April 28--Microsoft artificial intelligence guru Eric Horvitz has reeled in another award for his work making computers smarter. Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft'sRedmond research lab, on Wednesday received the prestigious ACM -- AAAI Allen Newell award for his work building tools that help computers better understand and react to human intent. Horvitz, at Microsoft since 1993, is a well respected researcher in artificial intelligence, a field booming along with the recent availability of the virtually unlimited on-demand computing power and data storage that accompanies cloud computing. Those advances, building off of work by Horvitz and others, has led to nascent services that scratch at the surface of machine intelligence, including Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana, Google's Now, and a host of intelligent algorithms powering things like Web search and document discovery. "There's a huge opportunity ahead in building systems that work closely with people to help them to achieve their goals," Horvitz said in a Microsoft blog post.

Hyundai Mobis (KRX:012330) is increasing opportunities for technical exchange to secure original future car technologies, such as environmentally-friendly cars and intelligent cars, which emerged as new growth engines of the automotive industry. On April 28th, Hyundai Mobis announced that it would invite dozens of local and overseas experts consisting of university professors and researchers from institutions and organizations, and hold the industry-academia'Technology Forum' from May to November. This'Technology Forum' was first held in 2010, and this year marks its 7th anniversary. The forum began with the aim of actively embracing the knowledge and ideas of external experts from various fields, and thus improving the R&D capabilities of Hyundai Mobis. As part of the forum, the company will hold professional technical seminars and workshops, and receive feedback from experts in various fields and explore the direction of developing advanced environmentally-friendly and intelligent vehicle technologies.

When it comes to robots replacing humans, we might think we have the upper hand since we're the ones who build and program them but that's not neccesarily the case anymore. Google is taking a different approach to training its robots – it's letting them teach each other. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. Researchers at Google have released a report showing how they connected 14 robotic arms together and used convolutional neural networks to let them teach themselves how to pick things up. The approach mimics how young children learn between the ages of one and four years old, and is essentially helping the robots to develop reliable hand-eye coordination.

Sounds like some scary future education method from George Orwell's 1984, right? Well, machine learning is not even remotely close to being as scary as it sounds and can even be used to help improve your business' marketing strategy. According to Optimove, a customer retention automation platform, machine learning is "a discipline combining science, statistics and computer coding that aims to make predictions based on patterns discovered in data." In other words, machine learning helps individuals make better decisions and predictions through large sets of data. Unlike rule-based decision systems, "which follow an explicit set of instructions known by the developers in advance, machine learning algorithms are designed to analyze data and discover patterns that people cannot find by themselves."

For resources, the single best thing you can do is find people who can challenge you and make you think. These can be collaborators that you work with in "real life," or folks online (say, for example, contributing to open source projects). I've also found that the projects that turn out the best for me are the ones that I find most interesting or exciting, so I've grown to put a lot of effort into reading about many different things so I can find out what seems most cool or fun and then go after that--at first it felt a little backward, like instead I should be reading up to find out what I "should" be excited about and then letting that guide my choices, but I've found that thinking about it instead from the perspective of "what makes me excited, and let's think of a way to apply machine learning or data science to that" is way more fun for me. That's not really a resource, sorry, but I think it's important. For resources, I love online courses (like Udacity of course, but there are lots of good ones out there), podcasts (I have to say that, since I host one as a side project–Linear Digressions), and there are some excellent blogs out there too.

I've always had a thing for Mario's brother Luigi. So when I recently heard of another Luigi--also tall, thin, and willing to drop into sewers--I had to meet him. At MIT's Senseable City Lab, a team of researchers recently premiered a second-generation robot named Luigi who sifts through sewage as a way to improve public health. Luckily, I didn't have to brave the smells of the sewer to meet him. In a small campus makerspace stacked to the ceiling with batteries, wires, and glue, architects Newsha Ghaeli and Alaa AlRadwan introduce me to Luigi, then proceed to do what all good inventors do: repeatedly try to turn the robot on.

If you had the opportunity to vote for a politician you totally trusted, who you were sure had no hidden agendas and who would truly represent the electorate's views, you would, right? What if that politician was a robot? Futures like this have been the stuff of science fiction for decades. And, if so, should we pursue this? Recent opinion polls show that trust in politicians has declined rapidly in Western societies and voters increasingly use elections to cast a protest vote.

In Facebook Messenger, for example, several news organization such as CNN and The Wall Street Journal are already using bots and some level of automation to deliver news through the platform. Artificial intelligence understands the environment it operates in and performs certain actions as a result of it. AI seeks to learn what its users want and how they want it. In the specific case of news media, articles can be processed through algorithms that analyze readers' locations, social media posts and other publicly available data. They can then be served content tailored to their personality, mood and social economic status, among other things.

The size of the digital universe will grow to 176 zettabytes by 2025–leading to a future of machine learning that could have significant ramifications for the defense and intelligence communities, officials said. Speaking at an event hosted by DefenseOne, James Harris, chief technology officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), said speed and automation will be key to the future of intelligence collection and analysis. DIA is testing machine learning to understand the full range of capabilities. One example is a machine that runs through all of the resumes a company has received, and matches the resumes with job vacancy announcements, said Harris. While this is a small-scale example, it opens up the possibility of machines running all open-source data.

Silicon Valley veteran Jerry Kaplan came to the Collision tech conference in New Orleans to talk about artificial intelligence, human intelligence, the likelihood of singularity and the future of technology and our lives. But his message was a little more tangible than all that: Don't let the hype around artificial intelligence distract you from the tremendous opportunities and potential pitfalls that lie before us as human beings. We are a long way away from humans merging with machines or machines taking over human existence. "We need to get rid of, in this field, this gee-whiz, apocalyptic gloss," Kaplan, an artificial intelligence pioneer who co-founded Go and Onsale, said speaking from the conference's main stage. "I'm not worried about super-intelligent machines or whether I'm going to live long enough to be uploaded into cyberspace. Such concerns only distract us from the real threats and opportunities that mankind is likely to face."