Artificial Intelligence, robots and cognitive computing are hot topics right now. It seems they are part of every conversation as our cars, computers, mobile devices and so many other things in our lives are becoming smarter thanks to new technology. However, there is still a lot of fear, uncertainty and mystery around this new technology. Everything from what it means to peoples' jobs, to whether or not people will be able to create normal relationships in a time where man and machine share the world we live in. Practical applications for AI are in the works, and not all of its uses will be far reaching.

Baidu, the Chinese-based internet services conglomerate, has made several major announcements about its upcoming IoT projects. The company's plans center on a revamped artificial intelligence (AI) platform, which the company hopes will enable it to effectively increase its presence in the world of the IoT. Baidu plans to use this revamped AI platform to develop a voice assistant similar to Amazon's Echo, reports Bloomberg. It will be working with speaker manufacturer Harman Industries to develop the device, which it hopes will allow users to order food, summon a ride, or control smart home products via voice commands. The Echo's surprising success has prompted Google, Samsung, and Apple to try and develop competitors, and Baidu, too, is seeking to replicate the success Amazon has seen. The company is partnering with chipmaker Nvidia to develop an AI platform for driverless cars and taxis, according to Fortune.

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

Any business that sells goods or services online is vulnerable to attack by fraudsters. This can be using stolen credit card details for purchases online, creating false accounts and even voucher code abuse. The cost of this fraud can be calculated in the multi millions, with chargebacks and related costs plaguing online businesses. In the UK it is the most common crime of all, with 2.47M offences in 2015/16 alone. The traditional approach to tackling this problem is to use heuristic rules and business logic to try to'predict' whether a new transaction that the business is seeing is fraudulent or not.

Artificial intelligence--the kind where robots understand a wide number of human concepts--has been a military focus for decades, and scientists in Japan may have just made a college-ready AI. For the first time, a Japanese artificial intelligence program has scored above average on a national standardized college entry exam, performing well enough to have an 80 percent likelihood of getting into 33 national universities, according to the National Institute of Informatics, or NII. The AI program scored 511 points out of 950 on the National Center Test for University Admissions (similar to the SATs), with a particularly strong performance in math and history, and well above the national average of 416. It was a first for the program, which performed less well in 2013 and 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal. NII announced the breakthrough on Saturday.

In the Editorial, Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, identifies many lessons that can be learned from the success of the popular AVG Pokémon Go(tm), in which players can log hours of walking as they physically chase the animated Pokémon creatures based on video images displayed on their smart phones. Dr. Baranowski encourages researchers to conduct well-designed studies to assess the health effects of AVGs. Game developers could then use this information to create new games that would be both fun to play and promote beneficial physical activity. "Pokémon Go(tm) stimulated substantial amounts of physical activity in many likely-otherwise sedentary game players without intending to! We might call this stealth exergame programming, and we have a lot to learn about how to achieve this!" says Dr. Baranowski.

Artificial intelligence helps profits surge at Shop Direct Very.co.uk generated sales of more than 1 billion for the first time as parent company Shop Direct announced a 44 per cent increase in profits before tax. Liverpool-based Shop Direct grew underlying profit to 150.4 million as sales increased by 4.3 per cent to 1.86bn. The 12-month period to June 30 represented its first full financial year as a pureplay digital retailer, having ceased catalogue production in January 2015. The group, which also operates digital department stores VeryExclusive.co.uk, That was realised on the back of new features such as push notifications and touch ID to its MyVery app, which is nearing a million downloads.

Programming languages are the primary tool of the software development industry. Since the 1940's hundreds of them have been created and a huge amount of new lines of code in diverse programming languages are written and pushed to active repositories every day. We believe that a source code classifier that can identify the programming language that a piece of code is written in would be a very useful tool for automatic syntax highlighting and label suggestion on platforms, such as StackOverflow and technical wikis. This inspired us to train a model for classifying code snippets based on their language, leveraging recent AI techniques for text classification. We collected hundreds of thousands of source code files from GitHub repositories using the GitHub API.

In the latest episode of #CoffeeWithAGoogler met with Christine Robson of Google's Machine Learning teams. We spoke about what was new and exciting in the realm of Machine Learning, including Project Magenta. We see how Magenta came up with a machine-generated piece of music, and how some artists jammed along with it! In this piece of music, we trained the model using the first four notes of'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star', and using a recurrent neural network, trained with everything from the Beatles to Bach, it came up with the tune. Listen to a great conversation with an expert on Machine Learning -- where Christine steps us through some pretty advanced concepts, but makes it so clear that even I could understand it!

With the recent success of depth cameras such as Kinect, gesture and posture recognition has become easier. Using depth sensors, the 3D locations of body-joints can be reliably extracted to used with any machine learning framework, specific gestures or posture can be modelled and inferred. Real world applications in Virtual Reality can be used for Yoga, Ballet training, Golf, anything related to activity recognition and proper postures. I also see application of it in the Architectural, Engineering, Construction and Manufacturing Industry by sending depth sensor data to the cloud. This is a proof of concept to detect pose "Y", "M", "C", "A" and stream the result back to the browser. This video explains a littlebit how it's hooked up together.