Here is a situation that I found myself in, and I'm sure other smart-home users can relate to it. A couple of weeks ago, while on a business trip in China, my smart doorbell (such as ring) rang. I picked up my smartphone to see who was at the door. To my surprise, it was my daughter standing outside our house. Although it was daytime in my location, she was standing in the dark, back at home.

Based in Google Research offices in Zurich, Switzerland, the new group will focus on three key areas of artificial intelligence: machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding, according to a blog post by Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research for Europe. It will research ways to improve machine-learning infrastructure and enable the technology for practical use, for instance. Researchers will also work closely with linguists to advance natural language understanding, Mogenet said. Zurich, meanwhile, is home to Google's largest engineering office outside the U.S. Researchers there developed the engine that powers Knowledge Graph as well as the conversation engine that powers the Google Assistant in its Allo messaging app. Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ... Full investment news article is here.

Computer systems could also be smarter than people at some issues, however are they clever? The ultimate in our Computing turns 60 collection, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the primary pc in an Australian college, seems at how clever the expertise has turn into. The time period "synthetic intelligence" (AI) was first used again in 1956 to explain the title of a workshop of scientists at Dartmouth, an Ivy League school in the US. At that pioneering workshop, attendees mentioned how computer systems would quickly carry out all human actions requiring intelligence, together with taking part in chess and different video games, composing nice music and translating textual content from one language to a different language. These pioneers had been wildly optimistic, although their aspirations had been unsurprising.

The defining advance of the next decade, if you listen to the prophets of Silicon Valley, will be the seismic and unavoidable ascent of artificial intelligence. It might be hard to take the thought seriously when a satnav sends you down a dead-end country road, or your phone's autocorrect feature turns a carefully-constructed text message to gibberish, but the milestones reached in the last year alone have been exceptional. DeepMind, the British AI company owned by Google, has defeated the world champion at Go, the ancient game that requires a finely-tuned sense of intuition to master. Driverless cars now seem like an inevitability rather than a curiosity. Error rates on image recognition technology have dropped from 25pc in 2011 to less than 4pc.

As the complexity and penetration of technology in automobiles increases, there is a growing need for solutions that support artificial intelligence, which uses machines and programs to emulate the functions of the human brain. In fact, unit shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) systems used in automobiles are expected to rise from 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, according to IHS. The attach rate of AI-based systems in new vehicles was 8 percent in 2015, and the vast majority were focused on speech recognition. However, that number is forecast to rise to 109 percent in 2025, as there will be multiple AI systems of various types installed in many cars. "An artificial-intelligence system continuously learns from experience and by its ability to discern and recognize its surroundings. It learns, as human beings do, from real sounds, images, and other sensory inputs. The system recognizes the car's environment and evaluates the contextual implications for the moving car."

This year's E3 may be over, but we'll feel the ripples for months. Here's a rundown of some of the heavily scrutinized industry trade show's biggest events and takeaways. It'll need more in the years to come, but for E3 2016 at least, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild seems like the knockout punch so many have been hoping for. The action-adventure game, which stars longtime series hero Link, transpires for the first time in an open world festooned with objectives, unique biomes and completely new-to-the-series activities. You can cook, (manually) jump, climb nearly anything and go anywhere you like in a painterly multifaceted playground as vast as any yet seen. It's a full rethink of the Zelda formula, reformulated from the footings up, and crafted so that players of the Wii U version won't feel left behind by the "NX" version when the game ships for both Wii U and Nintendo's forthcoming platform reboot next March.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments.

The first time I used Waze was a revelation. This was not because of the network effects it generates, but more importantly, because of how transparently the application's user interface (UI) exposes them. This means every time I open the Waze app, I'm implicitly participating in the system. In doing so, I help improve every other user's driving experience, and as an added bonus, all the other Waze users participating around me improves mine, too. This example shows that when you're an active participant in the learning loop, everyone benefits – in this case, because everyone reaches their destination faster than we could by ourselves.

At the Code Conference earlier this month, eBay CEO Devin Wenig revealed that the company started getting very serious about using AI 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. "They have the most data. Their data is very actionable," Wedbush Securities analyst Gil Luria said of eBay.

AI is everywhere, from movies and media coverage through to fashion statements at awards ceremonies (cue Zayn Malik's robot arms). We're being told AI presents a scary future where robots and machines take over the world - if you haven't already then watch Ex Machina and you'll get the picture - that we're entering a future where machines are much cleverer than us, take all our jobs and basically make us humans completely redundant. But does the advent of AI really spell the end of humanity? It's much less about the death of humanity and more about making humans better than we could ever be without technology. I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural'AI Summit, London' to learn all about how AI is affecting business and how to transform what we do in order to intelligently use machines' super-powers.