President Barack Obama's administration believes that artificial intelligence can be a positive force in the United States, vastly improving specialized areas within health care, transportation, education and policing over the coming decades. In two reports released today, one day ahead of the White House Frontiers Conference, the Obama administration calls for long-term investments in AI research and a broad range of investigation into the ethics, security and uses of AI. The report also emphasizes the current limits of AI, noting that narrow AI systems have rapidly advanced over the past few years, but general-intelligence systems -- machines that learn and respond as humans do -- are decades away.

Apple will celebrate the iPhone's 10th anniversary next year, but in chief executive Tim Cook's view, the technology is anything but mature. The Nikkei Asian Review caught up with Cook aboard a bullet train last week and asked him about artificial intelligence, his plans for Asia, and the experience of succeeding Steve Jobs. Cook, who was visiting Japan for the first time as CEO, said Apple will open a research and development base in Yokohama, near Tokyo, later this year. The facility -- the first of its kind outside the U.S. -- will develop AI and other technologies. Cook described it as a center for "deep engineering" and said it will be "very different" from the R&D base Apple plans to build in China. "I cannot tell you the specifics," he said.

You can star alongside Leo when cinema enters its'karaoke' phase The blockbuster era will come to a close in about 2042 with the colossal failure of Jedi Transformers V Jurassic Avengers 12: Revenge Of The Minions, an expensive crossover epic that bankrupts all the Hollywood studios simultaneously. By that time, the idea of "going to the movies" will have evolved anyway. Films will no longer involve two hours sitting in a cinema, predicted futurologist Faith Popcorn in The Hollywood Reporter: "They'll be gameified and will unfold in real time all around you. You pay for a time slot, tune in your technology, and literally become one with the action. Endings and events will be changed as you go; smells, tastes, sensations will all be experienced live. Casts will be comprised of your own avatars; you will be the star."

In the movie Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays Dr Will Caster, a researcher in artificial intelligence at Berkeley trying to build a sentient computer. Stuart Russell is Will Caster's real life equivalent. He works on artificial intelligence at the University of California at Berkeley, and is co-author of the definitive textbook on AI. He has also been very vocal about the risks of research in AI succeeding. Earlier this year, Google's DeepMind taught a computer program to play a wide variety of Atari video games at a superhuman level in a matter of hours.

An automatic system is being developed to disseminate information to the various sections of any industrial, scientific or government organization. This intelligence system will utilize data-processing machines for auto-abstracting and auto-encoding of documents and for creating interest profiles for each of the "action points" in an organization. Both incoming and internally generated documents are automatically abstracted, characterized by a word pattern, and sent automatically to appropriate action points. This paper shows the flexibility of such a system in identifying known information, in finding who needs to know it and in disseminating it efficiently either in abstract form or as a complete document. The premise of BI systems has remained pretty much the same: to collect an organization's data from disparate sources and process it in the best possible way to produce useful information to -- and perhaps this is the most important part -- help decision makers to make the best informed decision for the benefit of an organization.

Watson, can you grow into a multibillion-dollar business and become the engine of IBM's resurgence? IBM is betting its future that the answer is yes. Its campaign to commercialize Watson, the company's version of artificial intelligence technology, stands out, even during the current A.I. frenzy in the tech industry. IBM has invested billions of dollars in its Watson business unit, created at the start of 2014, which now employs an estimated 10,000 workers. Its big-ticket marketing push includes clever television ads that feature Watson trading quips with famous people like Serena Williams and Bob Dylan.

Artificial intelligence, or "AI," is the current direction of technological innovation, but if the U.S. does not step up its game, another world power may lead the future. The number of journal articles mentioning "deep learning" or "deep neural networks" produced by China…

Rand Fishkin posted another brilliant Whiteboard Friday last week on the topic of optimizing for RankBrain. In it, he explained how RankBrain helps Google select and prioritize signals it uses for ranking. One of the most important signals Google takes into account is user engagement. As Rand noted, engagement is a "very, very important signal." Engagement is a huge but often ignored opportunity.

OpenAI wants to build the technology that will finally create a computer that can converse in a way that is indistinguishable humans. The nonprofit, backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, brought on NVIDIA's supercomputer DGX-1, which has 170 teraflops of computing power, to help hone machine learning systems to create algorithms that can comprehend language and teach robots to respond appropriately. That should solve one of the biggest hindrances to making AI systems that can learn complex interactions: the slowness of current computers. "The speed of our computers is in some sense the lifeblood of deep learning," OpenAI research director Ilya Sutskever in an NVIDIA video. The goal of this project is to allow a robot to become smart enough to not only recognize speech, but to also use the data it gathers to formulate appropriate responses on its own--and to do that, computers need to digest data more quickly than they are currently capable of. The DGX-1, which is optimized for an arm of machine learning called deep learning, can feed copious amounts of natural language data into OpenAI's network much quicker than ever before.

Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci robot is a technical marvel. Nearly half a million operations were performed in the U.S. by surgeons controlling its large, precise arms last year. One in four U.S. hospitals has one or more of the machines, which perform the majority of robotic surgeries worldwide and are credited with making minimally invasive surgery commonplace. But when executives from Verb Surgical, a secretive joint venture between Alphabet and Johnson & Johnson, presented at the robotics industry conference RoboBusiness late last month, they made the da Vinci sound lame. Intuitive's machine, with an average selling price of 1.54 million, is too expensive and bulky, they grumbled.