IBM Research have announced a multi-year collaboration with the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT to advance the scientific field of machine vision, a core aspect of artificial intelligence. The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension's (BM3C) goal will be to develop cognitive computing systems that emulate the human ability to understand and integrate inputs from multiple sources of audio and visual information into a detailed computer representation of the world that can be used in a variety of computer applications in industries such as healthcare, education, and entertainment. The BM3C will address technical challenges around both pattern recognition and prediction methods in the field of machine vision that are currently impossible for machines alone to accomplish. For instance, humans watching a short video of a real-world event can easily recognize and produce a verbal description of what happened in the clip as well as assess and predict the likelihood of a variety of subsequent events, but for a machine, this ability is currently impossible. Beginning in September 2016 in Cambridge, the BMC3 collaboration will bring together leading brain, cognitive, and computer scientists to conduct research in the field of unsupervised machine understanding of audio-visual streams of data, using insights from next-generation models of the brain to inform advances in machine vision.

Do you know that some of the content you read wasn't written by human beings? Automated Insights states, its software created one billion stories last year, many with no human intervention. This content you are reading was written by a real person, but just think, what are the chances you haven't consumed that type of content without knowing it? So what does it mean for content marketing? Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers has a futuristic approach to that question: "Right now, human writers are available at a variety of expertise levels and costs, making it possible for any company to find a good fit for their own content needs. In the not-too-distant future, algorithms will outperform all of them, and at a far lower cost. Essentially, human writers will be completely out of the equation."

If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI. The Guardian, a British newspaper, warned recently that "we're like children playing with a bomb," and a recent Newsweek headline reads, "Artificial Intelligence Is Coming, and It Could Wipe Us Out." Numerous such headlines, fueled by comments from as the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, are strongly influenced by the work of one man: professor Nick Bostrom, author of the philosophical treatise Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies. Bostrom is an Oxford philosopher, but quantitative assessment of risks is the province of actuarial science. He may be dubbed the world's first prominent "actuarial philosopher," though the term seems an oxymoron given that philosophy is an arena for conceptual arguments, and risk assessment is a data-driven statistical exercise. So what do the data say?

Computer scientists have developed a new technique to measure human emotions wirelessly. CBC Radio technology columnist Dan Misener explains how. In the past, this has been done with electrocardiography (ECG) monitors -- electrodes strapped to the body. But a team at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has built a device that can do this without wires. They call it EQ-Radio, and in a lot of ways, the device is similar to a Wi-Fi router.

Cancer is like a computer virus and can be'solved' by cracking the code, according to Microsoft. The computer software company says its researchers are using artificial intelligence in a new healthcare initiative to target cancerous cells and eliminate the disease. One of the projects within this new healthcare enterprise involves utilizing machine learning and natural language processing to help lead researchers sift through all the research data available and come up with a treatment plan for individual cancer patients. IBM is working on something similar using a program called Watson Oncology, which analyzes patient health info against research data. Other Microsoft healthcare initiatives involve computer vision in radiology to note the progress of tumors over time and a project which Microsoft refers to as its "moonshot" aims to program biology like we program computers using code.

The release continues, "AI is creating new ways for people to engage with technology and with one another. Apple's Siri leverages natural language processing to recognize voice commands. Facebook's deep learning facial recognition algorithm can instantly identify a person with nearly 98 percent accuracy. And Amazon, Netflix and Spotify all utilize machine learning to understand how each item in their massive catalogs relates to the other and each customer's preferences. However, the technical expertise and infrastructure required to develop AI solutions are beyond the reach of most companies. They must bring together massive and diverse data sets, which requires significant engineering resources to manage complex data integration processes. Specialized predictive models must then be built to extract value from the data and continuously learn from it, requiring extensive data science expertise."

A group of self-driving Uber vehicles are lined up to take journalists on rides during a media preview at the company's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh earlier this month. A group of self-driving Uber vehicles are lined up to take journalists on rides during a media preview at the company's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh earlier this month. The U.S. government wants to help you take your hands off the wheel. The Department of Transportation on Tuesday issued its Federal Automated Vehicle Policy, which outlines how manufacturers and developers can assure safe design of driverless vehicles, tells states what responsibilities they will have and points out potential new tools for ensuring safety. Regulators say they want to prepare for the transition to self-driving vehicles, which they say will save money, time and lives.

Autonomous robots and other AI systems still don't do a great job of understanding the world around them, but IBM and MIT think they can do better. They've begun a "multi-year" partnership that aims to improve AI's ability to interpret sight and sound as well as humans. IBM will supply the expertise and technology from its Watson cognitive computing platform, while MIT will conduct research. It's still very early, but the two already have a sense of what they can accomplish. One of the biggest challenges will be to advance pattern recognition and prediction.

Forget PCs and servers: D-Wave Systems is looking into the future with its quantum computer, up to 1,000 times faster than an earlier model. The company will start shipping a quantum computer with 2,000 qubits, twice the size of its current 1,000-qubit D-Wave 2X. The D-Wave 2X is considered one of the most advanced computers in the world today. The 2,000-qubit quantum computer will be 500 to 1000 times faster than its predecessor, said Jeremy Hilton, senior vice president of systems at D-Wave. An even larger quantum computer based on a whole new processor design will come out two to three years after that, Hilton said.

Advanced cancer research is calling on techniques used by NASA scientists who analyze satellite imagery to find commonalities among stars, planets and galaxies in space. Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) use complex machine learning algorithms to identify similarities among galaxies that may otherwise be overlooked, NASA officials said in a statement. Using similar techniques, medical professionals are able to analyze a lung sample for common cancer biomarkers. However, analyzing a biopsy specimen for biomarkers is not the only way in which JPL's complex machine learning algorithms can be used in the medical field. Cancer researchers can also use the space exploration tools to identify common chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers, which could revolutionize strategies for early cancer detection.