Intel is making it easier to create smarter and more functional gadgets, robots, drones, and wearables using its Edison developer board. The company has made a series of improvements to its latest IoT Developer Kit 3.0, which is used to program functionality into devices. The developer kit adds support for a wider range of sensors and adds connectivity to IBM's Bluemix cloud service. The kit also has improved programming tools and integration with Google's Brillo and Android. Edison has been used as a developer board to prototype and test devices.

MaritzCX, a global customer experience (CX) software and services company, today is pre-announcing two new capabilities in its customer experience product offerings to help businesses broaden their understanding and response to customers. PredictionCX provides the first-of-its-kind capabilities to help businesses grow by analyzing known customer information and applying it to predict customer loyalty. SocialCX is a first-to-market offering that helps CX pros manage and increase reviews on social media at the local/branch level. PredictionCX – Rescue, Up-sell, Anticipate Needs of Silent Customers MaritzCX created PredictionCX to give organizations greater opportunity to recover customers and drive financial returns from their customer experience program. Companies are looking for ways to understand the full spectrum of the customer experience and increase loyalty and retention, which is continually challenged with increasing survey fatigue and growing response bias.

ARE ALGORITHMS taking over our jobs? Yes, yes they are… and that a good thing. An algorithm is a series of steps with rules that help us solve problems and accomplish goals. And when we structure these steps and rules the right way we can automate the algorithm to establish Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). And it is this A.I. that helps us do our analytical heavy lifting so we can focus our time on doing the things that we're good at… the things we were hired to do.

In 2007, Stephanie Costello had a boring office job with a lot of downtime that she spent online. She recalls the day she read one of those articles on MSN.com that have become a staple of the Internet: how to make extra money online. These types of articles often appear in the soft-news sections of MSN, Yahoo and other sites, usually with the message that there is money being left on the table. Costello was intrigued at the prospect of cutting through the boredom of her day with the opportunity to pick up a little extra cash. She went to the website, Mechanical Turk, where companies can post tiny tasks and workers can find and perform them online. It was free to register--no call for an "investment" up front, which indicated that it was not on its face a scam. And she began making money immediately. Costello is a trailblazer of sorts. She was one of the early workers to join Mechanical Turk, the first online, crowd-based, micro-labor platform.

IBM (IBM, Tech30) Watson is teaming up with Sesame Workshop to develop a new suite of preschool products that could range from consumer apps and toys, to educational tools for schools. Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit that creates "Sesame Street." The company says it entered into this partnership because it wants to provide personalized learning to as many kids around the world as possible. "There's not necessarily anything wrong with preschool education today," Harriet Green, IBM's GM for Watson IoT, Commerce and Education told CNNMoney. But not enough kids have access to the right level of education at the right time in their lives.

In his many years as an artificial intelligence researcher, Eric Horvitz has worked on everything from systems that help determine what's funny or surprising to those that know when to help us remember what we need to do at work. On Wednesday, Horvitz, a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, research lab, received the ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. The award honors Horvitz's substantial theoretical efforts and as well as his persistent focus on using those discoveries as the basis for practical applications that make our lives easier and more productive. Harry Shum, the executive vice president of Microsoft's technology and research group, said Horvitz epitomizes a style of research that is unique to places like Microsoft because it is focused on having an impact in both the research and industry domains. "People talk about basic research and applied research. What we are doing here is Microsoft research," Shum said.

The development of artificial intelligence and robotics is not only seen as a key to economic competitiveness, but AI research is also a reflection of different countries' "soft power" influence. For instance, nations such as the U.S., Israel, and India consider AI as key to securing their borders. By contrast, Japan and South Korea expect the "fourth industrial revolution" to benefit their trade positions. Today, China and Russia are trying to predict events. Different approaches to AI are already changing the world.

Emerging technologies and techniques in artificial intelligence are poised to have an impact on your industry, and sooner than you realize. We've invited an extraordinary group of speakers to EmTech Digital in San Francisco next month to delve into some of the most promising areas of AI research. We'll hear from leaders in their field who are working to improve the ability of machines to sense, perceive, and act in different environments, allowing for more natural and closer collaboration with human counterparts. No industry will be unchanged. We'll hear from leaders of companies including Facebook, Pinterest, and Google to better understand how AI is transforming our digital lives.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no foreign term. While technically machine intelligence, most people conjure images of robots when they think about AI. The man who coined the term back in 1955, John McCarthy, defines AI as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." AI is indeed much like an engineering process. Yes, these machines are smart and capable of achieving multiple tasks, but they also need a facilitator, right? That's where the human element comes in.

The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December. But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn't that no one was looking. It was that everyone was looking. When some of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI's freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers--some made at the conference itself--were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup.