Artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies. So many works of film and fiction are hooked on the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and what it might mean for humanity. They are often apocalyptic tales – Blade Runner, Alien, Terminator – where mankind comes off badly. But now that AI is being spearheaded by internet giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and our daily lives are increasingly affected by AI systems – chat bots, purchase prediction, news generation – what will really happen? In 2015 the UK media widely picked up on American media organisation NPR's calculator that could predict which jobs are susceptible to computerisation.

Two robotic arms face two closed doors. Both reach forward and miss the door handles entirely. So they reach again, and this time, they hit the handles head-on, rattling the door frames. Finally, they grab the handles cleanly and pull the doors open, and after a few more hours of trial and error, they can repeat the trick every time. The two robots are somewhere inside Google, and though other machines have long been agile enough to pull a door handle, these are different: They learned to open those doors largely on their own.

Artificial intelligence is luring science into dangerous waters. To make scientific publishing more efficient, commercial publishers now rely more and more on editorial software systems. These are beginning to transform peer review from interaction between humans into interaction between humans and AI. We should think twice before allowing autonomous AI systems to decide what research warrants publication. Janne I. Hukkinen (@JIHukkinen) is professor of environmental policy at University of Helsinki, Finland, and editor of Ecological Economics.

The general idea here is that the work done by a Machine Learning engineer can be automated, thus freeing potential users from the tyranny of needing to have specific expertise. Presumably, the ultimate goal of such automations is to make Machine Learning accessible to more people. After all, if a thing can be done automatically, that means anyone who can press a button can do it, right? I'm going to make a three-part argument here that "Machine Learning Automation" is really just a poor proxy for the true goal of making Machine Learning useable by anyone with data. Furthermore, I think the more direct path to that goal is via the combination of automation and interactivity that we often refer to in the software world as "abstraction". By understanding what constitutes a powerful Machine Learning abstraction, we'll be in a better position to think about the innovations that will really make Machine Learning more accessible.

Few frameworks have gained so much popularity as quickly as Apache Spark. The open source technology may not be ubiquitous yet in the analytics world, but it's fast approaching that point. Spark has certainly caught on among Web giants in the Silicon Valley, where it's often paired with Hadoop, Kafka, Cassandra and other open source tools to process big and fast-moving data. But the real mark for Spark may be how quickly it's been adopted by real-world companies. Among the firms using the in-memory technology are credit card company Capital One, the drug giant Roche, and DNV GL, an energy consulting firm.

The round-up post for December 2016 covered McKinsey's report on data science, Deepfield's Acquisition by Nokia and AWS Managed Services. Chip giant Intel has open-sourced BigDL, a deep learning framework that runs as a Spark job on top of Hadoop. It has been designed to leverage pre-built Spark clusters to run deep learning algorithms and makes it easy to load big datasets. The BigDL framework has support for Spark versions 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 and and provides option to embed deep learning in existing Spark programs.Although modeling of the framework is based on Torch, tests show significant performance improvement in comparison to Torch when running on Xeon servers. It also performs better than other open source frameworks like Caffe and TensorFlow.

We can't deny that artificial intelligence assistants have come flooding in the market lately. You have Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft Cortana. Finnish tech company Nokia is also getting in on the AI Assistant bandwagon. Its name is Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant or simply MIKA. The announcement for Nokia's new AI voice assistant comes a month before Nokia's expected appearance at the Mobile World Congress.

The chatbot revolution is in full force, but Sage said it is the first to pull cloud-based SME accounting into the trend. The firm said Wednesday (Jan. According to the company, Sage now has more than 20,000 Pegg users just six months after it released the bot. New research from the cloud accounting company, also released Wednesday, found that about half of SMEs are looking to operate their businesses using artificial intelligence and bot technology. Sage North America Executive Vice President Nancy Harris said this trend is just part of the overall progress small business accounting technology has made.

It's likely that nothing underscores the importance of artificial intelligence more than the alliance that major tech companies are forming. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and IBM are usually competitors in one way or another, but they still formed the group called Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. Now, Apple can be counted as one of their numbers. According to the group's blog post on the matter, the initiative has been getting a lot of support from the AI community since it was announced in September last year. Now, the iPhone maker is finally a formal member of the alliance.

WhatsApp appears to be working on a new feature that would allow users to track their contacts in real time. Live Location Tracking, as it's currently known, has been spotted in the beta version of the messaging app, both on Android (version 2.16.399) and iOS (version 2.17.3.28). With the feature, users will be able to make their current location visible to members of a group chat, allowing them to find each other more easily during meet-ups. 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.