The initiative will be driven by a government-wide partnership comprising NRF, the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO), the Economic Development Board (EDB), the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), SGInnovate, and the Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS). AI:SG will bring together research institutions, AI start-ups and companies developing AI products, to grow knowledge, create tools and develop talent to power Singapore's AI efforts. AI.SG will work with companies to use AI to raise productivity, create new products, and translate and commercialize solutions from labs to the market. Mr Tan Kok Yam, Deputy Secretary, Smart Nation and Digital Government Office, said: "Through AI.SG, we intend to work with AI research performers, start-ups and companies to audaciously tackle tough challenges in areas such as transportation and urban management.

Five years ago, researchers made a sudden leap in the accuracy of software that can interpret images. The technology behind it, artificial neural networks, underpins the recent boom in artificial intelligence (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). Yann LeCun, director of Facebook's AI research group and a professor at New York University, helped pioneer the use of neural networks for machine vision. That's what would allow them to acquire common sense, in the end.

And last year, one tech company, Alphabet's Google, published papers in all of them. According to the tally Google provided to MIT Technology Review, it published 218 journal or conference papers on machine learning in 2016, nearly twice as many as it did two years ago. "The top people care about advancing the world, and that means writing papers the world can use, and writing code the world can use." So when Apple hired computer scientist Russ Salakhutdinov from Carnegie Mellon last year as its new head of AI, he was immediately allowed to break Apple's code of secrecy by blogging and giving talks.

And last year, one tech company, Alphabet's Google, published papers in all of them. According to the tally Google provided to MIT Technology Review, it published 218 journal or conference papers on machine learning in 2016, nearly twice as many as it did two years ago. "The top people care about advancing the world, and that means writing papers the world can use, and write code the world can use." So when Apple hired computer scientist Russ Salakhutdinov from Carnegie Mellon last year as its new head of AI, he was immediately allowed to break Apple's code of secrecy by blogging and giving talks.

And last year, one tech company, Alphabet's Google, published papers in all of them. According to the tally Google provided to MIT Technology Review, it published 218 journal or conference papers on machine learning in 2016, nearly twice as many as it did two years ago. "The top people care about advancing the world, and that means writing papers the world can use, and write code the world can use." So when Apple hired computer scientist Russ Salakhutdinov from Carnegie Mellon last year as its new head of AI, he was immediately allowed to break Apple's code of secrecy by blogging and giving talks.

The likes of China -- who among other things is building cruise missiles with a certain degree of autonomy -- are nipping away at America's heels. The Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the centre of its strategy to maintain the United States' position as the world's dominant military power, earmarking $US18 billion ($23.5 billion) over the next three years for developing the technology. Speaking from San Francisco ahead of a major AI industry conference, Prof Walsh said unlike previous arms races, much of the progress in AI development was being made by private corporations. "It's the same sort of technology that is going to go into autonomous cars which is going to be a good thing ... but giving it the right to make life or death decisions (in the battlefield) is probably a bad idea," Prof Walsh said.

How can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help companies operate in the 21st century? And, when Ardire talks about Machine Intelligence, he means intelligent computers "that process data for pattern discovery, discern context, make inferences, reasons, learns, and improves over time" without supervision by humans. According to the study, for 80 percent of enterprise executives artificial intelligence makes workers more productive and creates new jobs. "Powerful Artificial Intelligence can help make sense of the conversations people have on their networks."

Frey is a co-founder of Deep Genomics, a professor at the University of Toronto and a co-founder of its Machine Learning Group, a senior fellow of the Neural Computation program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. My team studied learning and inference in deep architectures, using algorithms based on variational methods, message passing, and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. My group's approach was inspired by Beer and Tavazoie's work, but differed in three ways: we examined mammalian cells, we used more advanced machine learning techniques, and we focused on splicing instead of transcription. We built a framework for extracting biological features from genomic sequences, pre-processing the noisy experimental data, and training machine learning techniques to predict splicing patterns from DNA.

Our analysis includes companies applying AI algorithms to verticals like healthcare, security, advertising, and finance as well as those developing general-purpose AI tech. Our analysis includes all equity funding rounds and convertible notes. In addition, auto tech company and unicorn Zoox raised $200M in Series A in Q2'16 and cybersecurity startup StackPath raised a $180M private equity round in Q3'16. Last quarter also saw 4 mega-rounds: $130M Series B round raised by life science startup Zymergen, $120M Series B round raised by computer vision startup SenseTime, $100M Series C round raised by facial recognition startup Face, and a $100M round raised by Israel-based Voyager Labs.

One particular challenge is to ground human language to robot internal representation of the physical world. Although copresent in a shared environment, humans and robots have mismatched capabilities in reasoning, perception, and action. A robot not only needs to incorporate collaborative effort from human partners to better connect human language to its own representation, but also needs to make extra collaborative effort to communicate its representation in language that humans can understand. This article gives a brief introduction to this research effort and discusses several collaborative approaches to grounding language to perception and action.