HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT will be open to the public from March 2 through March 6. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Artificial intelligence or AI is among the most favorite subjects today. With AI's versatility and flexibility, you can find them anywhere. There are already companies run by AI and factories with robots operating the machines. But did you know that AI robots also suffer stereotypical sexism in the workplace?

If robots are going to take over the world, they could at least have the courtesy not to bump into us while they're at it. That's not as easy as it sounds, though, especially when a robot is trying to make its way through a bustling space like a mall, hospital, or crowded city street. Thankfully, researchers have developed an algorithm that could give robots the ability to deftly maneuver through spaces packed with unpredictable humans. Robots are gradually leaving controlled spaces like labs and factories and edging into more settings in which they will inevitably encounter human beings (see "Are You Ready for a Robot Colleague?"). We navigate hectic spaces by reading other people's movements and planning our paths accordingly.

IBM wants its Watson computer system to learn how to fight cyber crime and it's asking eight leading universities, including three in Canada, for help. Watson -- IBM's question answering computer system -- was originally designed to compete (and win) on the television quiz show Jeopardy, but the technology has since been used on other problem-solving projects. Now IBM is launching Watson for Cyber Security -- a cloud-based version of their cognitive technology -- that will be trained over the next year to examine threats of cyber crime. Caleb Barlow, vice-president of IBM Security, said it is becoming increasingly difficult for security staff to deal with the growing number of cyber threats. "Your average enterprise is dealing with 200,000 incidents a day that they've got to dig through. Human beings simply cannot look at all of that data," he said.

Amazon is making a bigger leap into open-source technology with the unveiling of its machine-learning software DSSTNE. The newly released program is competing with Google's TensorFlow, which the search giant open-sourced last year. Amazon says DSSTNE (which stands for Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine and is pronounced "Destiny") excels in situations where there isn't a lot of data to train the machine-learning system, whereas TensorFlow is geared for handling tons of data. DSSTNE is also faster than TensorFlow, with Amazon claiming up to 2.1 times the speed in low-data situations. The software comes from Amazon's need to make recommendations in its retail platform, which required the company to develop neural network programs.

Physicists are putting themselves out of a job, using artificial intelligence to run a complex experiment. The experiment, developed by physicists from The Australian National University (ANU) and UNSW ADFA, created an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, replicating the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize. "I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," said co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the Universe to run through all the combinations and work this out." Bose-Einstein condensates are some of the coldest places in the Universe, far colder than outer space, typically less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

Ever since IBM's Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game contest in May 1997, humanity has been looking over its shoulder as computers have been running up the inside rail. What task that we thought was our exclusive preserve will they conquer next? What jobs will they take? And what jobs will be left for humans when they do? The pessimistic case was partly set out in the Channel 4 series Humans, about a near-future world where intelligent, human-like robots would do routine work, or stand on streets handing out flyers, while some people worked (law and policing seemed to get a pass, mostly) but others were displaced – and angry.

Another Sunday, another easy afternoon with your omniscient Go computer. This being your 223rd match together, your record is 0-222. Despite your dismal losing streak, you are comforted by the presence of this mysteriously powerful, utterly opaque technological marvel. It is best that complicated things like Go are left to the professionals – or their God-like artificial replacements. In freeing yourself of the need to make decisions, you have transcended to a new level of awareness.

The subtle relationship between machines and language has evolved over a reasonably long period but is now accelerating. Soon after the first computers were built, various abstract languages were formulated in order to link these machines' inner mechanisms to processes coded by humans. The man-machine relationship has evolved dramatically since then, especially through the languages used both to instruct the machine and to relate to it. These languages now have a double role: meta-knowledge (language used for the functional description of processes) and content (language processed in various forms but in the end reduced to readable text). The digitalization of everything, by both institutions and private companies, is progressively producing impressive "corpuses" which, in their ethereal digital nature, can be goldmines for neural network software.

Businesses around the globe are bracing for the next wave of digital transformation. Many have begun to embrace it, but it is still early days. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing the way we work and live, but the biggest impacts from it are yet to come. Accenture already has invested in advanced AI across our business, to help our clients improve business outcomes and create new growth opportunities. But our new partnership with IPSoft is meant to truly advance that agenda.

Move over, Siri and Tay, and make room for a new female virtual agent set to invade the enterprise: Amelia. Things are happening fast in the new world of artificial intelligence (AI) development, and a new industry partnership just announced today aims to help enterprises adopt the complicated and potentially game-changing technology with Amelia. Accenture, a professional services consultancy, is teaming up with IPsoft, an autonomic and cognitive computing specialist that invented Amelia, "to accelerate client adoption of artificial intelligence to improve business outcomes and create new growth opportunities for their businesses." The importance of AI in the enterprise -- along with ancillary technologies like machine learning (ML) and cognitive computing -- was highlighted recently by no less than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in keynote addresses at their respective developer conferences. Their companies are helping to spearhead AI programming, with early efforts centered around bots, or chatbots, or virtual agents.