After a several-month trial in which staff used the AI internally, while they dealt with business clients, RBS will let Luvo talk directly to the outside world by the end of 2016. Luvo functions as a chatbot – a program that opens when you access the bank's website – that you can ask typical customer service questions, concerning lost PINs and credit cards that need to be replaced. At first glance, this is nothing extraordinary, and chatbots have become a frequent feature for websites dealing with a large flow of individual queries. But RBS and IBM, which spent millions developing the program together, say that it is revolutionary, with a nuanced understanding of human speech, a "unique" personality, and an ability to learn on the job. "To be helpful it has to understand dialogue," the bank's managing director of digitization, Chris Popple, explained in a presentation earlier this year.

When commercial-scale crops in First World countries get diseases, lab-equipped experts are typically called in to identify the affliction and advise treatment. Such resources aren't always available to smallhold farmers in developing nations, however, who may lose entire crops without ever knowing what was wrong with them. That's why scientists are now creating software that could be incorporated into an app that identifies crop diseases, based on user-supplied smartphone photos.

What are the best practices for creating artificial intelligence? It's a question posed by the "partnership on AI" formed by major American technology firms. The goal of the partnership, which includes Google, IBM, Microsoft and Facebook, is to "conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license (sic) in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology." Now, a clarification of terms: AI and robots are different. I should know: I wrote a series of novels about self-replicating humanoid robots.

Google has revealed its new own-built smartphone, Pixel, which the tech giant says has been built with artificial intelligence at its centre. The Pixel has Google Assistant built into its software, the firm's artificial intelligence program that is designed to understand context and help with tasks. The new phone was unveiled at an event in San Francisco, and comes in both a 5in and 5.5in size. Google's range of new products including its new own-built smartphone, Pixel (centre), which the tech giant says has been built with artificial intelligence at its centre It has been billed by Google as housing the "best smartphone camera ever made" and the first device to be built to work with Google's new Daydream virtual reality platform. Users will be able to access the Assistant AI program from any screen on the device, and it will be able to understand context.

We are in the middle of a technological revolution. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to fundamentally transform the world around us -- the way we communicate, work, and conduct our daily lives. While artificial intelligence has made significant advances in recent years, its inception goes back more than six decades. Put simply, "Artificial intelligence is the activity devoted to making machines intelligent, and intelligence is that quality which enables an entity to function appropriately with foresight in its environment." Artificial intelligence encompasses deep learning, computer vision, robotics, collaborative systems, machine learning and natural learning process among other things.

CCF Artificial intelligence will make the tech channel a happier place by removing much of the tedious grinding interaction that poisons relationships between vendors, distributors and partners, Lenovo's boss claimed today. Lenovo COO Gianfranco Lanci told the audience at Canalys Channels Forum that the firm was examining how to use emerging technologies to change the way it does business. "We are working on lot of things - big data and analytics, AI." "You can think about how to run the company in a different way." Pressed as to what he meant, Lanci said the organisation was already shifting to chat, away from email, although this was not always possible, with some customers wedded to fusty old email. Further ahead, he said, AI could start taking over some of the workaday, grinding tedious tasks that occupy much channel time – such as handling financing issues.

When heavy August rain flooded Louisiana neighborhoods, residents self-organized in online communities to reach out for help. For federal service providers, the problem was taking all that information and using it to provide assistance. "The difficulty was how do you take that data and make it A) digestible and B) actionable in a way, or even to be able to spot trends before they happen," said Justin Herman, SocialGov community leader at the General Services Administration. "This isn't just like an outreach thing, this isn't just a chatbot thing, this is being able to look at where to provide lifesaving food, water, shelter into areas." Register for the Ask the CIO Chat with Andy Ozment of the Homeland Security Department on Oct. 11, at 1:30 p.m.

Golden parachutes can't seem to stay out of the news. Last year, Jeff Smisek, the former CEO of United Airlines, received a separation payment of 4.875 million in cash along with additional equity awards and other benefits for a total of close to 37 million after being ousted from his company. Can it also transform the nation? Hillary Clinton was campaigning for her husband in January 1992 when she learned of the race's newest flare-up: Gennifer Flowers had just released tapes of phone calls with Bill Clinton to back up her claim they had had an affair. We tend to associate salads most closely with spring and summer, when fresh produce is at its peak and when we're all in the mood for lighter, fresher-tasting meals.

Besides being a major player in the earthquake prediction method discussed here, the ionosphere is important because it's the layer of the atmosphere that reflects electromagnetic waves back to Earth and enables radio communication. There was increased ionization over Japan before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and a spike in radio wave emissions near Haiti before the 2010 quake there. Enough historical data linking ionospheric activity to earthquakes needs to be collected in order to generate patterns, and the patterns then need to be matched to real-time data. When the Tohoku earthquake hit, Tokyo residents received a one-minute warning via Japan's earthquake early warning system.

Artificial intelligence isn't just helping you work more effectively... it can help you find work, too. Source{d} is running a job service that matches programmers with employers by using a "deep neural network" to scan open source code for relevant qualities. And it's not just about understanding whether or not you can write well in a given language, either. The AI can even look for coding styles that match the methods of a given company, so you may land a position simply by fitting in more gracefully than anyone else. Of course, the approach doesn't rely exclusively on algorithms.