My colleague Harold Cohen, who has died aged 87, was a computer art pioneer and developer of the popular Aaron program. He was born in London, the son of Victor and Leah Cohen, who ran a general store and expected Harold to enter the family business. His passion, however, saw him enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he obtained a diploma in 1951. He then spent a year on a fellowship in Rome and came back to Britain to teach at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and at the University of Nottingham. Harold became well known in London as an abstract painter, representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, Documenta – the German modern art show – and other international exhibitions in the 1960s.

This isn't a far-fetched idea, and not just because robots have a long track-record of automating human labor. There are already algorithms that can write stories. Bots can easily be programmed to write other basic stories--things like box scores and real estate listings, even obituaries. In January, Wired had a news-writing bot produce a remembrance of Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence pioneer. The result was a little dry compared with the obituary for Minksy written by a human at The New York Times--but the machine version was decent.

Facebook is known for a variety of mantras embedded in its culture, often spelled out on signs at its offices or recited by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives: "Code wins arguments," "Move fast and break things," or "Done is better than perfect." A sign on the wall at the company's New York office perfectly sums up the approach Yann LeCun brings to his leadership of Facebook's nascent efforts in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning: "Always be Open." Artificial intelligence has become a vital part of scaling Facebook. It's already being used to recognize the faces of your friends in photographs, and curate your newsfeed. DeepText, an engine for reading text that was unveiled last week, can understand "with near-human accuracy" the content in thousands of posts per second, in more than 20 different languages. Soon, the text will be translated into a dozen different languages, automatically. Facebook is working on recognizing your voice and identifying people inside of videos so that you can fast forward to the moment when your friend walks into view. Facebook wants to dominate in AI and machine learning, just as it already does in social networking and instant messaging.

Why do you think technologies such as AI and predictive coding are apparently gaining momentum in term of their uptake in the UK legal market? First and foremost, the legal market isn't an isolated bubble. There is so much happening right now in the world at large about AI and cognitive computing that the legal market simply can't be immune. Our behaviours in the workplace are driven (and increasingly so) by our experiences in the rest of our lives, so when there's a constant stream of mainstream news about AI, it's inevitable that it must impact the legal market. Add into the mix a number of other legal market factors – the increasing price sensitivity of clients, the explosion in data, the long-standing feeling that there must be a better way to do repetitive knowledge tasks than simply adding more junior lawyers – and you've got the perfect conditions for these technologies to take hold.

The owner of a brand-new Tesla Model X SUV said the car suddenly accelerated at "maximum speed" by itself, jumped a curb and slammed into the side of a shopping mall while his wife was behind the wheel. The owner of the Model X, Puzant Ozbag, said the vehicle had been delivered only five days earlier to his home in Irvine, Calif., where the accident also took place. He said his wife had not activated any self-driving features at the time of the crash. "My wife is 45 years old and has had a driver's license almost 30 years and has a clean record. It's not like she's a 90-year-old person who's going to press the gas pedal instead of the brake," Ozbag said in an interview with Computerworld.

There is a lot of buzz in the media right now about new electric vehicle (EV) company Faraday Future (FF). The startup seemingly came out of nowhere and is currently making a huge impact on the EV world. Even with significant press and social media attention, FF is still secretive about its upcoming EV projects. Auto-blog giant, Jalopnik, published an article about just how "mysterious" the EV startup is. The company's intrigue stems not only from its uniquely designed concept car, the FFZERO1, but also from its leaders' forward thinking mentality regarding technological advancement – especially artificial intelligence (AI) – something that the automotive industry has barely tapped into.

Forget about interactive iPad newspapers, mobile apps and catchy television graphics. The future of news may be far less complicated than anyone could have imagined -- as simple as a conversation with a friend. We're on the cusp of a chatbot revolution, with tech giants Facebook, Google and Microsoft all competing to create the brainiest robotic agent powered by artificial intelligence. "We think you should be able to message a business in the same way you message a friend," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said, announcing the launch of a chatbot store during the social network's annual developers conference. "And you shouldn't have to install a new app."

BluVector is a next-generation machine-learning malware detection and cyber hunting solution. Kris Lovejoy has been recognized for a wide range of industry accolades, including SC Magazine's Reboot 25 issue in 2014 as one of the world's Top 25 Security Managers, a 2012 Compass Award Winner by CSO Magazine, an eWEEK 2012 Top Women in Information Security, a Top 25 CTO by InfoWorld, and a Top 25 Most Influential Security Exec by Security Magazine. Most recently, Lovejoy received the EWF 2015 Women of Influence Award, Private Solutions Provider. Lovejoy holds U.S. and EU patents for Object Oriented Risk Management Models and Methods.

Physicists are putting themselves out of a job, using artificial intelligence to run a complex experiment. The experiment, developed by physicists from The Australian National University (ANU) and UNSW ADFA, created an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, replicating the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize. "I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," said co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the Universe to run through all the combinations and work this out." Bose-Einstein condensates are some of the coldest places in the Universe, far colder than outer space, typically less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

It's the result of Google's Project Magenta, which aims to use machine learning to create music and art, and bridge the communities between those interests with coders and researchers. Here is the final product. You'll not believe, that it has been entirely composed by a machine! So, what do you think of this machine-made, sounds just like man-made music? It looks pretty impressive for the beginning but researchers are still exploring the possibility of taking it a step ahead.