Israel's PointGrab has raised $7 million in funding for its sensors for smart buildings. The investors include lighting company Philips Lighting; Mitsubishi UFJ Capital Co. (MUCAP), a venture capital arm of Japan's largest financial group; and existing investors ABB Technology Ventures (ATV) and others. Israel-based PointGrab makes CogniPoint, a smart-sensing solution that detects people in buildings and shuts off lighting if there's no one around who needs it. The goal is to enable effective building management and save money through energy efficiency. By embedding deep learning neural networks technology into cost-effective, miniature, and connected optical sensing devices, PointGrab's CogniPoint sensing solution provides analytics in the detection of occupants' locations, count, and movements.

Masayoshi Son, one of the world's most successful investors, is putting his money behind the artificial intelligence revolution. Son, the world's 82nd richest man by Forbes' reckoning, leads Softbank, a Japanese telecommunications powerhouse that also holds investments in dozens of companies. The newest in the stable is ARM Holdings, developer of the chip designs that power nearly all phones, which Softbank acquired for $32 billion this year. Those ARM chips will help spread artificial intelligence and propel the world toward the so-called singularity, Son said, speaking Tuesday at ARM's developer conference here in Santa Clara, California. The singularity is the moment futurists envision when computing progress has accelerated to the point where we no longer can predict what's next for technology or humanity.

Salesforce Einstein has ushered in a new era of curiosity about AI. It wasn't the first commercial AI usage, and others will crop up alongside it, but the buzz these past couple of weeks is a surefire indication that companies are really considering AI as a viable technology for short-term gain as well as far-fetched, long-term big ideas. I look at the opportunity in front of us and I think to myself: "Yes! The energy is contagious, but with it comes more questions than answers. As marketers, what does it all mean?

There are more than 30 million research papers out there, and more than 3,000 papers are published every day. Put simply, you haven't a chance in hell to read all of them. So what's a poor researcher to do when set a challenge in a brand new field of research? Once the wave of blind panic and urge to drink copious amounts of gin has dissipated, you reach for a technology solution. Iris believes it has just the thing.

Want to watch this again later? Need to report the video? This feature is not available right now. Are you ready to inject your body with new Artificial Intelligence technology that will "spider web" your brain and turn you in a hybrid?

Hot on the heels of Bank of America's announcement yesterday that it is launching a new chatbot named Erica, Mastercard has unveiled its own personal finance bot named KAI at Money 20/20. Mastercard's artificial intelligence-powered bot responds to more than 1,000 queries about personal finances and other subjects. It was developed by Kasisto, a spinoff of Siri creator SRI International. Available to US consumers later this year, Mastercard KAI will converse about a customer's account history and account balance, as well as make payments, identify spending patterns and set alerts for specific kinds of spending. In addition to the Mastercard bot for banks, the financial services provider is also launching a bot for merchants.

Spookily powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems may work so well because their structure exploits the fundamental laws of the universe, new research suggests. The new findings may help answer a longstanding mystery about a class of artificial intelligence that employ a strategy called deep learning. These deep learning or deep neural network programs, as they're called, are algorithms that have many layers in which lower-level calculations feed into higher ones. Deep neural networks often perform astonishingly well at solving problems as complex as beating the world's best player of the strategy board game Go or classifying cat photos, yet know one fully understood why. It turns out, one reason may be that they are tapping into the very special properties of the physical world, said Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a co-author of the new research.

Idling in rush-hour traffic can be mind-numbing. It also carries other costs. Traffic congestion costs the U.S. economy $121 billion a year, mostly due to lost productivity, and produces about 25 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics Stephen Smith told the audience at a White House Frontiers Conference last week. In urban areas, drivers spend 40 percent of their time idling in traffic, he added. The big reason is that today's traffic signals are dumb.

IBM launched a series of Watson technologies to incorporate machine learning, a data platform, conversational tools called Virtual agent, more integration with MobileFirst for iOS apps and education efforts to boost the cognitive computing ecosystem. The barrage of announcements comes as IBM hosts a Watson conference in Las Vegas. IBM CEO Ginny Rometty will use a keynote speech to outline the Watson portfolio, ecosystem and customer base. Here's what you need to know. There are some things that machines are simply better at doing than humans, but humans still have plenty going for them.

Mitch and Freada Kapor have long been champions of equality. They talk about their hope for a more diverse tech workforce in Silicon Valley. Mitch was the man behind Lotus Notes and has gone on to be a big promoter of social issues. During those three intensive days spent brainstorming new technologies, she realized she was not the only one. Huaranca was one of just two Latinos in a room of 100 people.