Google CEO Sundar Pichai has backed growth of artificial intelligence over virtual reality as the next era of computing. Speaking on the company's earnings call, where Google reported year-on-year revenue growth of 23% to 20.3 billion for Q1, Pichai highlighted investments in machine learning projects and artificial intelligence will continue, though the team is not discounting virtual reality completely. "And overall, I do think in the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile first to an AI first world," said Pichai. "And I do think we are at the forefront of development. And so that's the core of what we do, and we'll continue to do that."

According to the researcher's findings, published in the Nanoscale Research Letters journal, their creation functions like an actual biological synapse and may bring us one step closer to creating full-fledged artificial neural networks. "Four-nanometer-thick devices display the ability of gradual switching in both directions, thus emulating long-term potentiation/depression properties akin to biological synapses," the researchers say. This new technology may well be implemented in the development of computer systems that operate like biological neural networks, or even an artificial intelligence that can'think' like a human, possibly further bridging the gap between man and machine.

"She," in this case, is an avatar created by IPsoft, the global information technology services company. In a demo shown to Tech Insider, she shifts her weight from side to side when waiting for someone to speak, and smiles in between questions. If you tell her you're upset about something, she'll frown in empathy. If all goes according to plan, Amelia will be the customer service agent of the future, an "employee" who can field customer support questions for people without needing to bringing a human in. IPsoft solutions manager Benjamin Case tells Tech Insider that these low-level tasks are remarkably consistent across industries.

If all you've ever wanted to do in virtual reality is swing a pixellated virtual pick, that happy day has finally arrived. Minecraft for Samsung and Oculus' Gear VR headset is available right now from the Oculus Store for 6.99. It's technically called Minecraft: Gear VR Edition, but it's basically Minecraft Pocket Edition for Samsung and Oculus' tether-free 99 budget-priced headset. The catch is that you'll need a recent Galaxy S-series phone, limiting the appeal to a subset of Android users. If you've already checked that box, this version has all the Pocket Edition's Creative and Survival modes, skins and multiplayer options.

If you've recently found yourself wondering what the f*@k neural networks are and how they work, you're hardly alone. The rise of machine learning has made artificial neural networks--the computer programs that facilitate that learning--a common topic of conversation. Google, Facebook, and most other big players in the tech industry are investing heavily in them. News articles about artificial intelligence (including ours) are littered with references to neural networks. Still, getting inundated with an idea doesn't mean you understand it.

Creativity is alive and well at Samsung, which is developing several cool devices in its labs, including a home companion robot called Otto. The multi-talented robot can answer questions and double as a part-time security system when needed. It is expected to be demonstrated at the Samsung Developer Conference this week in San Francisco. Functionally, Otto is similar in some ways to Amazon Echo, featuring an interactive speaker that can answer questions, order products and play music. But the robot also includes a "head" that hosts a high-definition camera and a display.

In 2010, a group of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar, introduced their campus to Hala, the latest in a line of what the school termed "roboceptionists." Consisting of a truncated torso and an LCD screen featuring a blue-skinned female CGI head, Hala was designed to provide students and visitors with instructions, directions, and anecdotes in either formal Arabic or American English. In addition to educating visitors about Qatar, Hala's purpose was to explore human-robot interaction (HRI) in a multicultural setting. The population of Doha is a demographic mosaic; the city is primarily inhabited by expatriates from all over the world (most of whom speak Arabic and/or English). Because of this relative diversity, Hala interacted with visitors from a slew of countries, using features like natural language understanding and facial expressions to conduct, in Carnegie Mellon's words, "culturally appropriate" exchanges.

But those labor savings aren't the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks. Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost. And the savings become even more significant when you account for fuel efficiency gains. The optimal cruising speed from a fuel efficiency standpoint is around 45 miles per hour, whereas truckers who are paid by the mile drive much faster.

A recurring claim at security conferences is that'security is a big data / machine learning (ML) / artificial intelligence (AI) problem'. This is unfortunately wildly optimistic, and wrong in general. While certain security problems can be addressed by ML/AI algorithms, in general the problem of detecting a malicious actor amidst the vast trove of information collected by most organisations, is not one of them. Our faith in AI is based on personal experience ('everything cloud is big data and good') and the memes of the consumerisation era. It is tempting to project this optimism into an enterprise context: the idea that it ought to be possible to sift through large amounts of data to find signs of an attack of breach is intuitively reasonable.

The idea of conversational commerce is fairly new. At least if you think about it from a technological level. In reality, conversational commerce has existed since people started buying and selling goods and services thousands of years ago. You walk up to a person, talk to them, exchange currency, information or services, walk away. A conversation took place commerce happened conversational commerce. Somewhere along the way, the Web and apps economies lost the human element of commerce. Customer experience and customer service became a tangled series of browse-and-click, overloaded call centers, chat sessions and frustration.