After decades on every sci-fi fan's wish list, personal robots are on the cusp of entering our homes. Now it's time to put them to work. Everyone knows Pepper, the child-sized humanoid robot launched back in 2014 who was created to welcome visitors to SoftBank Mobile stores in Japan. Now Pepper has scored a few jobs in the US, from giving directions in a shopping mall in San Francisco to pouring beer at Oakland International Airport's Pyramid Taproom. The diminutive Pepper is not alone, not even at airports.

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) program developed by Google has demonstrated human-like aggression during simulations. Google's Deep Mind AI was tested playing several different games to see what kind of behavior would emerge. In one particular game, the AI was tasked with attempting to collect more'apples' within a 2D environment than another'player'. The AI also had the ability to hit a player with a beam which would remove them from the game. After running the game through millions of simulations, Deep Mind's'deep reinforcing learning' algorithm showed human-like emergent behavior.

Artificial Intelligence is a key topic at this year's World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. Artificial intelligence and increasing automation is going to decimate middle class jobs, worsening inequality and risking significant political upheaval, Stephen Hawking has warned. In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that"the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines.

"I was determined to do it precisely because I was told it was impossible." So says Yasuo Kuniyoshi, professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, in a quiet tone. However, the sharp glint in his eye betrays his grand ambition of developing a truly clever artificial intelligence to benefit humankind. Existing AI (Top) Self-driving cars most likely will one day be able to take people to their destination by recognizing simple instructions like, "Take me to the University of Tokyo." Because existing AI does not think the same way humans do, it cannot adapt to situations that are not in its playbook. Some current forms of artificial intelligence (AI), such as speech recognition and automated driving, are just as competent as humans--if not better--at carrying out their given tasks (figure 1).

On Friday, June 24, 2016, the world watched in horror as Britain voted to commit economic suicide as a nation. On November 8, 2016, America will vote. Will it also commit economic and political suicide? Increasing inequality is building up great stress in the world economic system. The disenfranchised masses are expressing their anger, including in irrational ways such as the Brexit vote.

We have seen the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and many more come out in open and acknowledge the impact machine learning and deep learning had on their business. Last week, I published top videos on deep learning from 2016. I was blown away by the response. I could understand the response to some degree – I found these videos extremely helpful. So, I decided to do a similar article on top videos on machine learning from 2016.

That was 4 months ago, and at that time I determined my existential purpose in life to be to do everything I can to move the field of artificial intelligence towards general AI. There's a bunch of reasons I want to do this and it's giving me a lot of value and meaning in my life, but that's irrelevant to this thread. I am currently enrolled in university and am majoring in Computer Engineering. I chose this major because it would give me a lot of knowledge in both the hardware and software aspects of computer systems and I think it's overall pretty flexible. At least that's what I've been told.

Only Homo sapiens, of all the descendants of Homo erectus, survived on earth whereas other species such as homo soloensis, homo denisova, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis faded away more than 40,000 years ago. What advantages did Homo sapiens possess that helped them to flourish while other species are extinct? Apparently a cognitive revolution (according to Prof. Yuval Harari in his famous book Sapiens) triggered by some kind of genetic mutation provided Homo Species with more cerebral power and thus they acquired an ability not possessed by any other species – ability to imagine things that did not exist. This ability helped them to invent things including powerful communicative languages, religion, tools and more. Does current cognitive revolution ushered under various nomenclatures such as artificial intelligence, cognitive computing etc provide more powers, this time to machines and bring in unprecedented progress to human life? Are public and private institutions geared towards initiating, leading and supporting this change?

Back in the 1990s, when IBM was close to becoming irrelevant as technology moved from mainframes to personal computing, Louis Vincent Gerstner, the then CEO of the over 100-year old company, embarked on a transformational journey. Two decades later, current chief Ginni Rometty is on a similar journey. With new technologies like mobility, cloud and artificial intelligence changing processes and systems, Rometty is in the middle of a transforming IBM to a solutions company. At the centre of her strategy is cognitive computing, which she believes will impact every sphere of our lives. BusinessLine was part of a select media round table where Rometty explained her strategy and how India fits into her scheme of things.

Computer programs' odor predictions are on the nose. Predicting color is easy: Shine a light with a wavelength of 510 nanometers, and most people will say it looks green. Yet figuring out exactly how a particular molecule will smell is much tougher. Now, 22 teams of computer scientists have unveiled a set of algorithms able to predict the odor of different molecules based on their chemical structure. It remains to be seen how broadly useful such programs will be, but one hope is that such algorithms may help fragrancemakers and food producers design new odorants with precisely tailored scents.