Of the many hot topics at the moment, anything related to artificial intelligence is obviously right up there. Like the holy grail, AI has always been just beyond our reach. But technology is rapidly approaching the threshold beyond which it becomes easy to confuse artificial logic with human intelligence. This leads to ethical discussions about human rights for digital beings, but comes no closer to actually defining these digital beings. The Saudi Arabian government's statement about giving a bot named Sophia human rights, is perhaps one of the most significant statements on this issue.

Apple Inc. is handing oversight of its Siri team to new artificial-intelligence chief John Giannandrea three months after hiring him from rival Google, shifting responsibility for the voice-assistant technology to its third leader in the past year. Apple announced Mr. Giannandrea's hiring internally in early April but hadn't publicly laid out his responsibilities until Tuesday, when it added him to the corporate leadership page of its website. It said he will report directly to Chief Executive Tim Cook, with the title chief of machine learning and AI strategy and a purview that includes development of Siri technologies.

Apple has put John Giannandrea exactly where he belongs where his first task will be to fix the schizophrenia that plagues Siri that has done nothing but harm to the appeal of Apple's digital assistant. John Giannandrea is a Scottish computer scientist who most recently led Google's Search and AI activities before being poached by Apple to fix its flagging AI efforts. So far, excellence in AI has not been determined by how many clever people one employs but how by long one has been crunching the data. Therefore, anyone who expects Siri to suddenly earn a PhD overnight is going to be sorely disappointed. Improving Apple's AI is going to be a slow, time-consuming process particularly because its focus on privacy has hobbled its ability to use data to train algorithms.

Branding is a vital part of any company's marketing strategy. Until recently, visual presence has been one of the largest, if not the largest, factors in a company's brand -- but Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants are drastically changing the ways consumers encounter products. Graeme Pitkethly, chief financial officer of Unilever (owner of such brands as Dove, Lipton, and Axe) recently told the Wall Street Journal, "Of all the disruptions that are taking place in all the things technology is bringing into our space, voice is among the most disruptive." Companies spend big money on buying up shelf space in the stores of leading retailers, to ensure their products are at the forefront of a consumer's shopping experience. Yet increasingly, customers are no longer putting themselves in front of physical products before purchasing them.

One of the newest approaches is centered on a dating platform driven by algorithms to help establish a relationship that will last. This provides important personal details for the user. These sites then obtain permission for the user to get more insight through social media platforms, online shopping histories, streaming sites and preferences. This data offers a lot of information about the user. This is important because many people are not completely honest when they fill out the questionnaire.

You've seen the ways AI has been leveraged in recent years: Tesla has self-driving cars, chatbots answer customer service queries, and Siri can send a text for you or set a reminder. In 2018 we're likely to see AI permeate our daily lives in much more real ways. Everything from the way we make purchases to the way we create content is likely to see a significant transformation. Here are five artificial intelligence advancements that will work their way further into your life in 2018. Sure, you can already unlock the latest iPhones and confirm some payments with your face.

What if we delegated so much to autonomous AI and intelligent machines that They passed a law that forbids humans to carry out a number of professions? We conceive the plot of a new episode of Black Mirror to reflect on what might await us and how we can deal with such a future.

Due to recent explosion of text data, researchers have been overwhelmed by ever-increasing volume of articles produced by different research communities. Various scholarly search websites, citation recommendation engines, and research databases have been created to simplify the text search tasks. However, it is still difficult for researchers to be able to identify potential research topics without doing intensive reviews on a tremendous number of articles published by journals, conferences, meetings, and workshops. In this paper, we consider a novel topic diffusion discovery technique that incorporates sparseness-constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization with generalized Jensen-Shannon divergence to help understand term-topic evolutions and identify topic diffusions. Our experimental result shows that this approach can extract more prominent topics from large article databases, visualize relationships between terms of interest and abstract topics, and further help researchers understand whether given terms/topics have been widely explored or whether new topics are emerging from literature.

Now that Google Assistant has a slew of voices to choose from, shouldn't you have an easy interface for picking one of those voices? Google is rolling out an update that gives US users a new, simple interface for changing Assistant's voice. It's very colorful, to put it mildly: you just tap on a color associated with a given voice (Google told us it chose them at random) and listen to be sure they're the dulcet tones you want to hear. The addition should be platform-agnostic and will be widely available in the US by the end of the week. It's not certain when other countries will receive the fresh interface, but that's also dependent on having multi-voice support in the first place.

In a market such as this, Sonos--with trailing 12-month sales now just topping $1 billion--would appear hopelessly outclassed. But papers for an initial public offering filed on Friday show that the maker of high-end wireless speakers still has a hand it can play. After being caught flat-footed by the surging popularity of Amazon Echo speakers in late 2015, Sonos shifted its approach. The company struck a deal to embed Amazon's Alexa voice technology into its own line of smart speakers, the first of which began shipping late last year. That helped Sonos deliver a 36% jump in device unit sales year over year for the first quarter ended December, with revenue rising 26% to $469 million.