The past few months were full of exciting announcements around two key topics: artificial intelligence and mobile messaging. Both have made significant leaps in progress, and together will make a very exciting year ahead for businesses. This year, Google announced Click-to-Message; Amazon released the Lex bot building toolkit; and mobile messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. To keep up with the massive growth of these messaging channels companies are scrambling to develop both an AI strategy and a messaging strategy. However, 2017 will show that both strategies are extremely intertwined.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to get the latest realty news. You can get our headlines via email as well, or follow us on Twitter. We'll see autonomous vehicle technology expand its reach. AI systems will be more fully utilized for sensing and decision making in self-driving. They'll also begin to transform the driver's experience inside the car.

Driving your car until it breaks down on the road is never anyone's favorite way to learn the need for routine maintenance. But preventive or scheduled maintenance checks often miss many of the problems that can come up. An Israeli startup has come up with a better idea: Use artificial intelligence to listen for early warning signs that a car might be nearing a breakdown. The service of 3DSignals, a startup based in Kefar Sava, Israel, relies on the artificial intelligence technique known as deep learning to understand the noise patterns of troubled machines and predict problems in advance. The startup has even chatted with companies about using their service to automatically detect problems in future taxi fleets of driverless cars.

For the uninitiated, the Webster dictionary defines artificial intelligence (AI), the word buzzing like a bee of late, as the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behaviour. The concept is exactly like what the science fiction movies have portrayed since decades, of a machine that can analyse, think, act accordingly and aid humans (though in a lot of movies they become villainous). In the last half-a-decade, leaps in AI have been made with its application in wide ranging areas. Education is, albeit slowly, coming under the ambit of sectors that will be greatly affected (disrupted, if you will) by AI in near future. AI has actually become a part and parcel of our everyday lives even though the term is not used frequently.

It sounds like a scene from the popular Tom Cruise movie, 'Minority Report,' where an artificially intelligent machine identifies a person who was released from prison will likely commit a crime again. However, this is real life and an MIT professor was the one who developed it. According to the latest crime statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), crime in the United States has decreased but it doesn't mean that security will slack off. According to a study, a majority of these crimes are committed by almost the same people. Data has shown that two-thirds of prisoners who have been released commit a crime three years after their release.

Kengo Kyogoku borrows about ¥122,000 ($1,035) per month in addition to a scholarship and a part-time job, because his mother can't afford to pay his college fees at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo. "The amount is huge," said Kyogoku, a sophomore of communications and computer engineering. "I get depressed when I think about it. I wonder if I will have to pay it back forever. But I have no choice."

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage today in venture capital circles. We've seen spectacular exits in the past few years, from Google absorbing Deepmind in 2014 for $500 million, to Twitter buying TellApart in 2015 for $533 million, and Intel swallowing Nervana in 2016 for $400 million. But these were all IT plays. Berkeley-based Lygos is engineering and designing microbes that convert low-cost sugar into high-value, specialty chemicals. Ultimately, the ability to design and optimize microbes, or program them, is becoming faster and cheaper than ever before.

Artificial intelligence is a concept that includes automatic or machine learning, so a first approximation to both terms places us already in a context of subordination that in no way implies inferiority. Despite their specificities, both are artificial intelligence systems, and as such they pursue a single purpose: the creation of devices or algorithms that omit or replace human being by emulating their cognitive functions. In this post we will see the approach and key applications that machine learning contributes as a distinctive element, against a general context of artificial intelligence that includes this and other areas. Artificial intelligence research, indeed, focuses on many different fields, among them machine learning or, for example, deep learning, a new area of investigation of this one. In addition, recent years, it has advanced in a surprising way, acquiring a protagonism that seems to endow it with a fictitious autonomy.

Teaching machines to read isn't the same as teaching a toddler. They don't have the nuances of culture, idioms, tone and other social cues to understand what you're writing about. Waterloo's Maluuba is leading the way in teaching machines to think, reason and communicate just like we do thanks to a growing research and learning lab in Montreal that is working on those types of common sense problems that could lead to the next breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. The company, founded in 2010 by University of Waterloo students at the school's Velocity program, took another step towards that last week by releasing two sophisticated natural language understanding data sets. Instead of guarding their data sets like a secret, they decided to share them to advance innovation in artificial intelligence research and facilitate future breakthroughs.