It's going to be a pivotal year for artificial intelligence (AI). And 2016 began with British AI firms asserting dominance over the sector. In February, Southwark-based predictive keyboard company SwiftKey was purchased by Microsoft for 250 million ( 173m) – one of the highest exits ever for a UK company. Around a month later, another UK-made smart machine, DeepMind's AlphaGo, trounced professional player Lee Sedol in a five-game match of Go – an ancient and complicated board game – in a historic first. Within a few months, AI has stopped being fodder for futurists' conversations and charged headlong into the here and now. Advances in neural networks and machine learning, and the availability of vast data sets, are bringing about an AI surge that has just started gaining momentum.

The nonprofit group linked to Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley tech paragons wants to start with the basics -- household chores. Its No. 2 goal -- No. 1 being a decidedly more prosaic vow to measure its own progress in advancing artificial intelligence -- is to build a household robot, one to "perform basic housework," OpenAI said in a blog post this week. Sure, such a thing would be welcomed the world over. But what makes this future housemaid robot rank so highly among the group's ideas and experiments is that robotics in general is a "good testbed for many challenges in (artificial intelligence)," Open AI says. OpenAI dubs itself "a non-profit artificial intelligence research company" with the goal of advancing AI in ways most likely to benefit humanity, all the while uninhibited by the need to generate a profit.

Artificial intelligence nonprofit OpenAI, funded by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, announced its major goals today, which include the creation of a "general purpose" robot and a natural language processing chatbot. "We're working to enable a physical robot (off-the-shelf; not manufactured by OpenAI) to perform basic housework," the nonprofit said in a blog post authored by OpenAI Research Director Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. An agent, a system able to respond to user input like a bot, will be built with "the ability to carry a conversation, the ability to fully understand a document, and the ability to follow complex instructions in natural language." Another intelligent agent will be made to win games. Finally, OpenAI plans to identify or create a metric to measure its progress.

As artificial intelligence become more and more applied to technologies all around us, we have read alot about recruiting tech talent from big tech giants. This companies want to dominate artificial intelligence, something that have been done in the world of technology ever since IBM was the bigest seller on mainframes. We had Microsoft dominating PC industry, Google dominating search engine, Facebook dominating social media. They want the same to happend to artificial intelligence, and right now the bigest player is Google with DeepMind. Tech giants have become very aggresive about recruiting tech talent, because in Silicon Valley the most valuable asset is not the money but the tech talent.

This step of your Learning Path introduces you to emerging technologies and cutting-edge practices in the field of machine learning through a series of presentations from from Strata Hadoop World in California. You'll expand your understanding of speech recognition and acoustic modeling; learn theoretical tradeoffs between statistical risk, amount of data, and "externalities" such as computation, communication, and privacy; look at developments in computer vision, and many other topics.

Understanding and managing unwarranted clinical variation is a significant and costly challenge in today's value-based health economy. Every patient is unique, so variation is a natural element in most healthcare delivery. But improving patient outcomes, minimizing medical errors and reducing costs is difficult when hospitals are unable to draw hidden insights from their own data. All Health Data Management content is archived after seven days.

Note: The following is a guest post by Roman Schindlauer, a product manager at Dato. With the release of Tableau 10 beta 3, we're happy to announce a partnership between Dato and Tableau. With Tableau 10, you can define calculated fields in Python, and leverage the power of machine learning through Dato Predictive Services directly from your visualizations. This partnership enables a number of new possibilities. To leverage the integration, you'll need to have access to an existing Dato Predictive Service, which can be set up to run in the Cloud (on AWS EC2 nodes) or on-premise.

Since I noted Timothy Tuttle of Mindmeld's LSA16 comments about the sudden increase in the volume of voice search queries, I've noticed an increasing number of articles on the subject. If the attention being given voice search is an indication of its anticipated impact on the marketplace, then it's going to be a big deal. The potential for voice search to become a major search medium is well illustrated by the number of slides Mary Meeker devotes to the topic in her annual Internet Trends report that was just released this month. Out of 213 slides, Mary included 23 slides on voice search. And while the numbers on voice search growth vary quite widely, they all agree on one trend: explosive growth.

The buzz in Silicon Valley is bots: they're cheaper and faster to build than apps, and make it a snap to reach users where and when they want to communicate. Are bots the future of customer engagement? Join our free VB Live event to find out. "The trend is very clear here that people don't want to talk on the phone," says Paul English, cofounder of Kayak and now founder of a new, exclusive personalized travel app called Lola. "It's why messaging has become such an important communication platform." And it's a trend that has opened up the doors to a new revolution in bot technology.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about the convergence of automation, artificial intelligence and rising connectivity. In the next five to 10 years, the adoption of these emerging technologies has the potential to raise efficiency, productivity and income levels to improve quality of life in Southeast Asia. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterised by the fusion and amplification of emerging technology breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, automation and robotics. This will be multiplied by the extreme connectivity between billions of people with mobile devices with unprecedented access to data and knowledge. Southeast Asian countries have the potential to leapfrog ahead of other developing nations by embracing new technologies to transform how people work, live and play, according to a new report by real estate consultancy JLL.