Despite the promise of artificial intelligence, Europe's managers aren't yet ready to embrace it.

In the military world, fighter pilots have long been described as the best of the best. As Tom Wolfe famously wrote, only those with the "right stuff" can handle the job. Now, it seems, the right stuff may no longer be the sole purview of human pilots. A pilot A.I. developed by a doctoral graduate from the University of Cincinnati has shown that it can not only beat other A.I.s, but also a professional fighter pilot with decades of experience. In a series of flight combat simulations, the A.I. successfully evaded retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene "Geno" Lee, and shot him down every time.

Hisashi Taniguchi used a sabbatical from developing software for driverless taxis and drones to take a pilgrimage to a Buddhist temple in western Japan. He shaved his head, donned black robes and studied to become its leader. He passed the test, yet within a week was back at the Tokyo offices of ZMP Inc., overseeing his robotics company in the more typical garb of jeans and red Converse sneakers. As ZMP's founder and chief executive officer, he tries to sync millenniums-old teachings with efforts to make artificial intelligence part of everyday life. "The temple teaches you that if you shine, you'll shed light on those around you," Taniguchi, 52, said.

An Osaka-based startup founded by health care product group Fujimoto Holding Co. and toymaker Wiz Co. has released an upgraded version of a stuffed robot doll designed to be a conversation partner for elderly people. The new Unazuki Kabochan, released June 17, has been programmed with a greater variety of words and phrases, totaling around 450, allowing a greater scope of response to the user's words and actions, according to PIP & WiZ Co. The previous model could handle some 400 words and phrases, but sometimes failed to reply appropriately according to context. Selling for a suggested retail price of 27,000 at department stores and shops handling nursing care devices, the new Unazuki Kabochan can also sing 13 songs, eight more than the older unit, and the need to reset after it is switched off has been eliminated, the company said. The 28-cm, 680-gram doll is made to resemble a 3-year-old boy.

Google uses a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called "RankBrain" to help sort through its search results. Wondering how that works and fits in with Google's overall ranking system? Here's what we know about RankBrain. The information covered below comes from three original sources and has been updated over time, with notes where updates have happened. First is the Bloomberg story that broke the news about RankBrain (See also our write-up of it).

If you're interested in large scale machine learning, then this book is for you. This book doesn't provide deep coverage of theoretical foundations of machine learning (I would recommend to look to other books, like Introduction to Machine Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series), Machine Learning in Action or Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, etc., if you want to get more background), but concentrates on explanation on how to use Apache Mahout ([...]) to solve some of machine learning problems: making recommendations, data clustering & classification. For each of class of these problems, description starts with base things, and continues with more complex examples, including complete solutions, that could be easily adapted for your machine learning problems. All examples that come with book were checked with actual release of Apache Mahout (version 0.5). Book is written in succinct, but understandable language and provides many code snippets that make understanding of topics much easier.

By early fall, a billboard in Tokyo will automatically identify the make and model of vehicles driving by it to display a targeted advertisement. "The ad could come up with'Hey you in the Mercedes, you could be driving this [instead],'" said Paul Turner, chief marketing officer with Cloudian, which is working with the Japanese company Dentsu on the project. A camera on the billboard will look hundreds of meters down the expressway to identify vehicles and present a corresponding ad for about five seconds. By targeting ads to specific types of vehicles, the companies should be able to charge a higher rate to advertisers. Highly-targeted ads are the norm while we browse the web and use apps, but such approaches have not largely entered the broader world yet.

Will Artificial Intelligence change the way we look at enterprise security?

Machine Learning is going to revolutionize so many different aspects of our lives, and it's starting to enter into game development with IBM's Watson. Developers can integrate cloud-based AI services into their game to dynamically change the game design progression curve based upon a user's behavior and performance. If the player is zipping through a series of easy puzzles with no problems, then Watson could detect that and more quickly progress the player to advanced levels in order to keep the game challenging and interesting for them. I was able to get a sampling of how a number of different innovative game designers have started to integrate machine learning resources last week at an Intel Buzz Workshop presentation by IBM's Interactive Media CTO George Dolbier. He showed off some code sample of how to integrate Watson with Unity with IBM's Watson Developer Cloud API and gave a number of different use cases for how to integrate machine learning into VR experiences.

KPMG will hold a series of workshops over the next few months with IBM Watson staff to work out how to use the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to carry out this new type of audit. "No-one knows exactly what the audit of the future will look like, but you can be sure it will involve two things - bright human beings and cognitive technology," said Duncan McLennan, the firm's national managing partner of audit. "Cognitive enables greater collaboration between humans and systems - so while it's a game-changer for audit in terms of depth of analysis, it will still require insights from talented people. We're being helped, not replaced."