At an artificial intelligence conference in New York City last week, Professor Alexi Samsonovich from the Moscow-based National Research Nuclear University (MEPhl) Cybernetics Department told Sputnik News, "We are on the verge of a major breakthrough" in AI. In the past six months, we've seen AI master the board game Go, write a short film script, and infiltrate Snapchat filters. Each of these achievements is impressive in its own right. Together, they show just how quickly AI is advancing. But what was this breakthrough Samsonovich hinted at in NYC? Digital Trends reached out to him to find out.

Ford is developing a fully-autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or gas and brake pedals, the auto industry giant announced on Tuesday. The car maker expects the vehicle to be ready by 2021, and says it will be made specifically for ride-hailing and ride-sharing services. Google's prototype self-driving cars don't have pedals or a steering wheel either, since the company says it "lets the software and sensors handle the driving." Ford will be doubling its Silicon Valley team and more than doubling its campus in Palo Alto, Calif. to help it reach this goal. The company has also acquired and invested in a few startups specializing in technologies that can help advance the development of its autonomous vehicle.

Ford will make a driverless car for ride-sharing purposes by 2021, using its Ford Fusion Hybrids (shown here) as technology test mules. CEO Mark Fields set the target at Ford's Research and Innovation facility here, which will double its staff to 300 and grow its footprint by 150,000 square feet by year's end to respond to the challenge. "This is one example of how we're thinking about expanding our business into mobility more broadly," Fields told USA TODAY. "Taking the driver out of the equation improves the economics for us as well as consumers." Currently, Ford is testing around a dozen self-driving Ford Fusion Hybrids on California, Michigan and Arizona roads.

Expedia has grown far beyond a search engine for flights -- it's now the parent company of a dozen travel brands including Trivago and Hotels.com The business of delivering quality flight search results is tough, and Fleischman describes it as an "unbounded computer science problem". The reason for this is because flight itineraries and schedules are constantly changing, and Expedia's proprietary'best fare search' (BFS) has to'learn' and adapt all the time. The extent of the problem can be summed up by one statistic. In those three seconds you will see, on average, 16,000 flight options, in order of convenience or price or time.

AI and Machine Learning grew up and matured in the world of gaming -- pitting computational power and algorithmic mastery against the best human players up for the challenge of taking on a machine. It may have taken decades, but machines eventually asserted their dominance. In 1997 IBM's Big Blue defeated chess master Garry Gasparov; In 2011 IBM Watson defeated two of Jeopardy's greatest champions; and most recently, Google's AlphaGo bested reigning champ Lee Sedol in the game of GO, a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess and, form the human perspective, requires intuition as well as calculation to execute a winning strategy. Machine Learning owes its current prowess to gaming in a literal sense. The holy grail of computer science has always been to create intelligent machines that can perceive the world as we do, understand our language, and learn from examples.

At Geneia, a health care technology and consulting company, they use big data along with machine learning to help health care organizations deliver better patient care at a lower cost. "Geneia brings data in from a lot of different sources," said Lavoie. We've built Theon, a unified platform to integrate the data and allow us to apply machine learning techniques." Using machine learning, Geneia can match and determine missing values, as well as perform principal component analysis and look at patterns in the data – clusters that help them see trends and causality. "Machine learning allows us to see patterns in the data that we couldn't see before.

Benchmarks are an important tool for measuring performance, but in a rapidly evolving field it can be difficult to keep up with the state of the art. Recently Intel published some incorrect "facts" about their long promised Xeon Phi processors. Few fields are moving faster right now than deep learning. Today's neural networks are 6x deeper and more powerful than just a few years ago. There are new techniques in multi-GPU scaling that offer even faster training performance.

Hexaware Technologies Limited, a leading global provider of IT, Business Process and Consulting Services, and WorkFusion, the leading Smart Process Automation (SPA) provider, today announced a partnership to help enterprise operations leverage smart automation software to realize higher productivity, drive agility in generating new products and reduce operational cost. The combination of Hexaware's industry and process expertise, and WorkFusion's best-in-class automation software will provide customers the ability to rapidly deploy and scale transformational technology to achieve business goals. Hexaware has constantly strived to provide business value to its clients through significant cost savings and creating opportunities for revenue generation. This partnership aligns with Hexaware's'Shrink IT Grow Digital' strategy that has radically revolutionized digital transformation journeys of their customers. This strategy helps global firms dramatically reduce commodity operations and IT costs, while enabling realization of value from digital initiatives through solutions across industries such as Telecom, Banking & Financial Services, Healthcare & Insurance, Travel & Logistics, and Manufacturing & Consumer.

Pursuing its stated goal to make software smarter, Salesforce has made yet another acquisition, this time agreeing to buy BeyondCore, a San Mateo, Calif.-based data-analytics company. BeyondCore disclosed the sale in a blog post and Salesforce founder the CEO Marc Benioff confirmed it in a tweet, saying that BeyondCore will "enhance the AI capabilities of Analytics Cloud." Terms weren't disclosed, but BeyondCore has raised 9 million since its founding in 2004, according to CrunchBase. BeyondCore was already integrated into Salesforce as part of its upcoming version 7 release, BeyondCore said its post. The acquisition is Saleforce's seventh this year, marking a major increase in velocity -- it bought only 13 other companies between 2012 and 2015, per CrunchBase.

Think about software that can mine LinkedIn connections, send intros, ask for meetings, follow up, follow up, follow up, schedule meetings, and prepare notes for the sales rep handling the meeting before handing off. AI as part of your prospecting and sales process can do everything your entry level salesperson can do, and then some. What's more, AI can use data from thousands of data points and then decide which leads are the hottest, and most likely to close, putting those leads in front of the sales team first. AI can make everything about the sales process more precise, more data-driven, and more efficient.