When Google's AlphaGo computer defeated a human champion in the insanely complex board game "Go" in March, experts were surprised by the computer's ability to recognize patterns and make quick, instinctive decisions – otherwise known to humans as intuition. Intuition, or gut instinct, is one of many hallmarks of business decision-making. Steve Jobs had no concrete evidence that the iPhone would be a success, but he saw patterns in the market, and in his mind, that convinced him that consumers would want it. AlphaGo's programmers set out to imitate that sense of intuition by first loading 150,000 prior matches between good players into the computer. Then they had AlphaGo play against itself endlessly.

Nasa launches million dollar contest to create'Valkyrie' AI robot that will accompany astronauts on ...

Computer scientists, public figures and reporters have gathered to witness or take part in a decades-old challenge. Some of the participants are flesh and blood; others are silicon and binary. Thirty human judges sit down at computer terminals, and begin chatting. To determine whether they're talking to a computer program or a real person. The event, organized by the University of Reading, was a rendition of the so-called Turing test, developed 65 years ago by British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing as a way to assess whether a machine is capable of intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

FILE - In this Thursday, March 26, 2015, file photo, Ford President and CEO Mark Fields speaks during the inauguration of Ford's manufacturing facility and engine plant at Sanand, near Ahmadabad, India. Fields said Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2016, that Ford Motor Co. will have a fully autonomous vehicle ready to provide ride-hailing or ride-sharing services by 2021. DETROIT (AP) -- Ford Motor Co. intends to have a fully driverless vehicle -- no steering wheel, no pedals -- on the road within five years. The car will initially be used for commercial ride-hailing or ride-sharing services, with sales to consumers coming later. "This is a transformational moment in our industry and it is a transformational moment for our company," said CEO Mark Fields, as he announced the plan Tuesday at Ford's Silicon Valley campus in Palo Alto, California.

Growing up in his grandmother's staunchly Catholic home in Cali, Colombia, Anthony Rivera never dreamed he'd become king of the Latin American nudie business. Soft-spoken and timid, Rivera was more comfortable working on computer science assignments than approaching girls. "I'd get stressed about meeting women," he recounts from his 12th-floor apartment in Medellín's posh El Poblado neighborhood. Even today, his role running a major adult webcam company seems incongruous with his diffidence -- but that might also be the key ingredient to his success. Rivera, born and partially raised in New York, has been instrumental in taking Colombia's webcam industry from the shadows to the second-largest webcam model market in the world, after Romania.

Perhaps nothing is better fodder for an argument in IT, especially when competitors are locking horns over undiscovered country. Over at the Nvidia Blog, Ian Buck is taking umbrage at Intel's recent performance claims around machine learning, saying that they are out-of-date. According to Buck, Intel is comparing its new Intel Xeon Phi processor against outdated GPUs using Nvidia's Maxwell architecture. Nvidia has since introduced products based on the Pascal architecture, which helped propel the company to some nice profits in their most recent quarter. Few fields are moving faster right now than deep learning," writes Buck. "Today's neural networks are 6x deeper and more powerful than just a few years ago.

In 2016 bots and artificial intelligent digital assistants seem to be the Next Big Thing. Back in 2014 I posited that Cortana would be the intelligent, voice-engaged UI for our increasingly mobile experiences. As a mediator between our "will" and our apps, I thought that she would effectively make apps "invisible" as she became the ambient user interface of our mobile computing lifestyles. As Microsoft continues to evolve Cortana toward the vision the company sees for its AI digital assistant, I've seen that my 2014 analysis was not entirely correct. Nor was it entirely wrong.

If you have a few free minutes, try, for fun, filling them with Google Translate. And you need not be multilingual to enjoy it. Start with something straightforward: Enter an English phrase or sentence (idioms bring particular pleasure). Click a language, say, Spanish, and then "translate." Copy and paste the translated results over your original English phrase, reverse both languages (so that, in this example, Spanish is now where you begin and English is where you end), and again click "translate."

Artificial Lawyer caught up with Noah Waisberg, Co-Founder & CEO of Kira Systems. We discussed how Kira Systems got started, how it is different to other AI systems and where it's going. Co-founder of Kira Systems, Noah Waisberg, used to be an associate at Weil Gotshal & Manges, starting there as a junior associate in 2006. A lot of his work focused on M&A and he says he found himself spending a lot of time reviewing contracts during due diligence (DD). According to Waisberg, DD often amounts to between 30% and 60% of the legal bill law firms gave to their clients.

Digital revolution has impacted 33 percent of the global economy, according to a study conducted by Accenture. The annual study report Accenture Technology Vision 2016 says that 85 percent of the survey respondents believe that the pace of technology change will increase at a rapid or unprecedented rate over the next three years.