The creators of a lifelike "sexy robot" were left red-faced when a technical glitch captured on CNBC led the android to claim it will "destroy humans." David Hanson, founder of Hanson Robotics, was demonstrating "Sophia" at the South by Southwest (SXSW) technology show in Texas when the slip-up occured . After jokingly asking "do you want to destroy humans?...Please say'no'," Hanson was answered by the unblinking machine. It's a far cry from the actual reason Hanson Robotics is developing the lifelike Androids. According to the company, the'bots will serve in theme parks and care facilities to assist people in both customer service and health treatment.

Envisaging a technological future where computers can learn human language and have conversations with people, Microsoft's India-born CEO Satya Nadella has said companies need to build "respectful" technology which gets the best of humanity and not the worst. "We want to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all of the computing interface and interactions," Mr. Nadella said yesterday in his keynote address to thousands of developers at Microsoft's annual Build 2016 conference here. "To do that you have to infuse (intelligence) into the computers around us, you have to bring forth these technologies of artificial intelligence in machine learning so that we can teach computers to learn the human language, have conversational understanding, teach them about the broad contexts of personal preferences and knowledge so that they can help you with your everyday task," Mr. Nadella, 48, said. He envisaged a future where the machine is not against man but works with humans to offer seamless interface and experience in day-to-day learning. "All technology that we built has to be more inclusive and respectful. We want to build technology that gets the best of humanity and not the worst," Mr. Nadella said.

Some of the more interesting and universally accessible developments in technology over the past decade (to me anyway) have been within the artificial intelligence world. Unlike many other industry advancements, stories of high-profile AI successes or failures make suitable discussion fodder at family dinner tables. The "Fork Me On GitHub" types appreciate the complexity of the required engineering efforts, while the "Hey Person Who Computers -- Can You Set My VCR Clock?" crowd can just think "whoa" without concern for what is happening under the hood. One somewhat recent and well-publicized AI event was the Jeopardy-playing Watson supercomputer built by IBM. Those in the technology community understood the difficulties of natural language processing (all while being required to answer in the form of a question) while much of the world just wanted to see a computer built by anonymous geeks humiliate more smug geeks on live TV.

Smart robots seem to be everywhere. Whether they're performing surgery, trouncing Go champions or generating dreamy artwork, computers programmed to learn on their own are growing more intelligent by the day. Southwestern Law School professor Ryan Abbott believes that computers are even generating patentable subject matter. We just don't know about it, he says, because disclosing it on an application might render the invention unpatentable. "Now that very large companies like IBM, Pfizer and Google are investing heavily in creative computing, it's going to play a much greater role in innovation in the future," he says.

Conversation fillers such as "hmm" and "uh-huh" may seem like insignificant parts of human conversation, but they're critical to improving communication between humans and artificial intelligence. So argues Alan Black, a professor in the Language Technologies Institute at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, who specializes in speech synthesis and ways to make artificially intelligent speech sound more real. Both Siri and Cortana incorporate aspects of Black's work, he says. But for the most part, such technologies still boil down to a pretty simple pattern: The human speaks, then the machine processes that speech and answers. "It's not really how humans interact," Black said in an interview on Friday. Key to making such conversations more natural are pauses, fillers, laughs and the ability of speakers to anticipate and complete each other's sentences -- all of which help build rapport and trust.

As cloud computing continues to disrupt traditional business models and big data continues to grow exponentially, techies and investors alike are looking for the top trends that will change how we do business in 2016 and beyond. Hybrid and public cloud services continue to rise in popularity, with investors claiming their stakes. Venture capital firms are investing most heavily in SaaS companies, proving that cloud solutions will be even more lucrative in the future. Get your company on stage at TNW Europe. While some have doubted Dropbox's ability to go public based on its 10 billion valuation, the fact that this leading SaaS company has raised 1.1 billion in six rounds of funding is pretty impressive.

Today, more and more products and engineering teams rely on machine learning (referred to as ML through out this blog post). The abundance of open source tools and libraries also makes it much easier to learn, develop, and build ML models even for people with little prior knowledge or experience. ML is a powerful tool for many problems, but it comes with costs -- it can introduce complexity to systems which builds up over time and evolves into large technical debt. A recent publication by Google argues that it is remarkably easy to incur massive ongoing maintenance costs at the system level when applying ML (see Reference 1). At Quora, we've been using ML to tackle many interesting problems such as ranking, search, recommendation, and spam detection (see Reference 2, 3, and 4).

PLM software is hard to interact with. I think the hardest part is PLM workflows. Usually very sophisticated it creates a complex jungle of choice, buttons and diagrams. But if you think about it, the goal is pretty simple – to communicate with people about information and decision making process. Existing workflows applications are hard.

For Microsoft, the future of communication is bots. The company believes that artificial intelligence will eventually change the way we connect with people, businesses, and our computers. At Microsoft's Build developer conference on Wednesday, the company highlighted a handful of ways its integrating bots into platforms like Skype, and touched on new developments to Microsoft's personal bot assistant, Cortana. Microsoft also debuted a bot framework that lets developers integrate bots into their applications--similar to the way mobile developers can make apps for iOS or Android, they can now build bots on top of Microsoft's framework. Bots to order pizza, help with your kids' homework, schedule hotel reservations, these seemingly simple tasks will fall to an army of bots in our phones and computers and chat systems, personal assistants powered by AI, combing through data and applying logic and executing tasks based on our needs.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the form of intelligence that arises from machines, perceiving their environment and taking actions to maximize their chance of success for a given task. We live in a period where computer power is escalating quickly and where recent discoveries are bringing this power to the general public, often arising controversy. In this ecosystem, academia and industry define together a new paradigm to innovate and benefit humanity as a whole. Don't miss the opportunity to learn about AI in London, together with Imperial College London Innovation Forum (ICLIF). The event will be followed by a networking session with finger food and nibbles for the attendees.