Google's week consisted of bringing its TensorFlow machine learning software to iOS, seeing its Tango software added into the first consumer smartphones, and receiving a proposal by its DeepMind division to add a kill switch to artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The firm's AlphaGo AI is also scheduled to face the best Go player the world can offer in a match later this year. Google updated its TensorFlow machine learning software to run on iOS devices. The technology that powers AlphaGo was released to the open source community in November, but has now reached the hands of Apple developers who can build a neural network right into apps. Google's Tango software was revealed to be a key feature of Lenovo's new smartphones.

This piece was originally published on Medium in Imaginary Papers, an online publication of Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination. Matt Scherer runs the Law and AI blog. Artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our economy and society, and are being designed with an ever-increasing ability to operate free of direct human supervision. Algorithmic trading systems account for a huge and still-growing share of stock market transactions, and autonomous vehicles with A.I. "drivers" are already being tested on the roads. Because they operate with less human supervision and control than earlier technologies, the rising prevalence of autonomous A.I. raises the question of how legal systems can ensure that victims receive compensation if (read: when) an A.I. system causes physical or economic harm during the course of its operations.

Ross has been built on IBM's cognitive computer Watson and is designed to read and understand language, formulate hypotheses when asked questions, conduct research, and generate responses in order to back up its conclusions. Ross also improves with age, as it learns from its experiences and gains knowledge with more interaction. "You ask your questions in plain English, as you would a colleague, and ROSS then reads through the entire body of law and returns a cited answer and topical readings from legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly. In addition, ROSS monitors the law around the clock to notify you of new court decisions that can affect your case," ROSS website says. Ross will also serve as a time efficiency tool, as it will be capable of narrowing down results from a thousand answers to a handful of the most relevant answers and then translates them into an understandable language.

For eBay (EBAY), artificial intelligence could prove to be its salvation. The San Jose, Calif.-based e-commerce giant, which has been working to transform itself after spinning off PayPal Holdings (PYPL) last year, could reap some huge benefits if it can find out a way to effectively use AI, according to analysts. At the Code Conference earlier this month, eBay CEO Devin Wenig revealed that the company started getting very serious about using artificial intelligence last year, noting that e-commerce is essentially a data business and that AI may be more important for eBay than its peers due to the "breadth of [its] inventory." Wenig further explained that eBay plans to formulate a strategy focused on using data to predict what consumers might want and offering a wide selection of products. In fact, eBay aims to use algorithms over the next three to four years to better understand consumer intent and create an ecosystem involving social networks and messaging applications to allow for better targeting, R.W. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian wrote in a note earlier this month.

It's well known that we in the tech sector love our acronyms. We also like re-badging stuff.What was once ASP (application service provision) morphed into SaaS (software as a service) and then became part of the cloud computing eco-system. And so it is at the moment with AI (artificial intelligence). There have been a number of pronouncements recently, particularly from private practice firms, about their adoption of AI. But is the truth more weighted towards the "artificial" than the "intelligence"? That well-known convenient one-stop-shop of truth, Wikipedia, defines AI as "a machine acting as a rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximise its chance for success at an arbitrary goal".

The edtech trend on the tip of everyone's tongue at this year's EdtechXEurope event is artificial intelligence. By harnessing the power of AI and deep learning, educators can glean insights from the vast quantities of data hoovered up from their students. AI could also help lecturers make better decisions and could improve student retention rates, according to experts. "AI is a tool to make better sense of data," says Satya Nitta, director of education and cognitive sciences at IBM. The world's top online learning platforms are working with business schools such as Yale SOM and Duke Fuqua, and are offering advanced analytical tools to help them refine and enhance student learning.

Are the warnings we have heard, from no lesser figures than Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, about artificial intelligence being a threat to the future of humanity, to be taken seriously? Will our children or grandchildren live in a world where walking, talking humanoid robots are difficult to tell apart from biological humans? There are those in the field, such as Ray Kurzweil, American writer and computer scientist, who believe that in just a few decades machine intelligence will be able to improve itself, independent from human help, to generate exponential improvements that are described as "the singularity" - a term borrowed from mathematics where it is used to describe a function that veers off to infinity.

We'd like to thank the awesome Jupyter team, especially Fernando, Brian, Min and Kyle for their work on Jupyter and their continuous support.

Pendo is bringing the attention to what really matters today: data liquidity, which Pendo defines as liberating data by sophisticated matching and search providing for API's and open standards. Pendo is pleased to announce Version 3.1 of the Pendo Data Platform (PDP), surfacing new abilities in the user-friendly web UI incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) attacking the battle of aggregation and intelligent machine learning in gathering of Excel spreadsheets. "AI is a magnitude more complex than machine learning" states Pamela Pecs Cytron, CEO of Pendo Systems. When you model the mind you can create systems capable of learning everything about the world. It is a much smaller task, since the world is very large and changes occur behind your back, which means World Models will become obsolete the moment they are made.

It seems today that Machine Learning has become synonymous with Artificial Intelligence. While this is the result of good marketing, it isn't rooted in reality. The reality is that Machine Learning is just one approach to AI (in fact it's called the statistic approach). In the field of AI, there are two main schools of thought when it comes to programming how to make a machine mimic a human business process: statistic (sometimes called probabilistic) and deterministic. Neither of these approaches are "superior" to the other, they are just suited better to different use cases.