Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have all done it -- and now Baidu's doing it, too. The Chinese tech giant has open sourced one of its key machine learning tools, PaddlePaddle, offering the software up to the global community of AI researchers. This move has become common among tech firms as they pour more and more resources into their AI work. Open sourcing your tools is a good way to attract talent, but it also allows companies to shape the development of a field that's becoming increasingly central to consumer tech, underpinning everything from voice interfaces to auto-sorting photo galleries. Baidu's big claim for PaddlePaddle is that it's easier to use than rival programs.

Among several new trends being pushed pumped out of the Defense Department's research offices under the guise of the Third Offset strategy -- an initiative that seeks to leverage manned-unmanned teaming to counteract adversarial capabilities -- is the concept of cognitive electronic warfare. Cognitive EW seeks to leverage artificial intelligence to adapt to rapidly changing electromagnetic surroundings in the field. The Air Force Research Lab has recently released a request for information in navigation warfare research assistance from the contracting community that includes electronic attack, electronic protection and electronic support techniques for cognitive EW applications, among other similar research areas to bolster operations in environments in which communications and navigation could be degraded or disrupted. Aircraft, upon deploying for a particular mission, have a library of profiles to counter an adversary's attempt to jam its radar. However, with the proliferation and increasing proficiency of certain adversaries in this space, such as Russia, there is a growing sense of inadequacy.

Say you're interested in automation software for some customer service tasks. You visit a vendor's website, provide your contact information to request a live software demo and a sales assistant emails you to make sure you have the information you need. If you don't respond to that email, the sales assistant sends another the next day and the next -- this last one with an apology for bugging you and a smiley face. You feel a bit bad and finally answer this personable, persistent sales assistant, who, as it turns out, isn't a person at all. That scenario is already happening with virtual assistant platforms such as Conversica, and while it isn't pervasive just yet, within the next five years, there's a high probability that the "person" emailing you about a product or service you've shown interest in will be an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot thanks to leaps forward in technologies that understand customer intent and that can generate dialog to simulate natural conversations. In fact, artificial intelligence has come so far so fast in recent years, Gartner predicts it will be pervasive in all new products by 2020, with technologies including natural language capabilities, deep neural networks and conversational capabilities.

Recently I wrote about an interesting new project that's helping to deepen our understanding of the cosmos. A team from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working on a prototype of an army of 5,000 robots that can head out into the galaxy. The machines, which are known as ProtoDESI, come in'platoons' of 10 robots and are designed to help us enhance the accuracy of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). DESI is intended to provide a 3D map of the universe and allow scientists to further explore things like dark matter. A second team, from University College London, are using machine learning techniques in their search for habitable worlds.

A panel of academic and industrial thinkers has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might affect life in a typical North American city - in areas as diverse as transportation, health care and education--and to spur discussion about how to ensure the safe, fair and beneficial development of these rapidly emerging technologies. Titled "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," this year-long investigation is the first product of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100), an ongoing project hosted by Stanford to inform societal deliberation and provide guidance on the ethical development of smart software, sensors and machines. "We believe specialized AI applications will become both increasingly common and more useful by 2030, improving our economy and quality of life," said Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the 17-member panel of international experts. "But this technology will also create profound challenges, affecting jobs and incomes and other issues that we should begin addressing now to ensure that the benefits of AI are broadly shared." The new report traces its roots to a 2009 study that brought AI scientists together in a process of introspection that became ongoing in 2014, when Eric and Mary Horvitz created the AI100 endowment through Stanford.

A panel of academic and industrial thinkers has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might affect life in a typical North American city – in areas as diverse as transportation, health care and education – and to spur discussion about how to ensure the safe, fair and beneficial development of these rapidly emerging technologies. Titled "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," this year-long investigation is the first product of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100), an ongoing project hosted by Stanford to inform societal deliberation and provide guidance on the ethical development of smart software, sensors and machines. "We believe specialized AI applications will become both increasingly common and more useful by 2030, improving our economy and quality of life," said Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the 17-member panel of international experts. "But this technology will also create profound challenges, affecting jobs and incomes and other issues that we should begin addressing now to ensure that the benefits of AI are broadly shared." The new report traces its roots to a 2009 study that brought AI scientists together in a process of introspection that became ongoing in 2014, when Eric and Mary Horvitz created the AI100 endowment through Stanford.

For the 1964 World Fair, science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote an article for the New York Times, envisioning what the exhibits at the event would look like in fifty years' time. Asimov's predictions were scrutinized and used in numerous think pieces and tech forecasts of 2014, the year that marked the passing of the five decades since the article's publish date. Since a large body of Asimov's work concerned itself with human relationship with artificial intelligence, much attention was focused on the following quote: "If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots." Most writers summarized that, while the closest we have to an android housekeeper is a Roomba, Asimov was right to draw the parallel between brains and computers.

IBM's Watson AI makes movie trailer for an upcoming film with only a little help from humans