Robin Li, head of China's web giant Baidu, unveils the firm's intelligent digital assistant, Duer. When Andrew Ng joined Google from Stanford University in 2011, he was among a trickle of artificial-intelligence (AI) experts in academia taking up roles in industry. Five years later, demand for expertise in AI is booming -- and a torrent of researchers is following Ng's lead. The laboratories of tech titans Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and Baidu (China's web-services giant) are stuffed with ex-university scientists, drawn to private firms' superior computing resources and salaries. "Some people in academia blame me for starting part of this," says Ng, who in 2014 moved again to become chief scientist at Baidu, working at the company's research lab in California's Silicon Valley.

Due to a very subtle wording change, the popular dating app has become a much more serious affair. In the past, when users got a match, they were presented with two buttons - 'Send Message', which would let them chat with their new beau, or'Keep Playing', which took them back to the swiping screen. From "Keep playing" to "Keep swiping" Tinder 5.0 just got dead serious guys! - for more - https://t.co/J5Fd4ZMYkY… The'Send Message' button is still there, but the one below now reads'Keep Swiping' - all mention of Tinder being some kind of game appears to have been removed. As Business Insider reports, this change is currently only being tested on certain iOS users, so most swipers will still see the old buttons.

It's interesting to watch a new CEO's strategy begin to transition from discussion to execution. IT leaders are witnessing such a shift at Microsoft. Former CEO Steve Ballmer made Windows Everywhere the cornerstone of his strategy, leveraging the entrenched position of Windows and Microsoft Office on the desktop to gain traction in mobile, an increasingly important platform that Microsoft essentially missed. Going by market share of Windows Phones, this strategy essentially failed, and current CEO Satya Nadella has not only abandoned Windows Everywhere but is seemingly focusing the organization away from staples Windows and Office. Windows, and the operating system itself, are quickly becoming little more than gateways to internet-based applications.

Amy Ingram, the artificial intelligence personal assistant from startup X.ai, sounds remarkably like a real person. The company designed her to take on the mundane tasks of scheduling meetings and e-mailing about appointments. If a bot had access to your calendar and was cc-ed on correspondence, why couldn't it do the work for you? After she made her debut in 2014, users praised her "humanlike tone" and "eloquent manners." But what most people don't realize about this artificial intelligence is that it isn't totally artificial: Behind almost every e-mail is an actual human--someone like 24-year-old Willie Calvin. Calvin, who worked as an AI trainer for X.ai before he said he quit in October, was part of the reason Amy never tripped up, sending the sort of blind response that reveals she's a bot.

When Steven Arkonovich brought home his Amazon Echo, he knew the little machine's basic functions: he could ask it to tell him the weather, add something to his shopping cart, or play NPR. The Echo was always on, waiting, listening for his invocation. Say "Alexa" and it lit up blue, ready to answer questions – "Where is the nearest Chinese restaurant?" – or act on orders – 'Call me an Uber' – responding in a calm, confident female voice. But after a few days having it in his house, something strange happened between Arkonovich and the squat, black device: Alexa came alive. Related: Goodbye privacy, hello Alexa: here's to Amazon echo, the home robot who hears it all "Even when I've tried to call her'it', it feels wrong. "And when she does something wrong, it's not like a broken vending machine.

It was probably the HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, that introduced the concept of AIs to the general public. But that was almost 40 years ago, and examining the more recent times, we have to look no further than in our own pockets to find the AIs that paved the way for the current hype: smartphones' digital assistants. Sure, there has been things like Cleverbot around earlier, but nothing has been as widely spread as these digital assistants. The main difference between a chatbot and a digital assistant is that former responds (be default) only to written queries, and the latter is capable to understand (at least to some extend) more natural, spoken queries. Things like voice activated searches and speech recognition softwares have been around for quite some time, but these digital assistants take the concept a step further by engaging in dialogue, performing tasks such as booking flights or setting up location based reminders, and they can even tell you a joke if you ask one.

Around the world, 91 million people are on dating websites and apps. Finding "the one" among them may seem daunting - but some tips based on scientific research might help, writes Dr Xand van Tulleken. I'm 37, and for years I've been dating in London and New York, looking for Miss Right. Some people enjoy being single but, perhaps because I'm an identical twin, for me it's purgatory. Nonetheless I found myself single having - wrongly I suspect - prioritised work and travel for too long.

With technological advancement comes economic adaptation. This is one of the greatest lessons of the next 10 years which will show some pretty dramatic shifts. For the youth, this means preparing for a completely different reality and on-demand economy. Please recognize, your children will also live in a different world. A world where machine intelligence is everywhere.

Tech giants are active players at the cognitive technologies scene. Alphabet and Facebook proved themselves active acquirers and investors in cognitive tech. Supercomputers, robots and drones are among themes approached by Internet giants. Microsoft, however, seems to be following a differed path: it integrates cognitive technologies into traditional products and makes them smarter. Bill Gates coined the concept of'digital nervous system (DNS)... that ... [provides] a well-integrated flow of information to the right part of the organization at the right time'.

It's a site that only lets in the genetically blessed based on some mysterious beauty metric – and today the personal data of 1.1 million BeautifulPeople.com It's only a slice of data from 2015, and the company says the leak's been patched up, but data once stolen can never be controlled: and so 1.1 million names of self-declared Beautiful People will now begin circulating. Like the Ashley Madison hack – which left 39 million people on a dating site for married people exposed and their names suddenly searchable – there's a joy in shaming people who would sign up for such a thing. "Online dating for beautiful people only," the website announces. "BeautifulPeople.com is the largest internet dating community exclusively for the beautiful," it reads.