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.

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.