An official German watchdog has told parents to destroy an internet-connected doll because hackers can use it to spy on children. My Friend Cayla was found to be equipped with an insecure Bluetooth device, which cybercriminals could hijack, in order to steal personal data and listen and talk to the child playing with it. Germany's Federal Network Agency, the regulatory office for electricity, gas, telecommunications, post and railway markets, has now warned parents to destroy it. 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.

There is a big role artificial intelligence can play in helping to shape the future of web-driven consumer healthcare and that future is happening now. The ubiquity of artificial intelligence is indisputable. Manifestations of machine learning, deep learning and neural network algorithms are deployed in almost every vertical industry, from equipment asset monitoring to real-time financial services analysis. Nonetheless, the future of these technologies likely depends on their consumerization in the form of mainstream adoption by the general public. It's what artificial intelligence can--and is--doing in the personal, as opposed to professional, lives of users which represents its most exciting developments today.

With Amazon, Facebook and Google all adopting an open source approach to development of their artificial intelligence (AI) services, what could this innovation mean for a family shopping on the High Street? An end to Saturday morning parking mayhem – having to spend half an hour queuing to get into a shopping centre car park only to find out the only spaces left are on the hundredth floor can be a miserable start (and end) to a Saturday shop for the whole family. An AI personal assistant could reduce the friction of this inconvenience by reserving a suitable car parking space at the shopping centre in advance, based on the family's store preferences, accessibility requirements and other factors, like forecast weather. It can then send the reserved space location to the family's in-car GPS and automatically pay for its ticket. The more an AI can effectively integrate or communicate with other systems the greater the convenience for customers.

As enterprises are becoming smarter nowadays, IBM has extracted the core machine learning technology from its Watson cognitive system and brought a native platform. The new machine learning platform is designed to run at scale through open source support. IBM is planning to bring its machine learning platform first to the z System mainframe that has already been used by a large number of organisations worldwide to handle "billions of daily transactions" from banks, retailers, insurers, transportation firms and governments. The solution is claimed to support any transactional data type and work with open source technologies like Java, Python. Additionally, there is support for machine learning frameworks such as Apache SparkML, TensorFlow and H2O that all are maintained by the developer community.

Retailers need to embrace next generation technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) if they want shoppers to continue using their apps, new research has found. The study found that nearly 30% of consumers would like to see more innovation in mobile apps, so that they provide a better, more personalised shopping experience. Shoppers surveyed said they would be more likely to download a retail app if it featured technology that helped them to make a buying decision, or let them preview products before purchasing them. The report, by mobile app developer Apadmi, surveyed 2,000 consumers who use retail apps to find out what they expect from apps and what they would like to see more of in the future. More than a quarter (26%) said they would like to see retailers implement AI tools in shopping apps, particularly if they help to remember past purchases and recommend products and deals based on shopping history.

Artificial Intelligence is the discipline of thinking machines. The field is growing dramatically with the proliferation of high powered computers into homes and businesses and especially with the growing power of smartphones and other mobile devices. Artificial intelligence software is assisting people in most every discipline. The many functions of AI are considered by many to be threatening many human jobs across multiple industries, but others consider it a great producer of jobs since it will help create entirely new industries and free more humans to innovate and create.

A machine that can handle basic tasks -- think the self-service checkout at Walmart or an ATM machine -- is a better option for one particular segment of the population. That's right -- introverts already know the benefits of machine learning. Full disclosure here: I have not paid a human for gas in about eight years. There have been a few times when I go into the gas station, but it's always to scour around for donuts or to find the restroom. A few friends and relatives are in the same boat.

About two weeks ago, I saw an article (actually, one of my colleagues posted it on our intranet) from the MIT Technology Review about the limitations of Artificial Intelligence. The article is here for those of you who want to read it in full, but the fundamental concept is; while AI has made great strides in the last 20 years or so (see the recent win by Google's AlphaGo over Lee Sodol, who is thought to be one of the best Go players of all time), it is still fundamentally inadequate in one respect – we have not yet built a machine that can carry on a conversation with anything remotely approximating human facility. Quite simply, the computer does not understand the meaning of words that it is using and is therefore unable to use them intelligently. The reason for this, according to the article, is that "words often have meaning based on context and the appearance of the letters and words." It's not enough to be able to identify a concept represented by a bunch of letters strung together.

Voice-based artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from obscurity to near ubiquity. My first experience using the technology was in the late 1990s on a PC that boasted a fraction of the computing power available on an Apple Watch today. For nearly two decades, the promise of voice interfaces seemed like something out of a Star Trek fantasy. But technology is finally catching up to the fantasy. Today, voice-based interactions are becoming one of the more promising ways in which we interact with technology.

First you could book a flight online. Then came online travel agents. And now you might check in for your hotel via mobile, a computer could set the price, while a chatbot answers your queries. Some travel experts expect the first autonomous cargo flights to start within several years, while big data analysis is on the rise at internet-based firms like Expedia, Lastminute.com and Skyscanner. "We have to reinvent the place of the man in the system," says Fabrice Otaño, chief data officer at AccorHotels group.