A recent announcement out of the company reports, "XPRIZE, the global leader in incentivized prize competitions, today announced that registration is now open and guidelines are available for the 5 million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a four-year global competition challenging teams to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to tackle the world's greatest challenges. The AI competition is XPRIZE's first open challenge where teams will define their own goals and create AI applications that solve some of humanity's most pressing challenges in areas such as healthcare, education, energy & environment, global development and exploration." Marcus Shingles, CEO of XPRIZE, commented, "In the coming decade, as XPRIZE strives to achieve its impact mission through incentive competitions and crowd-sourcing, we see tremendous opportunity in this emerging generation of problem solvers to use AI to solve humanity's grandest challenges… The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is intended to promote and progress the notion of'AI for impact' among the global bold innovator crowd, both the established community of practitioners, as well as encourage newcomers to experiment and ultimately demonstrate how AI can be used as a tool for good." The article adds, "Teams have until December 1, 2016 to register through the XPRIZE website for the four-year competition, and then will have until March 1, 2017 to submit a detailed development and testing plan for their proposed solution. There will be three subsequent rounds of selection each fall during which a panel of expert judges will choose the top 10 teams that will advance to compete at IBM Watson sponsored events where they can receive Milestone Prizes."

Artificial Intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems that normally require human intelligence. These days A.I. is also buzz word that contains any technology achieving intelligent systems. 'Cognitive' technologies -- designed to simulate human thought -- are organized into Cognitive Systems. They make use of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to enable humans to interact more naturally with machines, with the aim of enhancing and scaling human expertise.

In the coming decade, as X Prize strives to achieve its impact mission through incentive competitions and crowd-sourcing, we see tremendous opportunity in this emerging generation of problem solvers to use AI to solve humanitys grandest challenges," X Prize CEO Marcus Shingles said in a statement. "The IBM Watson AI X Prize is intended to promote and progress the notion of AI for impact among the global bold innovator crowd, both the established community of practitioners, as well as encourage newcomers to experiment and ultimately demonstrate how AI can be used as a tool for good.

IBM Watson joined forces with the X Prize Foundation to launch an open 5 million challenge to build an artificial intelligence app for healthcare that could also be used in other industries, including education, energy, the environment, global development or even exploration. "In the coming decade, as X Prize strives to achieve its impact mission through incentive competitions and crowd-sourcing, we see tremendous opportunity in this emerging generation of problem solvers to use AI to solve humanity's grandest challenges," X Prize CEO Marcus Shingles said in a statement. "The IBM Watson AI X Prize is intended to promote and progress the notion of'AI for impact' among the global bold innovator crowd, both the established community of practitioners, as well as encourage newcomers to experiment and ultimately demonstrate how AI can be used as a tool for good." Unlike previous X Prizes, including the Tricorder X Prize, in which companies are vying to develop a handheld medical scanner, and the original Ansari X Prize for suborbital flight, this contest allows the participants to define their own goals and to focus on solving different problems. "Rather than set a single, universal goal for all teams, this competition allows teams to define their own challenges and demonstrate their solutions, encouraging myriad problem-solving approaches," Amir Banifatemi, X Prize lead for the IBM Watson AI competition, said in a statement.

Artificial intelligence is a major player at Cannes Lions this week. And while AI is expected to transform tech within five years, Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt assured attendees that there's little chance it will become "evil" as Hollywood films have depicted. In fact, he said, there are imminent benefits of AI. "Computer vision is now better than human vision. It means self-driving cars probably see a lot better than you, especially if you are drunk." Meanwhile, British musician and producer Brian Eno spoke about creativity and AI, defending human intelligence. "AI is not as advanced as we expected it would be," he said.

Registration has just opened up for an all new US 5 million XPrize, this time focusing on getting humans collaborating better with artificial intelligence to solve major global issues. Unlike previous competitions, this XPrize, sponsored by IBM's Watson division, doesn't feature a set of pre-determined goals, but instead challenges teams to come up with their own. You might be familiar with XPrize from its ongoing Google Lunar effort, which is seeing small teams from around the world compete to successfully land a robot on the Moon. It's a seriously ambitious project, and one that has seen rivals team up in the hope of winning out against the competition. This new project is totally different to the Lunar XPrize, but it's no less ambitious.

IBM Watson gained global fame as a "Jeopardy!" While Watson is no longer dominating the game circuit, IBM has put the computer system to use in a wide range of applications from tennis to weather. Now Watson is also powering a modified version of "Minecraft" that makes learning about the human body as fun as crafting a house. "Medical Minecraft," as its called, was created by high school educators to teach students about infectious diseases. Normally, that would be a topic that would completely bore teens or to be too complex to the point of alienation.

IBM Watson, the distributed natural language processing platform, isn't the only advanced system available, but it's the highest-profile and arguably the most sophisticated. It's also important to recognize how shrewdly Watson is being marketed. Even before Watson was Watson, IBM was adept at generating publicity for its futuristic computing activities. Most famously, Big Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Four years later, Watson, in a form far more rudimentary than today's commercialized version, beat Ken Jennings, the human Jeopardy!

Although our project is to make robots play poker, our main focus is to demonstrate the power of the Watson Developer Cloud. We were all blown away when we found out how simple and easy it was to use the APIs on Bluemix to do things like natural language classification, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, visual recognition, and much more. The hard part, as is usually the case, is coming up with an idea. We want to inspire others to be creative and make use of these services. To do that, we will be sharing everything we've been doing with the robots in a series of blog posts.

Firstly, AI is an incredibly vibrant field. We're discovering ways of evolving the technology and applying it to solve profound social and business problems – problems where previous generations of computing systems were not able to provide much benefit. It has a tremendous ability to amplify our own cognitive strengths – it contributes to my ability to make better decisions, to see the world through a lens I would have otherwise been blind to. There are tremendous opportunities and we are only at the threshold of what is possible. Watson is being developed as a tool that can help build and grow businesses – what do you see as the potential for AI in this field? Watson is transforming the way businesses approach their operations and fuelling their growth with tools that help them understand, reason, learn and interact in a way that has clear and obvious benefits to the human condition.