Anki has a big hit with its iPhone-controlled Anki Overdrive race cars that use sophisticated artificial intelligence. And now it has its second act in the form of a cute, smart A.I. toy robot named Cozmo. Cozmo is a playful, intelligent, and seemingly sentient being that is aware of people and its surroundings. It is a labor of love for San Francisco-based Anki, which has worked on 45 different versions of the toy over the past four-and-a-half years. You could think of Cozmo as something like Eve the robot in Pixar's Wall-E animated film.

The idea of human-robot relationships may sound absurd to you, especially if you aren't the biggest fan of technology, but these types of relationships will happen in the next twenty to fifty years, and maybe even sooner. In case you are wondering about the above picture, it is from the movie Serenity. The man in the photo is Mr. Universe--a man who sits in front of screens all day monitoring the universe--and the "woman" is his female companion robot that he married. The idea of someone like this is absurd right? Except when you look at what is happening in western society, you realize it isn't.

Interesting points; I agree and we already exchanged few tweets about a futuristic vision of a bot-to-bot (sort of p2p) converse (I hypotized a return of something like web services (…failed architecture, I admit) for bots "cooperative" machine to machine services: What you call Meta Chatbot -- A chatbot'router' (and I'd call "master-slave", just joking) appears to me an architecture more faisible now; in a sense, maybe Amazon Alexa is exactly in this way, with Skills plug-in ecosystem: Concerning natural languages conversational software (aka chatbots), and specifically about vertical versus General AI: I agree about the fact many companies claim to supply some sort of mysterious "AI/machine learning" engines (proprietary cloud platforms often), but until now is not to clear (to me) if these software contains real machine learning (or are just baeysian clasifiers;-)? Maybe IBM Watson Dialog contains a machine learning features? To be verified (my duty). About domain-specific I think that if domain is really "vertical", so a retrieval-based (or call I call"rule based pattern matching engine) like great Bruce Wilcox's ChatScript dialog flow language, could be a starting point for a possibile integration with some machine learning (a simple metalanguage for dialog flow design by linguistics, domain experts a deeplearning subsystem for inferences?) … some notes here:

David Axe for the Daily Beast reports The U.S. Marine Corps is around six years away from putting a laser cannon on its trucks, according to one top general. The goal: to outfit ground forces with a weapon that can shoot down enemy aircraft faster and more precisely--and at lower cost--than today's guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Over twenty years ago, I worked for company called The Carnegie Group, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratories. That company is long gone. Today, a think-tank goes by the same name. While extant, the erstwhile Carnegie Group worked on some of the most cutting edge AI products of its time. It was funded by a consortium of firms such as Caterpillar and USWEST (now Qwest Corp.) and its sole aim was to look for the application of AI technologies in businesses.

Over twenty years ago, I worked for company called The Carnegie Group, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratories. That company is long gone. Today, a think-tank goes by the same name. While extant, the erstwhile Carnegie Group worked on some of the most cutting edge AI products of its time. It was funded by a consortium of firms such as Caterpillar and USWEST (now Qwest Corp.) and its sole aim was to look for the application of AI technologies in businesses.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

One of the most intriguing public discussions to emerge over the past year is humanity's wrestling match with the threat and promise of artificial intelligence. AI has long lurked in our collective consciousness -- negatively so, if we're to take Hollywood movie plots as our guide -- but its recent andvery real advances are driving critical conversations about the future not only of our economy, but of humanity's very existence. In May 2014, the world received a wakeup call from famed physicist Stephen Hawking. Together with three respected AI researchers, the world's most renowned scientist warned that the commercially-driven creation of intelligent machines could be "potentially our worst mistake in history." Comparing the impact of AI on humanity to the arrival of "a superior alien species," Hawking and his co-authors found humanity's current state of preparedness deeply wanting.

The Drum shines a light on how the GroupM media investment unit is leveraging its relationship with AppNexus to harness machine learning, and better improve the performance of its media traders, and usher in the age of'programmable marketing'. Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI) – for many of those involved in the advertising industry such terms are nothing more than buzz phrases used by panelists on the conference circuit, with little real application to contemporary media practice. However, while the more cynical in the industry may dismiss the above phrases as merely the domain of science fiction, the impact of such technologies (be it positive, or negative) will be felt a lot sooner than such cynics think. The latest issue of The Drum magazine, guest edited by IBM's AI system Watson demonstrated that, while not without its problems, the technology is within the grasp of the contemporary marketer. Meanwhile, at the cutting edge of the media industry's use of AI, is the ad tech sector (or'programmatic advertisers').

The ROCSAFE Project (Remotely Operated CBRNe Scene Assessment & Forensic Examination) has recently been funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme. Led by Dr Michael Madden in NUI Galway, it will make advances in autonomous robotics, probabilistic reasoning, intelligent decision support, and miniaturised sensors, all of which will work together to gather forensic evidence in the event of a chemical, biological, radiation/nuclear or explosive (CBRNe) incident. ROCSAFE's overall goal is to fundamentally change how CBRNe events are assessed, and ensure the safety of crime scene investigators, by reducing the need for them to enter dangerous scenes to gather evidence. There are 13 partners in total involved in the project across Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Germany, along with a further group of advisory board members. There is more information at http://www.nuigalway.ie/remoteforensics/.