The insurance industry is on the horns of a dilemma: how to use new technologies to improve their operations and how to insure the risks these new technologies present to their customers. The pace of technology is changing at faster rates than ever before and continues unabated despite the associated risks. New technology startups constantly enter the field, using technologies that impact multiple industries and user groups. Additionally, new technologies are developed virtually every day and are released almost immediately. This means that rapid adoption and use of new technologies is happening ahead of the ability of insurers to understand and respond to them, both as a user and as an insurer.

It looks like Google, which yesterday acquired API.ai, a company that helps developers build conversational interfaces, isn't the only major tech company hoovering up chat bot talent. The e-commerce giant confirmed that Angel.ai "I can confirm that Navid started at Amazon, and that his first day was yesterday. We don't have anything further to share at this time," an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch. A quick check on LinkedIn confirms Hadzaad's new job title: "Head of New Bot Products at Amazon".

When you see or hear something happen, you can instantly describe it: "a girl in a blue shirt caught a ball thrown by a baseball player," or "a dog runs along the beach." It's a simple task for us, but an immensely hard one for computers -- fortunately, IBM and MIT are partnering up to see what they can do about making it a little easier. The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension -- we'll just call it BM3C -- is a multi-year collaboration between the two organizations that will be looking specifically at the problem of computer vision and audition. The problem of computer vision spans multiple disciplines, so it has to be attacked from multiple directions. Say your camera is good enough to track objects minutely -- what good is it if you don't know how to separate objects from their background?

As history tells us, the more you know about the person you're selling to and the more you're able to tailor your offer to his or her circumstances, the higher likelihood of sales success. This is not rocket science. In 1968, I helped get the Apollo capsule to the moon and back. The question is, how do you get a deep understanding of your customers? The introduction of intelligence is now underway and will play out for quite some time.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes to demonstrate the domestic artificial intelligence system installed in his home this September. Zuckerberg gave the update on his home AI system, the creation of which was a personal goal for 2016, during a Facebook Townhall Q&A held in Rome and broadcast online. "When I walk up to my gate, I don't have to put in a code or something like that to get in, or put in a key. It just sees my face and it lets me in," he said. The system can control gates, lights, and temperature, but so far has been calibrated for use solely by Zuckerberg himself.

Artificial intelligence systems and their development are becoming increasingly important. "Smart" devices, self-driving cars, and robots are all gaining more attention. We are now at the point where people – blue-collar and white-collar alike – are worried about losing their jobs to robots. Like it or not, however, AI is the future – for the industry, for enterprise, and for society. Of course, all of this will mean new headaches for the CIO, the IT administrator and the network engineer alike as the ongoing evolution of AI places increasing demands on the networking industry.

Me: Siri, how are you tonight? Siri: I'm happy to be alive! Siri: OK, one option I see is Totto Ramen which averages 4 stars and is moderately priced. Looks like I'm going to be needing a Lyft. Siri: Lyft can be there in 6 minutes.

Kalingrad is a Russian seaport named for a Soviet revolutionary. It sits near the Baltic Sea, between Poland and Lithuania, and it's a place where pre-Putin Russian leaders would occasionally threaten to install nuclear missiles. But in the 18th century, it was a city called Königsberg in the German kingdom of Prussia. And it was a math problem. Königsberg stretched across both banks of the river Pregel, and it included two islands in the middle of the river.

Add Google to the list of companies with big fall announcements. The Android-maker and search engine giant announced late Monday that it will be holding an event on October 4 in San Francisco. In invitations sent out to media, the company was fairly vague as to what it would be showing off, though it was a bit more revealing in teaser on the company's website, madeby.google.com, Google has long used fall events to showcase its latest versions of Android, often introducing new variants to its Nexus line of phones and tablets. This year, the company is expected to follow a similar path, with new devices built by HTC said to be on the way.

The U.S. Department of Transportation released long-awaited guidelines Tuesday for the testing and deployment of self-driving vehicles, giving manufacturers and researchers some clarity for the future, but providing only a vague sense of the federal government's exact responsibilities. At a Tuesday morning news conference, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx described the 116-page policy document as "the most comprehensive national automated vehicle policy that the world has ever seen." However, he added that the policy is a "living document" and leaves room for "more growth and changes in the future." "One of reasons we take great pains not to be so prescriptive" is because the technology is "dynamic" and changing fast, he said, so the government needs to be "flexible." In the document, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration emphasized that it did not intend to write the "final word on highly automated vehicles" with these guidelines.