IBM has teamed up with Local Motors, a Phoenix-based automotive manufacturer that made the first 3D-printed car, to create a self-driving electric bus. Named "Olli," the bus has room for 12 people and uses IBM Watson's cloud-based cognitive computing system to provide information to passengers. In addition to automatically driving you where you want to go using Phoenix Wings autonomous driving technology, Olli can respond to questions and provide information, similar to Amazon's Echo home assistant. The bus debuts today in the Washington D.C. area for the public to use during select times over the next several months, and the IBM-Local Motors team hopes to introduce Olli to the Miami and Las Vegas areas by the end of the year. By using Watson's speech to text, natural language classifier, entity extraction, and text to speech APIs, the bus can provide several services beyond taking you to your destination.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced via a blog post today to acquire Wand Labs, a messaging app developer. It added that this deal will enhance its strategy and vision for Conversation as a Platform, which was introduced by CEO Satya Nadella at the Build 2016 conference, held in March, this year. The takeover will help the company strengthen its position in the emerging wave of conversational intelligence via Wand Labs' talent and technology. The Windows maker plans to bring the power of human language to advanced machine intelligence, which will connect people to information, knowledge, services, and others in more relevant, natural way. The blog post also mentioned that the advancement will build on and extend the power of Bing, Office 365, Microsoft Azure, and Windows Platform to empower developers globally. Wand Labs' team possesses expertise in various areas, which include semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration, and conversational interfaces, which makes it perfect to join Bing's team.

Artificial intelligence, which has been around since the 1950s, has seen ebbs and flows in popularity over the last 60 years. But today, with the recent explosion of big data, high-powered parallel processing, and advanced neural algorithms, we are seeing a renaissance in AI--and companies from Amazon to Facebook to Google are scrambling to take the lead. According to AI expert Roman Yampolskiy, 2016 is the year of "AI on steroids." How the'PayPal Mafia' redefined success in Silicon Valley A decade ago, the PayPal Mafia played a major role in revitalizing the tech industry in Silicon Valley. The story behind this group of leaders proves that their success is more than just luck.

Ask any soccer fan who will win the Euro 2016 championship and every one of them will have an opinion, fueled by a combination of patriotism, passion and hope. It's safe to say none of them will offer an opinion based on the results of more than 36,000 soccer matches held during the past 146 years and an analysis of 94 billion outcomes. That's what researcher Michael Feindt, a particle physicist who worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) for six years, has done. At CERN, Feindt created an algorithm to predict collisons of particles inside the Large Hadron Collider. Now he's CEO of Blue Yonder, a startup looking to commercialize the technology in retail, logistics, manufacturing and transportation, a process he describes as finding the "the possibilities of probable futures."

IBM's weather forecast and data arm has launched Deep Thunder, a machine learning-powered service designed to provide customised local forecasts. The Weather Company, which IBM recently acquired after a long partnership, uses global weather forecast models and sophisticated analytics to provide forecast and climate data to companies and organisations across the globe. Adding The Weather Company's datasets and forecasting capabilities has given IBM the scope to mix in its own analytics and machine learning technology to create Deep Thunder. The software can provide weather analysis for targeted areas at a 0.2 to 1.2 mile resolution. The application of machine learning-based weather impact models developed by IBM Research allows Deep Learning to assess the effect of weather on a certain area, taking into account historical forecasts and environmental data such as vegetation and soil conditions.

That is exactly what Forrester wants to find out - is there something behind the artificial intelligence and cognitive computing hype? AI and cognitive computing have captured the imagination and interest of organization large and small but does anyone really know how to bring this new capability in and get value from it? It is time to roll-up the sleeves and look beyond conversations, vendor pitches and media coverage to really define what AI and cognitive computing mean for businesses, are businesses ready, where they will invest, and who they will turn to to build these innovated solutions, and what benefits will result. As such, Forrester launched its Global Artificial Intelligence Survey and is reaching out to you - executives, data scientists, data analysts, developers, architects and researchers - to put a finger on the pulse.

The Mad Men era of advertising is long behind us, but some of its lessons are timeless: not least those imparted by David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy & Mather, who was once described by Time magazine as "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry". That was in 1962, but even today, 17 years after his death, Ogilvy remains one of advertising's most revered minds, universally acknowledged as the father of modern advertising and credited with pioneering a unique style of ad that didn't insult the intelligence of the individual. But what could today's advertising leaders, or indeed those just starting out on their advertising careers, learn from Ogilvy? The Drum decided to find out, teaming with IBM's Watson to analyse Ogilvy's myriad writings and talks to draw out insights and advice. A man of many words, Ogilvy became the authority on advertising in his day, penning a number of books on the subject and representing the industry in numerous TV and newspaper interviews.

Google is starting a research unit in Europe focused solely on machine learning, a major branch of artificial intelligence. The Zurich-based project, announced today (June 16), will be key to the company's ambitions, as it bets big on machine learning to power its next generation of products. These include the digital assistant inside its Allo chat app, its driverless car efforts, and enhancements to its ubiquitous search engine. The new unit, called Google Research, Europe, comes at a time when the search giant is facing serious scrutiny from European authorities. The European commission has the company in its crosshairs, as it faces two antitrust charges, over a search product and Android, which could rack up billions in fines.

Do join our debate chaired by Will Hutton, author of'How Good We Can Be', on The Future with AI: Will it be good for us? The UK has a wealth of capability in AI techniques and their application, but a future with AI raises many questions. In this 90 minute debate our panel of thought leaders chaired by Will Hutton, author of'How Good We Can Be', will address your questions. They will discuss the safeguards that might be needed to ensure a responsible and ethical approach towards the applications of AI technologies. The debate will be followed by refreshments and networking.

Come to Singularity Hub for the latest from the frontiers of finance and technology as we bring you coverage of Singularity University and CNBC's Exponential Finance conference. "Technology is a double-edged sword...every technology has had its promise and peril." Appearing via a telepresence robot, Ray Kurzweil took the stage at the Exponential Finance conference to address questions posed by CNBC's Bob Pisani. Though the conversation covered a slew of topics from quantum computing to uploading the human mind, it returned repeatedly to artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity. Unphased, Kurzweil at one point stated his position succinctly: "We have a moral imperative to continue reaping the promise [of artificial intelligence] while we control the peril. I tend to be optimistic, but that doesn't mean we should be lulled into a lack of concern."