The UK's AI scene is the talk of the town at the moment, with a number of significant startup exits happening over the last few years. Evi was acquired by Amazon for a reported 18 million in 2013, DeepMind was bought by Google for around 400 million in 2014, VocalIQ was acquired by Apple for an unknown amount in 2015, and SwiftKey was bought by Microsoft for 175 million in 2016. Saul Klein, a venture capitalist at London-based LocalGlobe, believes there are a number of factors that have led to a general surge in AI. "Clearly this [AI] has been decades in the making," said Klein during an interview with Business Insider at LocalGlobe's office in King's Cross. "There are conditions that exist now that make mainstream AI and the application of AI possible. In terms of what makes the UK so special, Klein believes the Oxbridge-London triangle is playing an important role in the creation of the UK's best AI companies. Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, and UCL all have deep expertise in applied mathematics, computer science, and machine learning, according to a blog post by two AI investors. As a result, several of Britain's best-known AI companies started off as research projects within these institutions before being spun out. Evi and VolalIQ began at Cambridge, for example, while DeepMind has close ties to all four institutions. There are also a number of organisations in the UK that incubate AI startups in their early days. Entrepreneur First in London, for example, helps deeply technical people to find cofounders to launch a tech startup with; at least half of their last cohort focused on applying machine learning to different challenges. LocalGlobe, which Klein founded with his father Robin, is using its 45 million fund to make a number of investments into UK AI startups, as are VCs like Playfair Capital and White Star Capital. "There are really amazing AI-driven businesses that are emerging and some of the companies that we will announce investments in are squarely focused in and around that," said Klein. In terms of whether AI could one day pose a threat to humanity, as famous scientist Stephen Hawking predicts, Klein said: "I guess the way I would look at it is that there are lots of technologies that we have created over time, including nuclear weapons, that have existential risk.

When Grace Hui moved to Los Angeles from China in 2014 and Googled the Chinese characters for "Los Angeles immigrant," the first result was Chineseinla.com. The Chino Hills-based website, a disorganized Yelp-meets-Craigslist hybrid, was a throwback, and Hui, 29, thought some of the posts were phishing scams. But with more than 680,000 listings, more than 350,000 registered users, 2 million monthly visits and sister sites in 15 cities, Chineseinla.com It's one of the only ways that Hui could connect to a country she couldn't understand. "American Internet is useless to me," said Hui, who used Chineseinla.com

Raibert has been designing walking robots since 1980, when he founded the Leg Lab at Carnegie Mellon University; he later moved the research group to MIT. When I visited the company in 2003, he showed me a video of mountain goats clambering easily up steep terrain and pointed out that "a large part of the earth's surface is inaccessible to vehicles that have wheels or [tank treads]. Yet people and animals can go to all of those places." Boston Dynamics's primary customer was the Pentagon's advanced research arm, known as DARPA. BigDog was pitched as a kind of robotic "pack mule" that would help soldiers carry heavy gear on terrain that was hostile to Humvees.

Google has been given access to huge swatches of confidential patient information in the UK, raising fears yet again over how NHS managers view and handle data under their control. In an agreement uncovered by the New Scientist, Google and its DeepMind artificial intelligence wing have been granted access to current and historic patient data at three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust, covering 1.6 million individuals. That would include any chronic illness people may be suffering from and the circumstances over why they were admitted – for example, if they have suffered a drug overdose. The agreement provides Google with access to data going back five years and is far more expansive than expected. Google and DeepMind previously said they were working with the NHS on a product called "Streams" that would "present timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury." The agreement however provides access to all patient data, covering issues far beyond just kidney functioning.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has written his first "Founder's Letter" that talks about his future vision of the company's future. He said that the company is working towards creating a smart assistant that can follow you anywhere. Talking about Search, Pichai said that is the "very core of the company". It's easy to take Search for granted after so many years, but it's amazing to think just how far it has come and still has to go. I still remember the days when 10 bare blue links on a desktop page helped you navigate to different parts of the Internet.

Tom Goodwin is senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media. We've fallen in love with apps. It's hard to see something so popular fading into the past, but what if that happened? What if apps were simply an iteration of the mobile web, before something better came along? With the flurry of announcements that occurred around Facebook's F8 conference, perhaps that time has finally come.

Ph.D. student Mikhail Jacob demonstrates the technology by dancing with a virtual character. A new project from the Georgia Institute of Technology allows people to get jiggy with a computer-controlled dancer, which "watches" the person and improvises its own moves based on prior experiences. When the human responds, the computerized figure or "virtual character" reacts again, creating an impromptu dance couple based on artificial intelligence (AI). The LuminAI project is housed inside a 15-foot-tall geodesic dome, designed and constructed by Georgia Tech digital media master's student Jessica Anderson, and lined with custom-made projection panels for dome projection mapping. The surfaces allow people to watch their own shadowy avatar as it struts with a virtual character named VAI, which learns how to dance by paying attention to which moves the current user (and everyone before them) is doing and when.

Machine learning-powered artificial intelligence will match and exceed human capabilities in the areas of computer vision and speech recognition within five to 10 years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted this week. Like most of the Web giants, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) uses machine learning technology to leverage its massive data set and deliver better services to its customers. Algorithms work behind the scenes at Facebook to do things like recommend new connections to Facebook users, to present content that matches a user's interest, and to block spam. But the company is starting to use machine learning is more advanced ways, such as for facial recognition on pictures posted to the site. After identifying a person in a photo, the new Moments app can even recommend to a user that she share it with that person.

Taking a break from the tradition where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin shared the company's progress and vision every year, this time it was Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai who updated the world with some of Google's achievements and key highlights. In a letter posted on official Google blog on Friday, Pichai reiterated "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Touching upon artificial intelligence (AI), powerful computing platforms and cloud, he stressed that mobile phone has become the remote control for daily lives and people are communicating, consuming, educating and entertaining themselves on smartphones "in ways unimaginable just a few years ago". "Search -- the very core of Google, comes from mobile and an increasing number of them via voice. The company made this easy and via Google Now, user can get information like the weather in your upcoming vacation spot," he posted.

The platform is called Mana and aims to drive automation and bring in innovation amongst businesses, the company said at its annual conference in San Fracisco. Mana, with the Infosys Aikido service offerings, lowers the cost of maintenance for both physical and digital assets; captures the knowledge and know-how of people in an organisation; simplifies core business processes and enables businesses to bring new user experiences leveraging technology, the company said in a statement. "We can automate the repetitive, mechanisable tasks; we can capture the knowledge and know-how across people and long-lived systems and bring this knowledge back inside the systems to drive more value; and in doing these things we can free people to put all of our creativity, passion, and imagination into thinking about the bigger opportunities ahead of us," he added. This initiative will be to simplify and automate migration of systems to Microsoft's products, to accelerate Microsoft Azure-based and other digital transformations for clients.