merging the two. That is if it hasn't happened already. Isaac Asimov was a prolific sci-fi writer and Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University and is regarded by many as the father of robotics. "The Three Laws of Robotics 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law; The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."?

Growing up in a small village in Vietnam, Quoc Le had no electricity till he was nine. A little over 20 years later he has helped design artificial intelligence used by millions everyday. The 32-year-old helps lead the Google Brain team, a specialised unit that attempts to give computers the kind of profound neural networks that human beings possess, or at least helps them simulate it. It is Google's attempt to build an artificial brain. It may not be humanoid-like machine that can think for itself that many will have in mind, but "intelligence" has already been integrated into Google products, the kinds of technology that Mr Le could only imagine as a child.

Economists have largely preferred to act within their own field and interpretations. However, the rise of big data challenges, data analytics, and machine learning is beginning to change all that. In the summer of 2015, Susan Athey, a Professor of Economics of Technology at Stanford attracted a crowd of over 250 economists for a one-day instructive session on machine learning. Historically, the discipline of economics has always been categorized among the social sciences, which means the word'science' should be understood as somewhat loosely applied. Unlike the natural sciences, which are prescribed as strictly positivist and bound by the ideals of empirical truth to only build theories around quantitative data that can be measured and duplicated, social sciences are often influenced by observations that are open to interpretation.

These strange-looking, two-legged robots might be the predecessor of a machine that someday helps with chores around the home. The bipedal bot, which has yet to be named, was developed by Schaft, a Japanese robotics company that is part of X, the research lab owned by Alphabet (previously Google). It was revealed at an event in Japan hosted by Andy Rubin, who started Google's robotics project before leaving the company at the end of 2014 to create his own hardware incubator. A video shot by someone at the event shows the robot carrying a heavy-looking gym weight, slipping on a tube without falling over, and cleaning a set of stairs with a vacuum cleaner brush attachment on its feet. It can also be seen walking through a forest and along a rocky beach.

It's been a busy month in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). In a face-off of man versus machine, the world champion of the Go board game lost to Google's AI program. And just last week, Microsoft unveiled a program designed to Tweet like a teenage girl -- only to have it devolve into praising Hitler and lambasting feminists. You've probably seen one of the many commercials featuring the IBM supercomputer Watson, which made waves a few years ago when it easily defeated two "Jeopardy!" Watson even analyzes trends in music now, as seen in a recent advertising spot featuring Bob Dylan.

An artist's rendering of Japan's new National Stadium, which will become the main venue for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. THE Olympic Games have long been used to showcase some of the world's newest technologies. From electronic stopwatches in Stockholm in 1912, to live television broadcasts in Berlin in 1936, to instant video replay at Salt Lake City in 2002 -- host cities have looked to stay at the cutting edge. But in four years, those innovations are going to look as ancient as the Games themselves as the most tech-savvy of nations -- Japan -- prepares to dazzle visitors and audiences across the globe with the most futuristic Olympics of them all. "The Olympic Games is a sports festival, but also it's a chance to show the innovation of scientific technologies," Tokyo's organising committee CEO Toshiro Muto said. "We have the potential to make this Olympic Games wonderful (and one) that the people of the world are going to admire."

Australia has warned the world that artificially intelligent killer robots "may be closer than many of us had imagined" and nations need to work harder to tackle the future threat they may pose. Is the Australian Defence Force the next big customer for unmanned aerial vehicles? At a United Nations meeting on "lethal autonomous weapons systems" in Geneva, Switzerland, the Australian delegation on Monday night called on the world to come up with agreed rules about how to handle the rapid pace in technology in military artificial intelligence. "The development of fully autonomous systems able to conduct military targeting operations which kill and injure combatants or civilians may be closer than many of us had imagined," the delegation's statement said. "It is an appropriate time to consider the risks of such weapons systems and to make sure we understand fully what might constitute misuse as well as legitimate use of emerging technologies."