SAP uncovered its machine learning arsenal at this week's TechEd event in Barcelona. In an approach that is similar to Microsoft's, it is infusing machine learning across its business applications and making services available to encourage partners to build the techniques into their HANA built applications. Wherever you look there appears to be a machine learning element. There is a newly developed SAP Machine Learning Platform which will be available to partners and developers next year. The new HANA 2 features analytics improvements with new processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data, driven by newly added classification, association, time series and regression machine learning algorithms.

It's one thing to want to protect endangered animals, but another entirely to keep track of them. Case in point: the dugong, a medium-sized marine mammal often referred to as a sea cow. Cute they may be, but spotting them in large bodies of water is easier said than done. Since marine researchers want to do so to keep tabs on population sizes, conservation status, and their important habitat areas, that poses a bit of a problem. Fortunately, this is where Dr. Amanda Hodgson of Australia's Murdoch University comes in.

Back in the 90s, I used to design automated systems to help pilots fly civil aircraft. Today, this would probably be called designing artificial intelligence (AI) or smart systems or something similar. One of the big questions for us back then was deciding how much responsibility to give to the aircraft to fly, manage failures and generally make and execute decisions, as well as how much to leave to the pilots. One of the hot issues was whether the pilot or smart systems should have the final call when things got tough. Controversially, in several cases, authority was given to the aircraft because the aircraft could manage specific situations better.

For the first time, artificial intelligence has been used to predict the outcomes of cases heard at a major European court. Researchers from the University of Sheffield, the University of Pennsylvania and University College London programmed the machine to analyse text from cases heard at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and predict the outcome of the judicial decision. During tests, the AI used a machine learning algorithm to make predictions with 79 per cent accuracy. "We don't see AI replacing judges or lawyers, but we think they'd find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes," explained Dr Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL Computer Science. "It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are most likely to be violations of the European Convention on Human Rights." In developing the method, the team found judgements by the ECtHR correlate highly to non-legal facts rather than directly legal arguments, suggesting judges of the Court are, in the jargon of legal theory, 'realists' rather than'formalists'.

Artificial intelligence and robotics are coming into our lives more than ever before and have the potential to transform healthcare, transport, manufacturing, even our domestic chores. Mary "Missy" Cummings, Director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab (HAL) at Duke University, and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, says the technology will work best in collaboration with humans. While cab drivers may fear for their jobs, she envisages a worldwide shortage of roboticists in 2030. Artificial intelligence and robotics are showing up in every part of life, anywhere from driving, to the cellphones we use, how our data is managed in the world, how our homes are going to be built in the future. So given its ubiquity, it really is important to start addressing the strengths and limitations of artificial intelligence.

Taking a hybrid approach of using both a rule-based algorithm created by expert humans and statistical algorithms where appropriate, gives a number of key advantages over purely statistical systems. Building such hybrid systems requires less data and might well take less time. The choice of development tools can also make a big difference to the final result. Some natural language development platforms include not only the development tools themselves, but also curated data resources and the tools for expanding them. With a rule-based algorithm, coupled with machine learning algorithms, curated data and a development platform with a sophisticated graphical user interface, humans can easily construct the intelligence behind human-machine conversations to ensure that natural language applications properly understand the context of the conversation – every time.

Artificial intelligence prophets including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Raymond Kurzweil predict that by the year 2030 machines will develop consciousness through the application of human intelligence. This will lead to a variety of benign, neutral and terrifying outcomes. For example, Musk, Hawking and dozens of other researchers signed a petition in January 2015 that claimed AI-driven machines could lead to "the eradication of disease and poverty" in the near future. This is, clearly, a benign outcome. And then there's the neutral result: Kurzweil, who first posited the idea of the technological singularity, believes that by the 2030s people will be able to upload their minds, melding man with machine.

AI is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. From intelligent traffic signals to intelligent robots, and from Siri to Google Now, AI is all around us. But how can AI can improve the online customer experience? Ecommerce profits have gained huge profits in the last 15 years. There are still some online stores, however, which operate the same way they did years ago.

Tomorrow, the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines and Reykjavík University's artificial intelligence lab, CADIA, will hold an AI Festival at Reykjavík University, intended to answer question such as, What are the implications for our economic systems as artificial intelligence and extensive automation invade our daily lives? The program starts at 2 pm and concludes with an open exhibition of artificial intelligence in industry and academia, where participants can enjoy a glimpse of some of the most advanced products, services, and research in the field of AI and high-tech in Iceland. The theme for this year's festival is artificial Intelligence and the economy, focusing on how ever more AI and automation will affect our economies. Besides, brand new approaches in economic research will be introduced. This year, the festival's keynote speaker is Dr. Doyne Farmer, who has advocated for reforms in economic research and theory.

Let's inject a virus into the attacking alien spacecraft and save Earth! Let's hack into the enemy mainframe with six keystrokes and abort the torpedo launch! Cybersecurity has long been a staple of science fiction, whether it's in movies like "Independence Day" or television shows like "Star Trek." Yet in our real 21st Century world, artificial intelligence is the new face of cybersecurity, even if it doesn't sound like Hal from "2001: A Space Odyssey." The most obvious place for added intelligence is to detect whether some pattern of network traffic is benign or hostile.