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Google changed the world with its PageRank algorithm, creating a new kind of internet search engine that could instantly sift through the world's online information and, in many cases, show us just what we wanted to see. But that was a long time ago. As the volume of online documents continues to increase, we need still newer ways of finding what we want. That's why Google is now running its search engine with help from machine learning, augmenting its predetermined search rules with deep neural networks that can learn to identify the best search results by analyzing vast amounts of existing search data. Microsoft is pushing its Bing search engine in the same direction, and so are others beyond the biggest names in tech.

Chatbots have faced a lot of criticism in recent months. They've been called dumb, frustrating and useless, and a waste of time. Of course, a lot of that criticism has been fair -- there are a lot of dumb, frustrating, useless, waste-of-time chatbots out there, after all. But there's one piece of feedback I've been hearing that just doesn't ring true for me. It's this idea that the shortcomings of today's chatbots stem from the fact that they're not human enough.

In the Game of Thrones-like artificial intelligence competition between Houses Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the company most reticent to speak about its technology has usually been the one that ships planeloads full of stuff to consumers, hosts thousands of companies in its data centers, greenlit Catastrophe, and has a breakaway hit product that answers questions, plays music, and 4,998 or so other things. Yes, for some time, Amazon has been even more shrouded than the famously secret Apple, which opened up about its machine learning programs earlier this year. Lately, however, Amazon's head scientist and vice president of Alexa, Rohit Prasad, has been speaking up in public, making the case for his company's prowess in voice recognition and natural language understanding. Alexa, of course, is the conversational platform that supports that aforementioned hit product, Echo. Today Prasad is giving an Alexa "State of the Union" address at the Amazon Web Services conference in Las Vegas, announcing an improved version of the Alexa Skills Kit, which helps developers create the equivalent of apps for the platform; a beefed-up Alexa Voice Service, which will make it easier to transform third-party devices like refrigerators and cars into Alexa bots; a partnership with Intel; and the Alexa Accelerator that, with the startup incubator Techstars, will run a 13-week program to help newcomers build Alexa skills.

The Vinci is the world's first AI-powered, voice controlled pair of headphones. Starting as a Kickstarter program, Vinci has already received more than five times the required funding, and this kind of support is proof that AI is making waves in the consumer market. Thanks to the company Inspero Inc., consumers worldwide will have a hot new product to marvel over: a pair of AI headphones that can act as a personal assistant or intuitive media player, and all with smart noise canceling and 3d sound quality. The Vinci means to make other headphones obsolete. To do that, it's dipping into the power of AI and deep learning neural networks.

The Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies has attracted high-profile researcher, Professor Dacheng Tao, who will join the School of Information Technologies on 5 December. In 2015 and 2016 he was ranked by Thomson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researcher for Engineering and Computer Science. In 2015 he received the Australian Scopus -Eureka Prize, and in the same year obtained the ACS Gold Disruptor Award. His research predominantly covers artificial intelligence (AI), with a focus on computer vision, deep learning, and statistical learning, as well as their applications to robotics, neuroscience, medical informatics, and video surveillance. Professor Tao is excited to be joining the university as he believes "it has a history of achieving research excellence, passing frontier knowledge on to students, and for building the base to change lives for the better."

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With technology governing almost every aspect of our lives, industry experts are defining these modern times as the "platinum age of innovation"; verging on the threshold of discoveries that could change human society irreversibly, for better or worse. At the forefront of this revolution is the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that is more vibrant than ever due to the acceleration of technological progress in machine learning – the process of giving computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed – as well as the realisation by big tech vendors of its potential. One major tech behemoth fuelling the fire of this fast-moving juggernaut is Intel, a company that has long invested in the science and engineering of making computers more intelligent. The Californian company held an "AI Day" in San Francisco showcasing its new strategy dedicated solely to AI, with the introduction of new AI-specific products, as well as investments for the development of specific AI-related tech. And Alphr was in town to hear all about it.

My academic background is in computer science and philosophy. My work has been about the relationship between those two fields. What do we learn about being human by thinking about the quest to create artificial intelligence? What do we learn about human decision making by thinking of human problems in computational terms? The questions that have interested me over the years have been, on the one hand, what defines human intelligence at a species level? And secondly, at an individual level, how do we approach decision making in our own lives, and what are the problems that the world throws at us? I find myself interested at the group level, the society level, and the civic level in a couple of different ways. I've been encouraged by what I've seen over the last few years in terms of the norms of the sciences changing. It used to be that people were scared to publish their models because that was the secret sauce; that was their advantage over other research groups.

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