Corporate giants like Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple and Salesforce, are competing in the race to acquire private AI companies, with Samsung emerging as a new entrant this month with its acquisition of startup Viv Labs, which is developing a Siri-like AI assistant. In 2014 Google acquired British company DeepMind Technologies for some 600M (Google DeepMind's program recently beat a human world champion in the board game "Go"). This year, it acquired visual search startup Moodstock, and bot platform Api.ai. Salesforce, which joined the race last year with the acquisition of Tempo AI, has already made two major acquisitions this year: Khosla Ventures-backed MetaMind and open-source machine-learning server PredictionIO.

Internet of Things (IoT) is creating a tectonic shift in the way brands react to consumers and how buyers interact with each other and seek out and find sources of information that assist their buying decisions. A spate of recent events are re-shaping the way consumers communicate with each others, with the brand, conduct research and shop for goods and services. New devices, systems, microprocessors, data hubs, networks, analytics and software demonstrating artificial intelligence are increasingly making their presence felt in the retail markets. "IoT data harvested from smartphones, wearables, sensors and other devices would soon provide significant insights and opportunities for both the customer as well as the brand. The use of predictive selling powered by artificial intelligence would enable retailers to deliver superior buying experience to customers, resulting in lifelong brand loyalty, says Suhale Kapoor, Co-Founder and Executive Vice-President of Absolutedata Analytics.

Google just announced that they're making a big bet on artificial intelligence to move the company's services forward. During Google's Q3 earnings call CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was "re-thinking" all of its products to include more artificial intelligence and an approach called machine learning. Artificial intelligence (AI) has always played a huge part in Google's success. We talked to Geoffrey Hinton, AI researcher at Google and the University of Toronto, over email about the future of the field. He predicted that AI will likely loom ever larger in our lives, without our even knowing it.

Speaking to attendees at a deep learning conference in London last month, there was one particularly noteworthy recurring theme: humility, or at least, the need for it. While companies like Google are confidently pronouncing that we live in an "AI-first age," with machine learning breaking new ground in areas like speech and image recognition, those at the front lines of AI research are keen to point out that there's still a lot of work to be done. Just because we have digital assistants that sound like the talking computers in movies doesn't mean we're much closer to creating true artificial intelligence. Problems include the need for vast amounts of data to power deep learning systems; our inability to create AI that is good at more than one task; and the lack of insight we have into how these systems work in the first place. Machine learning in 2016 is creating brilliant tools, but they can be hard to explain, costly to train, and often mysterious even to their creators.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, and the art of using computers to understand human intelligence. When it comes to healthcare, AI can bring about radical changes to the way doctors and physicians access, communicate, and interact with patient data. Crucially, this can result in improved patient outcomes and even the possibility of using an individual patient's history - such as previous illnesses, allergies or even genetic makeup - to predict their exact treatment requirements. Associate Medical Copywriter Kulveer Singh explains how the introduction of AI can change the landscape of healthcare, why it's an exciting time for the development of new technologies, and the challenges that implementing new AI may pose. In 2011, IBM's supercomputer WATSON competed against and obliterated a long-term game show champion. All this, despite the general thought that computer programmes were unable to understand natural language, puns, red herrings, and to simply unpack the meaning behind game show questions.

A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Tech have trained a software program to uncloak digitally-blurred or distorted images using deep learning, essentially teaching a computer to interpret a set of example data. Using this process, the team's software identified encrypted photographs with a 71% success rate. For context, the human success rate was 0.2%. The team purposely used an open source deep learning library to train their software, and their research exposes more weaknesses in the concept of online privacy. "The techniques we're using in this paper are very standard in image recognition, which is a disturbing thought," said Cornell Tech's Vitaly Shmatikov, pointing out that theirs was an "off-the-shelf, poor man's approach" to encrypted image recognition, and that a person or entity with bad intentions could do a lot of damage with this technology.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programmes aims to create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that get to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into the new Pixel handsets - aiming to outdo Apple's Siri - enabling users to organise and use information on the devices and in the cloud - to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.

Roughly 170,000 people descended on San Francisco this week to attend Dreamforce, an annual conference hosted by cloud computing company Salesforce. We round up the themes that dominated the on-site conversations. The biggest theme of the week was artificial intelligence (AI), not least because Salesforce unveiled its new'Einstein' product during the event, which has predictive capabilities and looks to bring AI technology to brand campaigns. But the technology also dominated conversations held away from the keynote sessions. Bob Stutz, chief analytics officer of'data visualisation engine' Wave Analytics, certainly seems convinced of its uses.

Jay Baer, a digital marketing consultant in Bloomington, Ind., spends half his time traveling on business. That means he also has to spend hours each week coordinating that travel. Help has arrived with the Pana app, which employs artificial intelligence to aid customers. Virtual travel assistant services -- some from established companies like Facebook, IBM and Expedia, and others from new entrants like Pana and HelloGbye -- are now popping up worldwide, just as major hotel chains like Starwood and Hilton are incorporating robots into their everyday operations. Many of the virtual assistant services use artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science that simulates intelligent human behavior.

Last week, Microsoft took the unusual step of placing its Cortana and Bing product teams inside the same organization as Microsoft Research. The new Microsoft AI and Research Group will be led by computer vision pioneer and executive vice president Harry Shum, whose 20-year Microsoft career involves leading Bing's search efforts from 2007 through 2013 and helping launch Microsoft Research China. We asked Shum how this new organization will benefit Microsoft's digital assistant in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. The language of the blog post announcing the formation of Microsoft's new AI division, together with how Satya Nadella has characterized it, suggests that Microsoft thinks it's in a space race of sorts when it comes to artificial intelligence. I just feel that the timing's right to go big on AI.