THE WINOGRAD Schema Challenge is a competition intended to reward technologists who can build a system that understands the kind of ambiguous sentences humans come out with all the time, but which are simple for other humans, even stupid ones, to understand. Get it right 90 per cent of the time and 25,000 is up for grabs. And with things like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Google Assistant, the Winograd Schema Challenge must surely be as good as obsolete by now. The best two entrants at the event this week achieved correct scores only 48 per cent of the time, little better than randomly guessing the meaning of the sentences they were supposed to crack. This is despite a decade of advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which has barely shifted since the late 1950s, according to some.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they would be opening up the hugely popular virtual game environment Minecraft for scientific research. They launched Minecraft AIX to utilize the platform for research into areas such as AI. The platform was developed at Microsoft's Cambridge lab and allows researchers to use the Minecraft environment to test out their theories and, hopefully, therefore make progress in the field of AI. One of the first examples of this in practice was unveiled in a recently published paper whereby scientists put AI algorithms through their paces in Minecraft constructed mazes. Mazes have long been used in behavioral psychology as researchers tested the ability of rats and mice to remember things and learn new pathways, with a particular emphasis on reinforcement learning.

In an Artificial Intelligence future, those with high-end computing skills will not only survive, but thrive… This is according to Digital Skills Academy CEO and Founder, Paul Dunne. "No industry – from farming to fintech – is immune to the changes being wrought by the new digital economy," says Dunne. And Artificial Intelligence (AI), once the stuff of sci-fi, is already making an impact in the digital world, he notes. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a'robo-boss' and 45 percent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines. By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in five percent of all economic transactions and smart agents will facilitate 40 percent of mobile interactions.

Nvidia Corp.'s graphics cards have long been a household name around the world, or at least in houses with gamers in them. And now, the company has finally taken a step into gaming proper, launching its first-ever game Thursday. Titled "VR Funhouse," the game is a virtual reality collection of seven arcade-style mini games and has been designed with two purposes in mind. In a blog post, Nvidia said: "It was created with a dual-purpose. First, we wanted it to be fun. To be enjoyed by people of all ages, whether or not they've tried VR, whether or not they're an early adopter. Second, it was created to show how immersive VR can be when physics simulation is fully integrated into an experience."

Scientists are hoping to use Big Data and machine learning to prevent further outbreaks of Ebola, by identifying the likelihood of various bat species carrying the virus. Ebola is what's known as a filovirus, which are long filament-shaped viruses whose genome is encoded on a single strand of RNA. Ebola is the most famous example, but there are others which are just as deadly, such as the Marburg virus that takes its name from an outbreak in the city of Marburg, Germany, in 1967. Ebola, like Marburg, is spread when people come into direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected persons. The most infamous outbreak of Ebola occurred just two years ago, in West Africa in 2014, where 11,310 people died from the disease, the World Health Organization says.

Coleman's work with low-dimensional nanostructures, as well as Nicolosi's in the field of battery development, bring 2D materials to the fore. Plummeting production costs mean that such 2D materials are emerging with a wide range of applications. Thomas Swann, for example, produces materials in commercial quantities, though the research in Ireland would largely relate to smaller measurements.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the buzzword of this decade. Google, Facebook, Twitter and IBM are acquiring companies and people as fast as they can. Computer Vision is one of the core focus areas. Vision is perhaps one of the most difficult problems to solve in AI, and as you might have guessed, it is currently unsolved. Neural Networks, specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have become very popular. Almost everyone (except a few companies like Vicarious) is using CNN's for Image recognition. From last few years, Stanford hosts the "ImageNet" challenge for visual recognition.

Once awhile ago, in a usual busy work morning, I was pulled into meeting which my colleague said I absolutely need to participate because someone was going to present a success story of Machine Learning. Being an analytics evangelist in the company, I was of course excited about it! At the end of the presentation, I raised my hand to ask the presenter a question..."Can you help me understand how was Machine Learning applied in this use case?". The presenter replied..."I passed through these data into a Regression Model to produce these prediction results on my laptop." Unfortunately, nowadays, the phrase "machine learning" has become an overused buzzword just like "big data".

Inbenta is a company specialized in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing which was born in Barcelona and nowadays has presence in 8 different countries (Spain, USA, Chile, Brasil, Mexico, France, The Netherlands and Singapore).

The other day, a search for "artificial intelligence in law" produced 86,400 results from just the News section of Google's vast index. From the Web as a whole, 32,800,000 results and from Videos – 261,000, beginning with Jude Law's role as Gigolo Joe in the movie A.I. (thank you, RankBrain). The first News story was "Law firm bosses envision Watson-type computers replacing young lawyers," reporting on the answers to one question in the recent Altman & Weil survey of law firm leaders (page 82). As wittily argued by Ryan McClead, "the question is flawed on many levels [and] … it's time to cut the hysteria surrounding artificial intelligence in law." But we need to parse the pile a bit.