Microsoft has trained its artificial intelligence software to replicate and produce original paintings based upon the works of Rembrandt van Rijn in the hope to refine its deep learning and facial recognition programmes. In actual fact, the above image is an entirely original tribute to the master's works, created by a machine. The battle between humans and AI has been reignited after Google reaped the benefits of the excessive man hours applied to its AlphaGo software in March, which saw the computer program defeat Go champion Lee Se-dol 4-1 repeatedly in the Chinese board game, embarrassing one of humanity's finest players. Now Microsoft is now flouting its AI abilities, having tasked it with studying classic paintings to produce a brand new Rembrandt painting. ING, Microsoft, Delft University of Technology, The Mauritshuis and Museum Het Rembrandthuis all pitched in to birth the aptly named'The Next Rembrandt' project.

If you have even a passive curiosity about technology and have researched quantum computers, chances are you didn't get very far unless you started reading about it quite recently. This is mostly due to the scarcity of material that doesn't simply re-explain the theory driving the concept of quantum computing. A quick recap of that data can be found here on wikipedia. If we can use the manipulation of tiny particles in a suspended state to affect particles at a distance, how much faster can we make computers operate/communicate? Quantum computing, while in it's infancy, is still a very real and rapidly evolving technology.

DigitalMR is an early stage high tech company in the space of market research and marketing. Following 4 years of focussed R&D in A.I. - financed by multiple government grants and self generated cash - we have developed a lot of unique I.P. some of which is patent pending. The main areas of our research are: text analytics - NLP, sentiment & semantic analysis, emotion detection and scoring, automated image theme and sentiment analysis. We work with blue-chip multinationals such as P&G, SABMiller, DIAGEO, Vodafone, Saxo Bank, YPO, Nielsen, TNS, and many more. We are already disrupting a 60 Billion US industry.

It's tempting to think of artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive computing and deep learning capabilities as somewhat futuristic--even with companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Google introducing increasingly sophisticated features. Yet machine learning--which constantly sorts through incoming data and improves on its own over time--is already making waves across a wide swath of industries, including travel, pharmaceutical research and financial services. Facebook and Google use machine learning to analyze users, click patterns and deliver personalized content and ads. Others are turning to machine learning and predictive analytics to understand everything from consumer buying and spending patterns to real estate and housing rental markets. Still others are putting it to use to improve cyber-security.

William Hertling is the author of Avogadro Corp, A.I. Apocalypse, The Last Firewall, The Turing Exception, and the upcoming Kill Process. These near-term science-fiction novels explore the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), the coexistence of humans and smart machines, and the impact of social reputation, technological unemployment, and other near-future issues. His novels have been called "frighteningly plausible," "tremendous," and "must-read." Hertling's Singularity Series novels have been endorsed by and received wide attention from tech luminaries including Harper Reed (CTO for the Obama Campaign), Ben Huh (CEO Cheezburger), and Chris Anderson (CEO 3DRobotics, former Editor-in-Chief Wired). His first novel for children, The Case of the Wilted Broccoli, was published in 2014. Hertling grew up a digital native in the early days of bulletin board systems. His first experiences with net culture occurred when he wired seven phone lines into the back of his Apple IIe and hosted an online chat system. A frequent speaker on the future of technology, science fiction, and indie publishing, Hertling has spoken at SXSW Interactive, Defrag, OryCon, University of Colorado, Willamette Writers Conference, and many other conferences. Did you start off wanting to become a writer, or did you stumble into it? WH: I very much stumbled into it, although, in retrospect, there were a few hints ahead of time.

Microsoft made headlines when Tay, the chatbot designed to engage with millennials, was exploited and began tweeting what the company described as "wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images." But other companies are quietly implementing similar artificial intelligence technology to interact with current and future customers. Atom Bank, a startup, mobile-only bank based in the U.K. recently announced that it is incorporating WDS Virtual Agent software from Xerox into its mobile app. The machine learning software will give customers an agent-like option for assisted self-service on the app. The software was introduced two year ago to diagnose and solve customer queries by analyzing data and learning from the ways in which human agents diagnosed and solved customer problems.

The AI is part of the social network's alternative text project (alt text for short) and will be used to add captions to any photos posted on News Feeds. Facebook counts 39 million blind and 246 million visually impaired users who, if they are using iOS with a screen reader, will hear a list of items a photograph may contain as they swipe past them, the company announced in a blog post. Previously they would hear the word'photo' but not be receive a description of it. The team behind the code have been working on it for more than ten months. A computer vision platform allows a visual recognition engine to scan images and understand what is in them, from objects to scenes and even specific places.

Editor's note: this post is part of an ongoing series exploring developments in artificial intelligence. First, collect huge amounts of training data -- probably more than anyone thought sensible or even possible a decade ago. Second, massage and preprocess that data so the key relationships it contains are easily accessible (the jargon here is "feature engineering"). Finally, feed the result into ludicrously high-performance, parallelized implementations of pretty standard machine-learning methods like logistic regression, deep neural networks, and k-means clustering (don't worry if those names don't mean anything to you -- the point is that they're widely available in high-quality open source packages). Google pioneered this formula, applying it to ad placement, machine translation, spam filtering, YouTube recommendations, and even the self-driving car -- creating billions of dollars of value in the process.

After close to twenty years at IBM, where he began as an IBM Fellow and Chief Architect for the SOA Foundation, Rob High has developed a number of core technologies that back Big Blue's enterprise systems, including the suite of tools behind IBM WebSphere, and more recently, those that support the wide-ranging ambitions of the Watson cognitive computing platform. Although High gave the second day keynote this afternoon at the GPU Technology Conference, there was no mention of accelerated computing. Interestingly, while the talk was about software, specifically the machine learning behind Watson, there was also very little about the software underpinnings. Disappointing as this might have been for the hardware-oriented folks in the crowd hoping to understand how OpenPower Foundation-spurred efforts using GPU-backed, Power-based systems make Watson's gears turn (we can fairly assume that is the case), High did provide a summary of Watson's evolution since 2011 as well as a look ahead at what the Watson research teams are looking to next. High says he is frequently asked what about the differences between AI and cognitive computing, noting that while they aren't much different conceptually, the goal of the Watson team is far more about making humans better at what they do than recreating the human brain in machine form.

Relationships between robots and humans are quite debatable. While some believe that robots impose a threat to human occupations, others are excited to explore opportunities that robots will bring. The potential of robotics is almost unlimited as it is able to create machines for almost any operation across a wide range of industries. The financial services industry will not be an exception either. In fact, there is already a robot that was showcased at SEC in Barcelona last year – Pepper.