Artificial intelligence, and technology in general, will have a crucial role to play in society's progress, that is the view of the UK and American governments anyway. This Thursday President Obama announced at the first White House Frontier Conference that more than $300 million in funding, through partnerships, will be released for tech innovations that will improve healthcare, develop smart cities and enhance America's space ambition. "We may be in a slightly different period now, simply because of the pervasive applicability of AI and other technologies," said President Obama in a video shown at the start of the conference. President Obama believes AI, in particular, will be able to help solve the biggest crises that face the world, such as disease, famine, climate change and economic inequality. Others, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, suggest AI's rise will be the biggest threat to the survival of the human race.

Should judges begin to feel fearful for their job security? According to a team of researchers, a new AI tool has been found to be highly accurate at predicting the outcome of European court cases. An AI judge that computes outcomes instead of a human jury has been the dystopian creation of science fiction writers for a number of years, but new developments suggest that they could be used in some capacity in future courts. According to University College London, a joint team of researchers from the US and the UK has developed a new AI method that is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court, by automatically analysing case text using a machine-learning algorithm. The international court in this case is the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and by churning the data obtained during these court cases from the cases brought by defendants and prosecutors, the AI was able to predict their outcomes 79pc of the time.

This year, artificial intelligence has taken center stage as a technology to watch. From Salesforce to IBM to Oracle to Microsoft, all technology providers have been honing some version of AI and machine learning technologies. Microsoft rolled out its latest iteration of services for AI at the Microsoft Ignite conference in September. At Ignite, the company outlined Microsoft artificial intelligence in four areas of technology: agents, applications, services and infrastructure. By bringing AI to these four areas, Microsoft is hoping to make applications like Outlook more intelligent, helping workers to find documents relevant to their meetings more easily.

IBM Chief Executive Ginni Rometty told CNBC on Wednesday that the company's artificial intelligence platform, Watson, will reach more than 1 billion consumers by the end of 2017. "This is a celebration of Watson really scaling," she said. "Through others, Watson is touching hundreds of millions of consumers, and by the end of next year it'll be a billion." Rometty was on site at IBM's World of Watson 2016 event in Las Vegas where the legacy technology company demonstrated how Watson can influence businesses in several different industries. General Motors CEO Mary Barra was at the event for the announcement of Watson joining On-Star in millions of cars in 2017.

CapitaLand unveil virtual concierge services for customers that allows them to hail rides, book restaurants, and browse retailer offerings by chatting with Sparkle – the Group's fully automated artificial intelligence chatbot. This is the first chatbot piloted by a real estate developer in Asia. The chatbot is among a series of new features released on CapitaStar, Singapore's multi-mall, multi-store card-less rewards programme. It is available for download from the App Store and Google Play. Grab, ride-hailing app company, has also signed on as a launch partner, to provide ride hailing services.

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Tech pundit Tim O'Reilly had just tried the new Google Photos app, and he was amazed by the depth of its artificial intelligence. O'Reilly was standing a few feet from Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page this past May, at a small cocktail reception for the press at the annual Google I/O conference--the centerpiece of the company's year. Google had unveiled its personal photos app earlier in the day, and O'Reilly marveled that if he typed something like "gravestone" into the search box, the app could find a photo of his uncle's grave, taken so long ago. Google is open sourcing software that sits at the heart of its empire. The app uses an increasingly powerful form of artificial intelligence called deep learning. By analyzing thousands of photos of gravestones, this AI technology can learn to identify a gravestone it has never seen before.

Guest blog post by Christopher Dole and other contributors, originally posted here. Deep Learning is one of the most revolutionary and disruptive technologies ever developed in Data Science. Essentially, this is a class of algorithms inspired by how the human brain works, and it has the ability to automate and replace most of the world's jobs. This is what enables self-driving cars to function and what allows Spotify to create very customized playlists and recommendations. This is how YouTube is able to identify faces and animals in videos and how Siri can understand and process free speech in milliseconds.

The term artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since the 1950s. However, it's only within the last five years that excitement about it has really begun to grow. This excitement is, in part, due to a new technique called'deep learning'. This is where artificial systems'learn' (in that they make and strengthen connections), through repeatedly working through large numbers of examples. The systems consist of networks of artificial'brain cells' (or neurons) that combine signals and send them between different layers within the network.

Note that the machine learning algorithm is better when you deliver more accurate data. To make the system more effective, you need to spend a few weeks manually indicating whether each payment is fraudulent or not.