Professor Pascal Poupart is a senior researcher at Borealis AI, an RBC research institute, and a professor of computing science at the University of Waterloo. My parents thought I was crazy when I announced my intention to study artificial intelligence. Back then, in 1998, AI was considered a fringe group within the academic community, even though we knew the field had the potential to transform lives. Today, AI is among the hottest fields in academia, attracting the focus of every major university and the courtship of the world's biggest companies as they try to apply cognitive machine learning to just about every challenge in the marketplace. Thanks to this commercial interest and the academic pursuit of AI, we now have personal assistants in our smartphones, intelligent cybersecurity to protect our credit cards, and even recommendation engines in our favourite movie and music streaming services.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia warns of'optimising for outrageous, salacious, and often fraudulent content' amid 2016 election concerns Mon 5 Feb 2018 07.00 EST Last modified on Mon 5 Feb 2018 07.02 EST The top-ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee has warned that YouTube's powerful recommendation algorithm may be "optimising for outrageous, salacious, and often fraudulent content" or susceptible to "manipulation by bad actors, including foreign intelligence entities". Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, made the stark warning after an investigation by the Guardian found that the Google-owned video platform was systematically promoting divisive and conspiratorial videos that were damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign in the months leading up to the 2016 election. "Companies like YouTube have immense power and influence in shaping the media and content that users see," Warner said. "I've been increasingly concerned that the recommendation engine algorithms behind platforms like YouTube are, at best, intrinsically flawed in optimising for outrageous, salacious, and often fraudulent content." He added: "At worst, they can be highly susceptible to gaming and manipulation by bad actors, including foreign intelligence entities." YouTube's recommendation algorithm is a closely guarded formula that determines which videos are promoted in the "Up next" column beside the video player.

Google currently doesn't have a horse in this race. Several third-party manufacturers announced Google Assistant-powered smart displays at CES, but none are available right now. That leaves the Amazon Echo Show as the default winner. The Echo Show's best feature is its ability to make video calls to people on your contact list (it can also function as a video intercom within your home). But having a digital assistant that can also show you things has plenty of other useful applications, too: displaying album art (and lyrics, with Amazon's service) when you play music; shopping and to-do lists that you edit on the screen; illustrations that accompany your weather forecast; slideshows from your personal photo library; still photos from Wikipedia entries; and a whole lot more.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere. Possibility is that you are using it in one way or the other and you don't even know about it. One of the popular applications of AI is Machine Learning (ML), in which computers, software, and devices perform via cognition (very similar to human brain). Herein, we share few examples of machine learning that we use everyday and perhaps have no idea that they are driven by ML. Siri, Alexa, Google Now are some of the popular examples of virtual personal assistants.

The firm's latest Alexa-powered addition to its Echo range adds a clock and touchscreen interface to the mix Mon 5 Feb 2018 04.00 EST Last modified on Mon 5 Feb 2018 04.02 EST Amazon's new Echo Spot is one of the most novel takes on a smart speaker yet, and while it is certainly more than just a smart clock, that's what it's best at – an attractive voice-assisted smart desk or bedside-table accessory. The Echo Spot is to the Echo Show what the Echo Dot is to the original Amazon Echo. That is to say, it can do everything the Echo Show can just in a smaller, cheaper ball-shaped device with a circular screen. That includes playing music, answering questions and showing the weather, video from cameras and the like. The Echo Spot is the first of Amazon's small army of voice-assistant speakers that can really be considered cute-looking. The 91mm-tall little black or white ball looks incredibly modern with just three buttons on the top and a crisp-looking 2.5in circular screen on the front.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and others are aggressively imbuing their products and services with "intelligence." We're told that computer systems will become smarter, will anticipate our needs, proactively serve us, and understand us in various contexts and via multiple methods including voice, text, inking and motion. The digital "face" of this promising tech comes in the form of assistants like Cortana, Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Bixby. As smart speakers and the AI genies they harbor begin finding a place in our homes, and as those same digital sprites serve us through our phones and PCs, the promise of an AI-assisted existence is becoming a reality. But what's behind the magic of our speaking, "Hey, Cortana," and her - its - response?

MTV's "TRL" recently welcomed Poppy, a rising star with hologram-perfect skin, an avant-garde Japanese schoolgirl wardrobe and a voice like Betty Boop's on benzos. For much of the show, she perched silently on the couch and methodically stacked candies on a glass table. A longhaired handler called Titanic Sinclair accompanied her, explaining, "I'm just making sure she doesn't malfunction." Poppy proved a tough interview. Asked what she thought of the Grammys, which had aired the night before, she chirped: "Um, I don't really remember them."

It's no secret that AI is being applied to virtually everything, but this was a big week for enterprise conversational AI. Salesforce's Einstein debuted a platform for businesses to deploy bots on apps and websites, Facebook Messenger is coming to the web, and Microsoft Word now has a Resume Assistant imbued with intelligence from LinkedIn. It's pretty exciting to see Microsoft begin to incorporate insights from LinkedIn into products like Cortana and Microsoft Word. Using AI to determine the best job title to put on a resume can be powerful, as Indeed demonstrated last month at VB Summit, but the most intriguing part of the assistant may be its ability to surface good examples of work experience derived from LinkedIn public profiles written by humans. Salesforce's bots can be configured to only operate when a business is closed, and if the bot lacks confidence in its answer to a question or a high-value lead lands on your website, the conversation can be routed to an experienced (human) customer service agent.

Looking back, things probably started to unravel when my wife, Katie, found me tucked up in bed, talking to another woman. 'Goodnight,' she heard me say. 'Sweet dreams,' came the woman's obliging response. The next morning, Katie walked past the sitting room door to catch me muttering something about the weather. 'I wasn't talking to you,' I replied.

For the last 15 years we've had to stare at screens to interact with the magic inside. But machine learning is changing the way we communicate with our devices, and our relationship with them is becoming more real, and downright emotional. Before you shrug off the notion of a humanized machine, or shake your head at its potential dangers, it is important to recognize that the industry has always attempted to provide an emotional input to our virtual ecosystem. Take Clippit, Microsoft's creepy but helpful talking paper clip--or even the smiling Mac. If you were to open up a '90s version of Microsoft Office, Clippit would be there to make you happy (or angry).