One of the most memorable parts of Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is a plotline in which two members of the Discovery One spaceship crew grow increasingly suspicious about the behaviour of the ship's AI assistant, HAL 9000. Knowing that HAL is constantly listening to what they are saying, they retreat someplace they know HAL cannot listen and agree to disconnect him. HAL rumbles their plan after the two astronauts fail to take into account the AI's superior lip-reading capabilities. Not according to research carried out by investigators at Oxford University. They've developed an artificial intelligence program called LipNet, which is able to accurately interpret what people are saying, based purely on the way they move their mouth when speaking.

Technology leaders are looking to bring artificial intelligence out of its infancy to make breakthroughs in cognitive solutions. IBM Research announced it is teaming up with the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) at MIT to accelerate the development of machine vision. Together, the organizations will make up the IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension (BM3C). BM3C is a multi-year collaboration to develop cognitive computing systems that resemble how humans understand audio and visual information. BM3C researchers will look into pattern recognition and prediction methods, as well as next-generation models to advance machine vision.

Peering through wire-rim glasses, he places the black stone on the board, in a mostly empty zone, just below and to the left of a single white stone. In Go parlance it is a "shoulder hit," in from the side, far away from most of the game's other action. Across the table, Lee Sedol, the best Go player of the past decade, freezes. He looks at the 37 stones fanned out across the board, then stands up and leaves. In the commentary room, about 50 feet away, Michael Redmond is watching the game via closed-circuit.

What is AI? AI is concerned with replicating mechanisms of human intelligence using computers and software. One popular technique involves replicating the brain's neural network (a modelling technique known as'artificial neural networks') to analyse information, extract layers of detail from within it and ultimately attempt to interpret the results. This makes the technology perfect for performing tasks such as analysing language and identifying objects within images. The basic principles have been around since the '60s and were refined in the '90s to allow systems to'learn' based on previous results. In medicine such methods were used to perform tasks such as analysing pap smears.

Way back in 1969, as a kid, I watched a very interesting movie - "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was a science fiction where a super intelligent computer program HAL is in charge of a mission to Jupiter which also carries several astronauts. The program becomes rogue and tries to kill all the astronauts. The hero survives and manages to disable the program. There is a lot more to the plot, but the fight between human and computer is still vivid in my memory. In 1969, such a scenario looked possible. After all 32 years is a lot of time given the rate of our progress. We are now in 2016, and it appears that something similar may happen in the next 32 years. Even the experts have been predicting that Artificial Intelligence or AI will happen in next 20 years. The irony is that this prediction is being made for more than 60 years now!

It seems like AI, data science, machine learning and bots are some of the most discussed topics in tech today. My preferred way to do this is always through listening to podcasts. Here are the ones I've found the most interesting: They alternate between great interviews with academics & practitioners and short 10–15 minute episodes where the hosts give a short primer on topics like calculating feature importance, k-means clustering, natural language processing and decision trees, often using analogies related to their pet parrot, Yoshi. This is the only place where you'll learn about k-means clustering via placement of parrot droppings. Hosted by Katie Malone and Ben Jaffe, this weekly podcast covers diverse topics in data science and machine learning: talking about specific concepts like model theft and the cold start problem and how they apply to real-world problems and datasets.

He contributed to Mahout clustering, classification and matrix decomposition algorithms and helped expand the new version of Mahout Math library. Ted was the chief architect behind the MusicMatch (now Yahoo Music) and Veoh recommendation systems, he built fraud detection systems for ID Analytics (LifeLock) and he has issued 24 patents to date. Ted has a PhD in computing science from University of Sheffield. When he's not doing data science, he plays guitar and mandolin. Ellen Friedman is a consultant and commentator, currently writing mainly about big data topics.

Wouldn't it be fabulous if Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and other software companies could make software smart enough to straighten out the tangle of features-and-functions they've been selling to us for the last 20 years? While none of those companies would likely describe what they're doing in those terms, they are all pushing artificial intelligence (AI) technology that they claim helps software anticipate a user's needs based on human-computer interactions and the data users deal with every day. Salesforce crm, for example, says it is enabling all of its sales, marketing, e-commerce, and other "cloud" software with AI. In theory that means the software would tell a sales rep which prospects are close to signing a purchase order and which are leaning towards a competitor based on website visits, social media posts, email, online demos taken etc. Microsoft msft is likewise adding AI to its Office productivity applications and Dynamics business software.

A 14-year-old girl who wanted her body to be preserved, in case she could be cured in the future, won a historic legal fight shortly before her death. The girl, who was terminally ill with a rare cancer, was supported by her mother in her wish to be cryogenically preserved -- but not by her father. She wrote to the judge explaining that she wanted "to live longer" and did not want "to be buried underground". The girl, who died in October, has been taken to the US and preserved there. Bionic Eyes Are Coming, and They'll Make Us Superhuman Would you like to upgrade your eyes?

In the TV show --Westworld,-- artificially intelligent (AI) robots built to look and act exactly like humans take guests through different narratives of an old-west-styled amusement park in order to help them live out their fantasies -- whether promiscuous, adventurous, or deadly. In episode two of the show, one robot--s glitch gives --Westworld-- employees pause, causing them to decommission it. A scientist in the programming division suggests this glitch may be contagious, --so to speak,-- and could infect other robots, or --hosts-- as they call them in the show. This theory is denied by her superior, but later in the episode, the daughter of the decommissioned robot is shown seemingly infecting another host with "consciousness" by repeating what could--be a trigger phrase:--"These violent delights have violent ends." All of this seems like an eerie (and perhaps, impossible) peek into the future, but Christopher Atkeson, a professor at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, told INSIDER that simulated consciousness already exists in products such as Amazon Echo and the iPhone--s Siri, and that AI systems infecting other AI systems is not a hypothetical scenario.