How a person tells a story could be interpreted in a multitude of ways -- telling your friend about your awesome new car can come across as excitement or a brag, depending on the listener. To help detect the sentiment behind speech, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a wearable app that can parse conversation to identify the emotion behind each part of the story. The app, built into a fitness tracker for this research, collects physical and speech data to analyze the overall tone of the story in real time. Using artificial intelligence, the app can also figure out which part of the conversation was happy or sad, and tracks emotional changes in five-second intervals. In the research, participants were asked to wear a Samsung Simband with the app installed and tell a story.

Artificial intelligence is primed to pervade everyday life, from automonous cars to intelligent ads that anticipate your desires. How will these shifts vary globally, and what do they mean for the future of work, life, and commerce? Two big thinkers share their views: Darrell West, editor in chief of TechTank at the Brookings Institution, and Stephanie Wander, who designs prizes for XPrize. Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11; volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan to "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues; and serving as a Senior Executive advocating for increased information interoperability, cybersecurity, and civil liberty protections. He completed a PhD in from Emory University's business school and two post-docs at MIT and Harvard.

The patter of automated machinery fills the air inside wire-basket manufacturer Marlin Steel's bustling factory in a rugged industrial section of this city. Maxi Cifarelli, 25, of Baltimore, peers through safety goggles at a flat screen, her left knee bent and heel resting on her chair. Two years after earning a fine arts degree from Towson University with a specialty in interdisciplinary object design, she now spends her work days working with a personality-free machine with a name to match: a computer numerical control, or CNC, router. With automation poised to sweep through the economy, some fear that it will kill more jobs than it creates. But Cifarelli's experience is the opposite. She befriended automation, instead of fighting it, and she has a job because of it.

There was one big name missing from the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (AI) member list when the research consortium was announced last September. Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft all pledged to work together to ensure AI is developed safely and ethically but Apple refused to get involved. Now it looks like the world's largest company and a tech giant renowned for keeping its research efforts a secret may have reconsidered its decision. Citing sources with knowledge of the situation, Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Apple is set to join the elite club, going on to say that its admission could be announced as early as this week. Apple has been gradually building up its AI and machine learning capabilities and buying a succession of small AI startups.

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This is part of a series on my quest to learn as much as possible about AI. To know why I'm doing this, check out my first post. In grad school, I primarily studied Ancient Greek philosophy. My only published piece of academic research is on his Atlantis myth. But now I work at a tech company and I'm writing about artificial intelligence -- a subject I'm very interested in but know little about.

The question of whether robots will replace human jobs has been hotly debated for decades, but the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence – and the populist socio-political environment in which we find ourselves – have given the debate around automation and employment an added sense of urgency. A report by the Nomura Research Institute indicates that by 2035 nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots, and recently we've started to see these predictions materialise. Insurance firm Fukoku Mutual Life made 34 employees redundant by replacing them with IBM's Watson Explorer AI system, which is capable of analysing and interpreting data to automatically calculate payouts to its policyholders. This AI system will be able to read tens of thousands of medical certificates and factor in the length of hospital stays, medical histories and any surgical procedures before calculating payouts, but in spite of being described by the firm as "cognitive technology that can think like a human," the sums will not actually be paid until they have been approved by an actual member of staff. And it is this aspect of human oversight that proves crucial to the conversation: Instead of treating Artificial Intelligence and Automation as a zero-sum game and pitching AI as an adversary to human employment, it is important to point out that technological advances generally correlate to increased prosperity in the long-term.

In the latest installment of Information Age's Innovation Spotlight Series, Adam Spearing discusses how AI is impacting the customer journey. He expressed that technologies like AI are integral to remain competitive because of an increasing demand from people to be "predictably served". An expectancy of anticipation from the consumer means they want to be told what they want, before they want it and AI acts as a tool to satisfy this desire. "Research we have done has shown that people in the consumer space and people in the business-to-business space expect to be anticipated on their needs on what it is they want and I don't think there is a lot of technologies currently out there that offer that capability," said Spearing. He continued by saying that the technology is "going to transform the way you deal with the whole interaction of how customers operate with you. The ability to look at a tweet, or a post, or an email and understand the sentiment behind that and change the way you prioritise your interactions [will be significant]."

Helen of Troy may have had a "face that launch'd a thousand ships", according to Christopher Marlowe, but these days her visage could launch a lot more besides. She could open her bank account with it, authorise online payments, pass through airport security, or raise alarm bells as a potential troublemaker when entering a city (Troy perhaps?). This is because facial recognition technology has evolved at breakneck speed, with consequences that could be benign or altogether more sinister, depending on your point of view. High-definition cameras combined with clever software capable of measuring the scores of "nodal points" on our faces - the distance between the eyes, the length and width of the nose, for example - are now being combined with machine learning that makes the most of ever-enlarging image databases. Applications of the tech are popping up all round the world. In China, for example, fried chicken franchise KFC recently unveiled its first "smart restaurant" that uses facial recognition to predict what meal customers are likely to want, based on their age, gender and the time of day, while payments giant Alipay is experimenting with "smile to pay" tech.

Activists protest against the gang-rape of a 16-year-old girl in Brazil last year – videos and images of the assault were posted to social media and circulated widely, revictimizing the woman. As Facebook defended itself in a German court against claims that it does too little to counter abusive content on its platform, one of its lawyers made the intriguing claim "There are billions of postings each day. You want us to employ a sort of wonder machine to detect each misuse. Such a machine doesn't exist." For a technology company with a heavy investment in deep learning and filtering technologies that has repeatedly run afoul of free speech advocates for its aggressive stance on content removal this is certainly a curious claim to make.