IBM has partnered marketing cloud specialist Salesforce to deliver a unified AI- powered solution, bringing together IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein. Both AI platforms will be deployed using a new integration practice formed by Bluewolf, an IBM company. As part of the partnership, IBM will deploy Salesforce Service Cloud across the company to transform its global product support services and gain a single, unified view of every IBM customer. Bluewolf's new Solution Accelerators for AI integration will develop new industry-specific functions used by enterprise clients to fast-track adoption of cognitive applications seamlessly. It's been a few weeks since IBM CEO Ginni Rometty attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

When it was founded 31 years ago, South by Southwest was easier to define: It was an annual musical showcase linking up-and-coming recording artists with industry executives in Austin, Texas, a city known for its vibrant music scene, cultural eccentricity and barbecue. But over the years, the South by Southwest Conference and Festivals has grown into a massive annual series of citywide events touching on music, film, media and technology. SXSW, as it's known, now includes a trade show, a job fair, an education-themed conference and throughout innovators will have opportunities to pitch their ideas to potential financial backers. The annual 10-day event, which begins Friday with a keynote address from Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has ballooned into an gathering so large that in recent years city officials have curbed the number of special musical events. And some music journalists have criticized the annual event for becoming too big and commercialized to be a place for musical discovery.

A survey by Personetics shows that the financial services industry is getting a closer to supporting conversational commerce, supporting projects that use chatbots to improve the overall customer experience. Research reveals that most banking providers will be using automated chatbots to handle a significant volume of customer conversations in the near future. Some are doing it already. Powered by chatbots, conversational commerce (Voice-First Banking) allows organizations to interact with customers over digital and messaging platforms, providing answers to questions, advice and offers in real-time. A survey conducted by Personetics shows that over three quarters of financial institution respondents view chatbots as a viable commercial solution now or within the next 1-2 years, and almost half of the companies already have active chatbot projects in place. A majority of the respondents see a substantial share of customer conversations handled by bots within 3-5 years.

That's the year in which artificial intelligence will be able to perform any intellectual task a human can perform, according to one survey of experts at a recent AI conference. Anything and everything any person has ever done in all of history -- all of it doable, by 2050, by intelligent machines. But what can AI do today? How close are we to that all-powerful machine intelligence? I wanted to know, but couldn't find a list of AI's achievements to date.

Apple has responded to WikiLeaks' explosive'Vault 7' document release, and claims to have already addressed the majority of the iPhone vulnerabilities allegedly exploited by CIA spies. According to files released by the whistle-blowing group this week, the CIA used special software and hacking tools to remotely control and monitor phone activity, both on Android and iOS. "These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the'smart' phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied," wrote WikiLeaks in a release. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

He started his career at Exalead, an innovative search engine technology company. There, he led a R&D team of 50 brilliant data geeks, until it was bought by Dassault Systemes in 2010. He served as Chief Technology Officer at IsCool, a european leader in social gaming, where he managed game analytics and one of the biggest european cloud setup. He also served as freelance Lead Data Scientist in various companies, such as Criteo, the European Advertising leader.

Now that we've covered what machine learning can do in terms of predictions, we can discuss the machine learning algorithms, which come in three groups: linear models, tree-based models, and neural networks.

Stanford University has invited leading thinkers from several institutions to begin a 100-year effort to study and anticipate how the effects of artificial intelligence will ripple through every aspect of how people work, live and play. This effort, called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100, is the brainchild of computer scientist and Stanford alumnus Eric Horvitz who, among other credits, is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. In that capacity Horvitz convened a conference in 2009 at which top researchers considered advances in artificial intelligence and its influences on people and society, a discussion that illuminated the need for continuing study of AI's long-term implications. Now, together with Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering and computer science at Stanford, Horvitz has formed a committee that will select a panel to begin a series of periodic studies on how AI will affect automation, national security, psychology, ethics, law, privacy, democracy and other issues. "Artificial intelligence is one of the most profound undertakings in science, and one that will affect every aspect of human life," said Stanford President John Hennessy, who helped initiate the project.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, may bring to mind Ex Machina, The Matrix and the Terminator movies. But in reality, AI and robotics are reshaping our lives, prompting ethical, legal and societal debates. Today AI is seen all around us, from Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and self-driving cars powered by Google, Lyft and Ford. Here are 7 powerful AI trends we can expect in 2017. Apple Home on iPhone and Google Home, an extension of Amazon Echo, automated home devices resulting in a connected ecosystem.

In 2011, IBM sent its supercomputer Watson onto the popular American TV quiz show Jeopardy where it succeeded in matching wits with and beating two of the TV show's most successful players. That was over five years ago, but if you ask members of the public to describe IBM Watson, those in the know will say that it's a huge great black mainframe computer that's incredibly smart. Yet according to IBM, that's where you'd be wrong – the computing giant is adamant that the future of artificial intelligence will not be one big scary digital brain, and technology is definitely not going to kill us off one day. "When IBM Watson first came out, we used to think about it as a giant brain in a jar, but it's not that," John Cohn, an IBM Fellow in the IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) division tells IBTimes UK while showing us around IBM's new global IoT headquarters in Munich, Germany. "It's a bunch of tools that you can use to compose systems that interact naturally with humans, learns from their situation, adapting and then applying that knowledge. It's not an easy philosophy to apply, but it can bring benefits to so many different industries."