IBM Australia is looking to maintain its first-mover advantage in the burgeoning enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) space by putting more resources behind its cognitive drive. The vendor has spent 2016 arming its commercial operation with a new team that has the industry domain knowledge to drive Watson harder into specific verticals. Its local Research team has revealed involvement in cutting-edge projects for IBM's nascent Watson Health business, as well as around neuromorphic computing, which is seen as the next evolution of Watson. Since IBM created the US 1 billion ( 1.3 billion) Watson Group in 2014, the vendor has been selling business on the benefits of cognitive computing, while at the same time trying to create as many applications and use cases for the technology as it can. While these efforts were initially internally-driven, the growth of Watson over the past two years has increased the number of people and organisations working with the technology, with a growing amount of this work being done behind the scenes.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Fintech Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Plum, which claims to be the first AI-powered Facebook chatbot, raised 500,000 in a seed round that closed on Friday, according to a press release seen by BI Intelligence. Plum wants to help millennials save money by automating the process for them. It was founded by Victor Troukoudes and Alex Michael, formerly of fintechs TransferWise and Tictail, respectively.

From gender-neutral bots to period-friendly healthcare trackers, cars with more storage and clothes with bigger pockets - the world could be a very different place if there were more women working in tech. We asked a group of women who are working in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) how the world might be compared to now, if more women were present in these male-dominated industries. Now in its sixth year, the annual celebration of women working in Stem is named after the woman regarded as the world's first computer programmer - Ada Lovelace - because of her work with inventor Charles Babbage on his idea for an "analytical engine" in the 1800s. "If there were more women working in bots & Artificial Intelligence (AI), women wouldn't be an afterthought when building new technology. "Early voice recognition software didn't always recognise female voices, because none of the developers had been female and no-one thought to test out the technology on women (Car safety failed to take into account female anatomy - female-sized crash test dummies were only enforced in the US in 2011).

If 2016 goes down as the year of something in the API economy, it might well be machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Although hardly a day goes by where I don't receive another ML or AI anouncement, a deeper dive often reveals some very liberal definitions of the sciences (some involve what sounds like real rocket science, others not really). Additionally, where there is (or could be) ML or AI involved, it's often buried deep in the cogs of the given solution in such a way that the machine learning and/or artificial intelligence themselves are very much out of the reach of users and developers. Instead, AI and ML are too often touted as characteristics that make the final solution better than others at what it does. But every now and then, an announcement comes along that gives the consuming developer direct and approachable access to ML/AI capabilities so that their own organizations, in bespoke fashion, can benefit more directly from the so-called rocket science.

Seven in 10 Australians trust autonomous vehicles to take over when they feel tired, bored, or physically and mentally incapable of driving manually, according to a study by the Australian Driverless Vehicle Initiative (ADVI). More than 5,000 Australians aged 18 and over were surveyed by ADVI and its academic partners, including the University of New South Wales, through an 80-question survey designed to help guide research, marketing, and vehicle design efforts. According to ADVI's preliminary findings, 69 percent of survey respondents said they would rather a driverless car take the lead when driving was "boring or monotonous", and 60 percent said they would prefer an autonomous vehicle during traffic congestion. Participants said the most likely activity they would spend their time doing in driverless cars was observing scenery at 78 percent, followed by interacting with passengers on 76 percent, resting came in at 52 percent, and doing work-related activities polled at 36 percent. Almost half, 47 percent, of Australians surveyed felt self-driving vehicles would be safer than human drivers.

King Midas learned the hard way what happens if you don't specify exactly what you want. The emergence of general artificial intelligence could be as significant for humanity as the agricultural or industrial revolutions. But humans need to take steps early on to make sure that these AIs are built in a way which makes them helpful rather than harmful. According to Professor Nick Bostrom, a leading philosophers on artificial intelligence and founding director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, there's a way in which humans can avoid becoming slaves to machines of superior intelligence: by designing from the very beginning to ensure they're going to act in the interest of the human race. This doesn't mean we need to "tie its hands behind its back and hold a big stick over it in the hope we can force it to our way" but rather that we must "build it in such a way that it's on our side and wants the same things as we do".

Elon Musk named his electric-car company after the engineering genius Nikola Tesla, but the sweeping nature of his vision to replace fossil fuels is reminiscent of Thomas Edison, Tesla's arch-rival. After creating the incandescent bulb, the home electric meter, and one of the first alkaline batteries, Edison spent much of his personal fortune building factories to produce them--all in the service of a grand plan to electrify society using his direct-current transmission technology. Eighty years before Musk was born, Edison was urging U.S. cities to set up networks of charging stations so those newfangled horseless carriages could run on electricity rather than gasoline. For Musk's fans and investors, the comparison should not be entirely comforting. In the course of a few short years, the Wizard of Menlo Park was unceremoniously forced out of the electricity game. After he stubbornly refused to embrace the transmission technology that became the foundation of the U.S. grid and focused increasingly on developing inventions such as the phonograph and the motion picture, his board of directors merged his Edison General Lighting with a rival to create today's General Electric--leaving the 46-year-old Edison with no management role.

If you already tried to upload some of your pictures to OneDrive, you may be aware that Microsoft's cloud storage service is able to automatically tag your photos and categorize them, group them by location, and more. By adding more data to user-generated content, Microsoft's artificial intelligence tools also make it easier for OneDrive users to find relevant pictures using OneDrive's search feature. But could artificial intelligence accomplish the same sort of magic with video content? That's exactly what Chia-Wen Lin and Min Sun, professors in the Electrical Engineering department of National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, are trying to do. In a new blog post on the Microsoft Research blog, the company explains that both professors partnered in 2015 with Dr. Tao Mei, lead researcher in multimedia at Microsoft Research Asia who worked on a new image recognition, segmentation, and captioning dataset called COCO (Common Objects in Context). Professor Sun created a video title generation method based on deep learning to automatically find the special moments--or highlights--in videos, and generate an accurate and interesting title for the highlights.

The people who know me know I'm not big on rocking the boat, but I just can't get this thought out of my mind. I often chew on the future and this post is about the future of the job market and our very survival as employees. It's an incredibly important issue, so I had to get your attention. I should pump the brakes a little before everyone thinks I've lost my mind. I used to think that.

It may sound like a lost track from The Beatles, but the catchy pop song, 'Daddy's Car', was composed by artificial intelligence (AI). The tune was created by Flow Machines, a system Sony taught to make music by feeding it 13,000 samples from different genres. Although the software is capable of creating the lead sheet, a human composer instructed it to produce a record in the style of The Beatles and wrote the lyrics. It may sound like a lost track from The Beatles, but the catchy pop song, 'Daddy's Car', was composed by artificial intelligence (AI). Sony has taught its AI, Flow Machines, how to compose music.