Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited by machines. In computer science, the field of AI research defines itself as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving". As machines become increasingly capable, mental facilities once thought to require intelligence are removed from the definition. For example, optical character recognition is no longer perceived as an exemplar of "artificial intelligence", having become a routine technology.

Robotic process automation (RPA) can be the true antidote to manual, rote work, or it can be our worst nightmare if you listen to all the drama or the hype. RPA centers on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to apply human-like thinking to streamline a typically manually intensive process or activity; and whether we like it or not, it's here to stay. Take, for instance, the process of data extraction from documents such as invoices. Application of advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document recognition can automate a significant amount of the job of data entry typically performed by clerks or specialized data entry staff. Interestingly, human effort is still involved with attaining the ability to hand off a process or task to a machine.

Last summer at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge pitted automated systems against one another, trying to find weaknesses in the others' code and exploit them. "This is a great example of how easily machines can find and exploit new vulnerabilities, something we'll likely see increase and become more sophisticated over time," said David Gibson, vice president of strategy and market development at Varonis Systems. His company hasn't seen any examples of hackers leveraging artificial intelligence technology or machine learning, but nobody adopts new technologies faster than the sin and hacking industries, he said. "So it's safe to assume that hackers are already using AI for their evil purposes," he said. "It has never been easier for white hats and black hats to obtain and learn the tools of the machine learning trade," said Don Maclean, chief cybersecurity technologist at DLT Solutions.

Machine learning is the subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed (Arthur Samuel, 1959). Evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence, machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data – such algorithms overcome following strictly static program instructions by making data driven predictions or decisions, through building a model from sample inputs. Machine learning is employed in a range of computing tasks where designing and programming explicit algorithms is infeasible; example applications include spam filtering, detection of network intruders or malicious insiders working towards a data breach, optical character recognition (OCR), search engines and computer vision. Machine learning is closely related to (and often overlaps with) computational statistics, which also focuses in prediction-making through the use of computers. It has strong ties to mathematical optimization, which delivers methods, theory and application domains to the field. Machine learning is sometimes conflated with data mining, where the latter subfield focuses more on exploratory data analysis and is known as unsupervised learning.

It is set to be a monumental battle for the next generation of smart assistants. Samsung has fired the latest salvo in its AI phone battle with Apple, revealing more details of Bixby, it's competitor for Siri. The AI is said to have visual search capabilities to analyze the images, identify objects and performing optical character recognition on visible text. Although the Samsung Galaxy S8 reveal is around the corner, many users are still feeling the burn from the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco. However, the firm may redeem itself, as the flagship smartphone is rumored to have an assistant more powerful than Apple's Siri Bixby could be used for a wide variety of functions in a similar way to Apple's Siri.

Praised as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century, Ray Kurzweil was selected as one of "16 revolutionaries who made America," along with the great inventors of the past two centuries. Forbes magazine called him "the ultimate thinking machine" and The Wall Street Journal dubbed him "the restless genius." Kurzweil is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, With 12 honorary doctorates and the world's largest prize for innovation - the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT award. Kurzweil, now 57, published what is arguably the most blogged-about book of 2005, a 640-page blockbuster: "The Singularity Is Near," a road map to "a unique event with singular implications," or some form of immortality for those younger than 50 today. Kurzweil's latest futuristic tome is the sequel to his last bestseller, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence," which posited that the ever-accelerating rate of technological change would lead to computers that would rival the full range of human intelligence.

Smorball tackles a major challenge for digital libraries: poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software significantly hampers full-text searching of digitized material. When first scanned, the pages of digitized books and journals are merely image files, making the pages unsearchable and virtually unusable. While OCR converts page images to searchable, machine encoded text, historic literature is difficult for OCR to accurately render because of its tendency to have varying fonts, typesetting and layouts. This educational game enables citizen scientists to engage in "purposeful gaming" by playing Smorball, which asks players to correctly type the words they see on the screen--punctuation and all. Smorball presents players with phrases from scanned pages from cultural heritage institutions.

The demonstration of a neural network used within an optical character recognition (OCR) application. The original document is scanned into the computer and saved as an image. The OCR software breaks the image into sub-images, each containing a single character. The sub-images are then translated from an image format into a binary format, where each 0 and 1 represents an individual pixel of the sub-image. The binary data is then fed into a neural network that has been trained to make the association between the character image data and a numeric value that corresponds to the character.

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Panasonic and Nuance have been close partners on TV voice recognition in the past; we now know that they're getting a bit cozier for Panasonic's 2013 Smart TVs. The engine will also speak out content and menus if you need more than just visual confirmation of where you're going. Panasonic's refreshed TV line is gradually rolling out over the spring, so those who see a plastic remote control as so very 2010 won't have long to wait. Panasonic's New Smart TVs Now Listen and Speak with Nuance's Dragon TV Panasonic's New SMART VIERA HDTVs Voice Interaction Lets People Find TV Content, Search the Web, Get Access to Apps and More with the Power of Dragon Now people can simply sit back and speak to find content, search the web, control volume and more – creating a more interactive and intelligent television experience. And with Dragon TV's text-to-speech, television content and options on the screen can be read aloud.