In the Game of Thrones-like artificial intelligence competition between Houses Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the company most reticent to speak about its technology has usually been the one that ships planeloads full of stuff to consumers, hosts thousands of companies in its data centers, greenlit Catastrophe, and has a breakaway hit product that answers questions, plays music, and 4,998 or so other things. Yes, for some time, Amazon has been even more shrouded than the famously secret Apple, which opened up about its machine learning programs earlier this year. Lately, however, Amazon's head scientist and vice president of Alexa, Rohit Prasad, has been speaking up in public, making the case for his company's prowess in voice recognition and natural language understanding. Alexa, of course, is the conversational platform that supports that aforementioned hit product, Echo. Today Prasad is giving an Alexa "State of the Union" address at the Amazon Web Services conference in Las Vegas, announcing an improved version of the Alexa Skills Kit, which helps developers create the equivalent of apps for the platform; a beefed-up Alexa Voice Service, which will make it easier to transform third-party devices like refrigerators and cars into Alexa bots; a partnership with Intel; and the Alexa Accelerator that, with the startup incubator Techstars, will run a 13-week program to help newcomers build Alexa skills.

Several years ago, I attended a Buddhist retreat in which I was introduced to the idea of the "retinue," a constellation of influential and supportive people whom one imagines in an enveloping cloud as one meditates. I took the concept one step further and decided to create an actual photo montage that I could hang on the wall above my desk: my childhood piano teacher, my high school English teacher, my rabbi, mentors in science, writers who encouraged me--in all, 20 people who had profoundly influenced me. Some members of my retinue were still living, some not. In some cases I could find the photographs myself. In others, I had to contact the mentors. When I finally tracked down William Gerace, who introduced me to physics nearly 50 years ago, he was puzzled as to why I should desire such a montage. We had not spoken for decades. Reluctantly, he sent me an old, out-of-focus photo of himself, dating back to the days when I knew him. Now, Gerace is a professor of science education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, after a 30-year career as a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, during which time he made the transition from theoretical nuclear physicist to leader in science education and co-founder of the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. When I knew him, in the late 1960s, he was a lowly instructor in physics at Princeton, where he had recently received his Ph.D. I was an undergraduate. The photo shows a man in his late 20s, about 5 feet 6, slight in build, dark hair beginning to thin, dressed in a button-down shirt and blue sweater, and a Mona Lisa smile. Each new mathematical technique Bill taught us was offered with the enthusiasm of a 12-year-old boy showing his friend a strange new butterfly. I first met Bill Gerace during a physics lab my sophomore year.

The Witcher 3 doesn't really belong in a 2016 video game award ceremony. I'm excited to watch the 2016 Game Awards this evening. We're in for a few big game reveals and some gameplay footage for highly anticipated titles launching next year. That's all well and good, but I have a quibble with two of the nominees for Best RPG in this year's awards. Notice that here we have both The Witcher 3 and World of Warcaft occupying two of the five slots.

This year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) celebrates 50 years of the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious technical award in the computing industry. The Turing Award, generally regarded as the'Nobel Prize of computing', is an annual prize awarded to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". In celebration of the 50 year milestone, renowned computer scientist Melanie Mitchell spoke to CBR's Ellie Burns about artificial intelligence (AI) – the biggest breakthroughs, hurdles and myths surrounding the technology. EB: What are the most important examples of Artificial Intelligence in mainstream society today? MM: There are many important examples of AI in the mainstream; some very visible, others blended in so well with other methods that the AI part is nearly invisible.

Las Vegas: Marvin is just a few inches tall, but he has a big mouth. "What do you think of that, human?" he sneers as he ties the scores 1-1. "Is that the best you can do?" he jeers as he takes a 2-1 lead. "Oh no, IBM will fire me if I lose," he says, as the score is tied 2-2. The decisive move comes up, and Marvin is beaten.

I want to make one point, that this is on the record. But we're going to have a great time discussing "Robots and the Future of Jobs: The Economic Impact of Artificial Intelligence." So I'll start with simple introductions, and then we'll lay out some definitions about the kinds of terms that will be involved in this conversation. So my name is John Paul Farmer. Very happy to be here with three experts on the topic. Next to me is Dr. James Manyika, who is a recovering roboticist. And his day job is at McKinsey, at the McKinsey Global Institute, where he's been focusing on the future of jobs and the future of work in this new era. In the middle, we have Dr. Daniela Rus. Dr. Rus is a professor and roboticist at MIT, and she is also the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab there. And at the end, we have Edwin van Bommel. Edwin is formerly of McKinsey, but now he's the chief cognitive officer at IPsoft. So, with that, let me lay out some definitions that are going to be important, I think, to following this conversation. You may have read in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere about this fourth industrial revolution, the changes that are happening in our society today and many more that will be coming down the pike. So as we--as we talk about these things, one, we should all be on the same page in terms of what artificial intelligence is. What do we mean when we say AI? And the definition that many accept is it's the development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and even translation between languages. AI is sometimes humorously referred to as whatever computers can't do today. Machine learning is another term you're going to hear a lot, sometimes thought of as a rebranding of AI, of artificial intelligence. But there's one key difference, which is that it takes a much more probabilistic approach as opposed to deterministic. So it looks at not just yes or no; it looks at a 30 percent chance of X, a 10 percent chance of Y, and so on. Big data, a term that I think we've all heard. Data is the raw material. Some people call it the new oil for this new era.

We caught up with Stephen Boyle following the IBM Watson Health event he ran at our Digital Health and Wellbeing Festival to see how IBM Watson Health is using Cognitive Computing to change the face of healthcare. I'm also a nurse by background so I have a long clinical career. This is my thirtieth year in healthcare – which I shouldn't admit to anybody! My role really, is to start to think about how we can work with cognitive computing in healthcare to really make that difference that we're all trying to achieve. A: IBM Watson Health is part of the giant organisation that is IBM, we're the part that is looking to utilise cognitive computing in healthcare.

More than fifty years of research in molecular biology have demonstrated that the ability of small and large molecules to interact with one another and propagate the cellular processes in the living cell lies in the ability of these molecules to assume and switch between specific structures under physiological conditions. Elucidating biomolecular structure and dynamics at equilibrium is therefore fundamental to furthering our understanding of biological function, molecular mechanisms in the cell, our own biology, disease, and disease treatments. By now, there is a wealth of methods designed to elucidate biomolecular structure and dynamics contributed from diverse scientific communities. In this survey, we focus on recent methods contributed from the Robotics community that promise to address outstanding challenges regarding the disparate length and time scales that characterize dynamic molecular processes in the cell. In particular, we survey robotics-inspired methods designed to obtain efficient representations of structure spaces of molecules in isolation or in assemblies for the purpose of characterizing equilibrium structure and dynamics. While an exhaustive review is an impossible endeavor, this survey balances the description of important algorithmic contributions with a critical discussion of outstanding computational challenges. The objective is to spur further research to address outstanding challenges in modeling equilibrium biomolecular structure and dynamics.

While many people in the world are worrying that robots will take over human jobs once artificial intelligence (AI) is fully developed, it's a safe bet that no one put "author" at the top of the robot job list. Yet, now that a Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize, it seems that no occupation is safe. The robot-written novel didn't win the competition's final prize, but who's to say it won't improve in its next attempt? The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn't enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close.

Marc Carrel-Billiard, Managing Director Global Technology R&D, AccentureBangalore: AI can double annual economic growth rates by 2035 by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine, according to Accenture Research. The impact of AI technologies on business is projected to boost labour productivity by up to 40 percent by fundamentally changing the way work is done and reinforcing people's role to drive growth in business. In an interview with ETCIO, Accenture's Managing Director Global Technology R&D, Marc Carrel-Billiard talks about company's technology labs and its focus areas, new technologies and its impact and key tech trends that CIOs and businesses need to look for and much more. Marc is with Accenture for the past 18 years and currently oversees the Accenture Technology Labs, Accenture Open Innovation, Accenture's global technology R&D organization which explores new and emerging technologies, across seven locations around the world. Which are the key technology domains that you are trying to focus on?