"It's really 1,000 times better," said Mustapha Debboun, the director of Harris County Public Health's mosquito control division. The prototype trap, part of Microsoft's broader Project Premonition research project, is designed to automatically do things entomologists previously had to do manually or not at all. For example, this new trap, which is being deployed in the Houston area for the first time this month as part of a pilot project, is designed to only collect the type of mosquito an entomologist wants to track, instead of a hodgepodge of mosquitoes, flies, moths and other critters that scientists then need to manually sort through. The trap also can tell researchers what time each mosquito was trapped, as well as what the temperature, wind and humidity was when the mosquito flew in. And it's designed to withstand the rain, wind and other elements that can batter traditional traps and take them out of commission.

The number of sophisticated cognitive technologies that might be capable of cutting into the need for human labor is expanding rapidly. But linking these offerings to an organization's business needs requires a deep understanding of their capabilities. If popular culture is an accurate gauge of what's on the public's mind, it seems everyone has suddenly awakened to the threat of smart machines. Several recent films have featured robots with scary abilities to outthink and manipulate humans. In the economics literature, too, there has been a surge of concern about the potential for soaring unemployment as software becomes increasingly capable of decision making. Yet managers we talk to don't expect to see machines displacing knowledge workers anytime soon -- they expect computing technology to augment rather than replace the work of humans.

Both Apple and Amazon now allow third parties to build their own brand-specific voice technologies on their respective products, Siri and Echo. These are huge steps forward in artificial intelligence (AI) based conversational interfaces or'chatbots' that will make computing a more effortless and intuitive part of our world. Microsoft was also recently in the news, but not in the way they had hoped. Their release of a chatbot named Tay, an AI designed to become smarter as more users interacted with it, was hijacked to spout hate speech. Microsoft created Tay to learn how AI programs could interact with users in casual conversation and, over time, learn from that interaction--just like people do.

Northwestern University's Ken Forbus is closing the gap between humans and machines. Using cognitive science theories, Forbus and his collaborators have developed a model that could give computers the ability to reason more like humans and even make moral decisions. Called the structure-mapping engine (SME), the new model is capable of analogical problem solving, including capturing the way humans spontaneously use analogies between situations to solve moral dilemmas. "In terms of thinking like humans, analogies are where it's at," said Forbus, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. "Humans use relational statements fluidly to describe things, solve problems, indicate causality, and weigh moral dilemmas."

Twitter has spent a reported 150 million on acquiring artificial intelligence startup Magic Pony Technology, with the aim of using machine learning to improve its image and video capabilities. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey described the startup as a "small and mighty machine learning team" and said that deep learning was key for Twitter's goal of being the "first and best place to see what's happening in the world." In a blogpost released Monday, Dorsey also gave details of how the machine learning techniques developed by Magic Pony Technology would be used by the social media giant. "Magic Pony's team will be joining Twitter Cortex, a team of engineers, data scientists, and machine learning researchers dedicated to building a product in which people can easily find new experiences to share and participate in," Dorsey said. "Magic Pony's technology--based on research by the team to create algorithms that can understand the features of imagery--will be used to enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter."

A university professor is heading the Japanese version of a U.S.-led movement to exonerate people who have been wrongfully charged and imprisoned using DNA testing. Mitsuyuki Inaba, 51, who is neither a lawyer nor an expert in criminal law, is a professor at Ritsumeikan University's College of Policy Science. He believes Japan's criminal justice system is rife with fundamental failures that lead to wrongful imprisonment due to the "unscientific" way in which investigations are carried out. Inaba, who specializes in cognitive science, took up the post of director at the Innocence Project Japan, which was launched in April in cooperation with lawyers and other legal experts. Similar movements have sprouted in Britain, South Africa and Taiwan.

The headquarters of Alphabet's X labs in Mountain View, California, is easy to miss. A simple yellow "X" marks the visitors' entrance to the sprawling building that was once a large indoor shopping mall. But on a weekday in late May, the parking lot is bustling, filled with employees and visitors, as X's pod-like driverless cars buzz about. Inside, various teams of mostly young people--the company won't say just how many people are employed at the facility--work on "moon shots," which Alphabet defines as transformative technologies that could have a huge impact on the world. Besides the driverless cars, publicly identified projects at X include Loon, an effort to use high-altitude balloons to deliver the Internet to remote regions of the world; Wing, which is building self-navigating drones for delivering stuff; and Makani, which is developing odd flying wind turbines tethered to a ground station.

Tom Murphy graduated from Carnegie Melon University with a PhD in computer science. Then he built software that learned to play Nintendo games. In some cases, the system works well. Playing Super Mario, for instance, it learns to exploit a bug in the game, stomping on enemy Goombas even when floating below them. It can rack up points by attacking the game with a reckless abandon you and I would never try.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) After bringing electric cars to the masses and taking people to Mars, Elon Musk's next goal is to design a robot to do your chores. Musk and some of the other leaders of the nonprofit artificial intelligence group Open AI jointly announced that they are "working to enable a physical robot ... to perform basic housework." "We believe that learning algorithms can eventually be made reliable enough to create a general-purpose robot," said in the blog post. It was signed by Musk as well as Sam Altman, the president of venture firm Y Combinator, and two staff members at Open AI. Musk is the CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX.

ML AI does seem to fit in this category but its much more inchoate than eg say web browsers, internet, email, or cell phones.