Toyota's latest autonomous test vehicle was developed by Toyota Research Institute, the carmaker's Silicon Valley advanced tech unit. Automated vehicles capable of taking over driving duties from humans like robotic chauffeurs are coming, though exactly when they get here remains fuzzy. In the runup to that, Toyota wants to leverage the same artificial intelligence and advanced sensors that self-driving cars rely on for a system it calls "Guardian" to achieve something equally remarkable: Cars that can't crash. "With a Guardian vehicle the palette of things the car can do would be way more than just using the steering wheel and stepping on the brake," Ryan Eustice, vice president of autonomous driving for Toyota Research Institute, told Forbes at a recent briefing in Sonoma, Calif. "Imagine going through an intersection and you're going to get T-boned. The right thing for the car to do is accelerate you out of that. That requires a huge amount of understanding on the car's part to be able to safely do that."

IBM Watson burst onto the world stage in 2011 when it participated in the trivia-based game show Jeopardy!. The supercomputer beat out two former champions to claim a victory for "artificial intelligence". Since then, Watson has embarked on a number of challenges across a variety of domains, from identifying the best cancer treatments to improving weather forecasting. For its latest endeavor, Watson is looking to improve the quality of life for individuals with autism and other cognitive disorders. Autism refers to a group of complex disorders of brain development characterized by difficulties in social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and possible repetitive behaviors.

In Getting Ready for Machine Learning, Tim Negris states that "despite what many business people might guess, machine learning is not in its infancy. It has come to be used very effectively across a wide array of applications." Machine Learning is definitely one of the hottest topics within the IT industry right now, but Negris' assessment that it isn't exactly new is correct. Back in 2014, my team and I identified it as a top priority for our company and customers. Since then, we have developed some interesting prototypes based on our overarching strategy to embed machine learning in our products, turning them into intelligent applications.

Teaching machines to truly understand natural language has been one of the biggest challenges facing computer scientists working to advance artificial intelligence. But Google has made real progress in getting computers to look at language as more than just a bag of words, and these advancements are now making their way into its products. Google Translate, for example, is getting a technical makeover with the introduction of Neural Machine Translation (NMT). This follows the first go at utilizing NMT in Translate last November, when English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish all saw the same improvement. "We have 103 languages overall, and our goal is to get all of them working with neural nets," a Google spokesperson told the Observer.

And as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, there will be fewer and fewer jobs that robots can't take care of--or so Elon Musk recently speculated. He suggested that we might have to give our own brains a boost to stay competitive in an AI-saturated job market. But if AI does steal your job, it won't be because scientists have built a brain better than yours. Most of the advances in artificial intelligence have been focused on solving particular kinds of problems. This narrow artificial intelligence is great at specific tasks like recommending songs on Pandora or analyzing how safe your driving habits are.

"If you ask me what's your certainty that chat is going to be the next once-in-a-decade platform, I would say 99%. I am completely convinced that chat is going to be the next big platform." By now we all have probably tried one of those sites – the ones with a pop-up down below on the right, that goes off with greetings, assistance with bookings, subscriptions, new service offerings etc. etc. These chatbots have been around for awhile now, giving both, the business holder and the visiting user the ability to bridge the gap of communicating services. While chatbots are extensively used in the customer services domain, today it has also found its way to various other domains like artificial intelligence, conversational systems like Siri, wearables, robotics, etc.

Although artificial intelligence (as a set of technologies, not in the sense of mimicking human intelligence) is here since a long time in many forms and ways, it's a term that quite some people, certainly IT vendors, don't like to use that much anymore – but artificial intelligence is real, for your business too. Instead of talking about artificial intelligence (AI) many describe the current wave of AI innovation and acceleration with – admittedly somewhat differently positioned – terms and concepts such as cognitive computing or focus on several real-life applications of artificial intelligence that often start with words such as "smart" (omni-present in anything Internet of Things as well), "intelligent", "predictive" and, indeed, "cognitive", depending on the exact application – and vendor. Despite the term issues, artificial intelligence is essential for and in, among others, information management, medicine/healthcare, data analysis, digital transformation, security (cybersecurity and others), various consumer applications, scientific advances, FinTech, predictive systems and so much more. There are many reasons why several vendors doubt using the term artificial intelligence for AI solutions/innovations and often package them in another term (trust us, we've been there). Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term that has somewhat of a negative connotation in general perception but also in the perception of technology leaders and firms. One major issue is that artificial intelligence – which is really a broad concept/reality, covering many technologies and realities – has become like a thing we talk about and also seem to need to have an opinion/feeling about, with thanks to, among others, popular culture.

WikiLeaks is about to release a huge, mysterious trove of documents, according to Julian Assange. The organisation's official Twitter, which is thought to be run by its leader, posted a link to a trove of documents early in the morning. It promised that the password to unlock them would be revealed later on, at 9am eastern time. The post didn't make any explicit reference to what was contained in the document, making reference only to mysterious phrases like "Year Zero" and "Vault 7". But the post included a hidden picture that appeared to make reference to a secret CIA code.

International Business Machines Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to mingle their artificial-intelligence technologies in a bid to boost sales of data-analytics offerings.

The Chancellor Philip Hammond will outline plans in Wednesday's Budget to make hundreds of millions of pounds available to scientists and researchers to develop solutions to hi-tech challenges including artificial intelligence and robotics, next generation batteries and new techniques for manufacturing medicines.