New Zealand is being urged to act now to manage the rapid rise of robotics and artificial intelligence. Within 24 years there is a 50 percent chance artificial intelligence could be smarter than us. Within 60 years, it's almost guaranteed. Now a leading business group and law firm want the Government to set up a working group of leaders from all areas of business and society to tackle the opportunities and challenges AI represents. "AI is an extraordinary challenge for our future.'

Technology giants IBM ibm, Google googl, and seven others have joined hands to launch an open specification that can boost datacenter server performance by up to ten times, to take on Intel intc . The new standard, called Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (OpenCAPI), is an open forum to provide a high bandwidth, low latency open interface design specification. The open interface will help corporate and cloud data centers to speed up big data, machine learning, analytics and other emerging workloads. The consortium plans to make the OpenCAPI specification available to the public before the end of the year and expects servers and related products based on the new standard in the second half of 2017, it said in a statement. Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, is known to protect its server technologies and has chosen to sit out of the new consortium.

In 1996 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted. The Accountability portion of the law requires that healthcare providers protect the privacy of patient health information and includes security measures that must be followed. Provider success has been mixed and has recently come under intense scrutiny due to the number and size of reportable breaches of health information.

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote to leave, one of the Tweets that caught my eye was from founder and CEO of analyst firm HfS Research Phil Fersht, which simply said, "At least the British can stop worrying about robots taking their jobs. Just get rid of the jobs altogether…" While that may not be amusing as it plays out against our globalized economy, it demonstrates how this topic has taken hold of so many of us. About a year ago, I was asked to sit on a panel at the annual Constellation Research Connected Enterprise 2015 called "The Robots Are Here! The Future of HR Tech," to debate whether we're entering a dystopian existence where humans are the bottleneck to productivity and innovation or becoming a world of augmented humanity and digital humanization. It's a fact that major economic shifts have led to both marginalization, the downside, as well as great opportunity, clearly the upside.

Computational workloads are growing, and processors, memory, and storage are getting faster at a blazing pace. Emerging technologies could leave computers choking for bandwidth. The potential chokepoint worries companies like Google, IBM, Samsung, and Dell, which are moving to remedy the problem. New specifications from two new consortia will bring data unprecedented boosts in data transfer speeds to computers as early as next year. OpenCAPI Consortium's connector specification will bring significant bandwidth improvements inside computers.

Popular dating app Tinder announced Thursday that it is implementing a new Smart Photos algorithm, which alternates the first photos seen by others, notes each response as others swipe on your profile and changes the order of your photos to show the best ones first. "Smart Photos takes into account each individual's swiping pattern when selecting which of your photos they'll see first. It's a system that gets smarter with more input: the more you swipe and the more you're swiped on, the better the algorithm serves you. Yes, there's science behind the swipe," Tinder said on its official blog post. Smart Photos will continuously test users' profile photos for their success so that photos that are most likely to be swiped right will go to the front of your profile.

For many people, Google is simply the gateway to a vast archive of facts and memories. For those who pay closer attention to its business dealings, the company also invests billions to find new ways to use the power of computers: it's developing robots, virtual reality gear and self-driving cars. Remember all the hubbub about Google Glass? Google has been using the same approach in sustainability – spreading its wealth in a variety of projects to cut its waste and carbon footprint, initiatives which may one day generate profits. During the SXSW Eco conference this week, I caught up with Google's sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, to find out more.

Linux-based smart home hubs continue to rule the home automation world, with the latest products integrating voice assistants and AI analytics. Industrial, rather than home, applications will likely dominate the Internet of Things (IoT) market in the years to come. Yet, in the early going, the home automation market has had the greatest visibility. And it hasn't always been pretty. Despite steady growth, retail sales have yet to achieve inflated expectations.

DeepMind has already been involved in several major new intelligence projects as it looks to get Ai systems into the mainstream. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the company will be working closely with the NHS, using its powerful systems to sift through mountains of data to establish patterns which could lead to improvements in patient care, including better ways to manage bed space and medication tracking. The partnership could also be used to try and spot diseases before they happen, as detecting infection trends could help the NHS prepare for harmful outbreaks or new strains of disease. Also among the possibilities are reading medical images, managing junior doctor schedules, and even financial solutions, such as ensuring expensive tests aren't carried out more than once.

Machine learning has the potential to disrupt every aspect of business as we know it, yet the application of machine learning in the enterprise world is nascent. Learn which industries are using this powerful tool to stay ahead of trends. As users increasingly reveal information online, companies are catching on to using big data technology to predict business outcomes. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are being used to make data-driven decisions for activities such as buying behavior, process optimization, equipment maintenance -- and even for brewing craft beer. Advancements in systems that can digest large quantities of voice, image, and structured text data are increasingly making it possible to complete functions across many different sectors in conversational, efficient ways.