IBM (NYSE:IBM) jointly announced with the German conglomerate Siemens (OTCPK:SIEGY) that they are planning to include IBM's Watson in Siemens's industry analytics platform MindSphere. Siemens is Europe's largest manufacturing and electronics company with a worldwide presence. Siemens operates in the industrial sector with lots of on-premises software suites, which the company is willing to send to cloud. As a result, IBM's Watson will get a significant boost. This article investigates how IBM's Watson platform will benefit from the development.

Japanese auto major Nissan is working on autonomous driving cars and to that effect, it will use the Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) system – derived from NASA-sourced technology – that utilises artificial intelligence to determine if human intervention is required in unusual and unexpected situations. Nissan believes NASA's technology built for the Mars Rover will help control fleets of autonomous vehicles. SAM is adapted from NASA's Visual Environment for Remote Virtual Exploration (VERVE), designed to supervise interplanetary robots like the Mars rovers. NASA scientists may use the system to chart out safe driving paths on other planets. Nissan uses the example of a police officer using hand signals at a traffic junction.

It's up for debate whether AI can master the subtleties of language, thought, and reason all within the next 14 years. One of the greatest hurdles for machine learning is grasping social interactions. Many AI systems today are still less capable (cognitively speaking) than a 6-year-old. Frey trusts 14 years isn't too generous a timeline for the technology to ramp up, given how quickly technology innovation builds on itself. The internet was just beginning to enter a lot of people's homes 14 years ago, in 2002.

Recently the 10 year old daughter of my friend Ed asked him if Artificial Intelligence means we can stop thinking. We both were perplexed and were not able to give an answer to this curious question. This extremely smart question cannot be simply answered with a yes or no. It triggered my own thinking and curiosity, after we had just mentioned the word Innovation. How will Artificial Intelligence contribute to Innovation in a Corporate Environment?

Coway makes Airmega air filtration systems that suck allergens out of the air in your home. And now it's making the devices easier to control, with the integration of Amazon Alexa voice commands, starting in mid-January. On top of that, the company will ship a graphite version of its filtration system in mid-February. The graphite unit will come in the Airmega 400 ($750) and 400s ($850) models. The Alexa integration is one more example of how much easier it can be to control devices when they become part of the Internet of Things, which is making everyday objects smart and connected. With Alexa, you can now ask Airmega for updates on indoor air quality, filter lifetime, fan speed changes, timer setup, and more.

To process an image, for example, the lowest layer is fed the raw images. It notes things like the brightness and colours of individual pixels, and how those properties are distributed across the image. The next layer combines these observations into more abstract categories, identifying edges, shadows and the like. The layer after that will analyse those edges and shadows in turn, looking for combinations that signify features such as eyes, lips and ears. And these can then be combined into a representation of a face--and indeed not just any face, but even a new image of a particular face that the network has seen before.

Those amazing, lifelike robots, reports Jefferson Graham on #TalkingTech. LAS VEGAS --The one, coolest thing from this year's 2017 CES is an easy pick -- those amazing robots. We saw robots to make your morning coffee, pour candy, fold your clothes, turn on and off your lights, project a movie on the wall, handle your daily chores and most impressively, look just like a human, or in this case, legendary scientist Albert Einstein, with facial expressions and movement. Why did robots dominate CES? You can thank the popularity of Amazon's Alexa for showcasing the technology of a voice-activated personal assistant.

In Pressed Data, my Forbes.com In 2016, I covered artificial intelligence--the 60-year-old new new thing, big data--the most recent hottest trend and a catalyst for the new-found popularity of the new one, the fading away of former tech leaders, a number of startups, and a number of influential business and tech innovators. When Artificial Intelligence Started To'Change The World' A review of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, "a nuanced, engaging and thoroughly researched account of the early days of computers, the people who built and operated them, and their old and new applications," contrasting it with "history as hype, offering a distorted view of the past, sometimes through the tinted lenses of contemporary fads and preoccupations." Hype is on full display in "The Human Face of Big Data" of which I wrote: "…in our technology-obsessed world, new technologies and new technology applications tend sometimes to become buzzwords that are hyped, celebrated and often discussed irresponsibly by technology vendors and the media. Unfortunately, 'The Human Face of Big Data' by and large falls into this trap, the fascination (self-delusion?) with the idea of we are living a momentous time in history thanks to technology."

Tree methods are commonly used in data science to understand patterns within data and to build predictive models. The term Tree Methods covers a variety of techniques with different levels of complexity but my aim is to highlight three I find useful. To set the problem up let's assume we have a census dataset containing age, education, employment status and so on. Given all this information we want to see if we can predict whether a person earns more than $50k per year. How can tree methods help us?

A robot is invading a popular reality TV show in China that tests people's brainpower. The smart, AI-powered bot, Xiaodu, will take on human competitors in complex trials involving face and voice recognition. The AI robot built by search engine giant Baidu is one of the contestants, facing off against four people and other clever computer programs. Baidu first showed off a small version of Xiaodu in 2015. After working on the AI in the interim – and building a giant version just for TV – the gadget now faces its biggest ever battle.