Google Translate is expected to become the latest product of Google that will benefit from the company's deep learning technology. Deep learning is based on intelligent training of neural networks to analyze lots of data and then make predictions on new data. Google has already used this technology to enhance Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Photos. According to a report, a senior Google official, who has led many high-profile projects and now heads the team involved in deep learning, said that his team is working in tandem with the Translation team to carry out experiments with translations on the basis of deep learning. Google Translate currently operates using different technologies, and this particular development could make it based entirely on neural networks, mainly, long short-term memory network (LSTM).

"Cognitive conversations" with artificial intelligence are "the future" of customer care, IBM's CTO of Watson Europe reckons. Speaking at Computing's Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016 last week, Duncan Anderson explained how AI like IBM Watson is "not Ex Machina" - referring to the 2015 film in which human-like AIs become self-aware - but is now at the point where it can soon make considerable changes to the daily lives of people. "The practical reality of where we are is not Ex Machina - we're not building beautiful computers and spoofing humans, [but] we're solving practical problems today," he said. Anderson said Watson's growing ability to process unstructured data - "text documents, images, voice - the novel data types" - is now bringing to an end the traditional approach of putting such data "in a database clock and [doing] nothing with it". While this is nothing new, Watson's improving effectiveness at communicating what it's learning back to a user in the form of "chat" is now becoming an increasingly viable frontline tool. "If you're five years old and go into a hospital it's a scary place - it's all white and doctors are big scary old people," said Anderson.

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Do you see artificial intelligence replacing PAs in the future? If the software is able to do this kind of scheduling job, would it be able to take over the whole role? So, there is part of my answer. Almost all of us are'not important enough' or not at the right place in life to have a personal assistant. That means that the vast majority, if not almost all, of the meetings being set up are being set up by people themselves - the Natalies, the Dennises, the Stefanies.

The consequences of Korean player Lee Se-dol's historic defeat against a computer program in March 2016 will be both global and political. One reason is that the ancient and revered board-game Go (some claim it was invented by a Chinese emperor around 2300 BC) -- in its very essence, is a profound meditation on the art of war. There are only two types of stones in Go, black or white -- reminiscent of zeroes and ones in digital computers. Contrary to the hierarchical pawns, bishops and kings in chess, the pieces in Go are identical and theoretically equal in value, somewhat analogous to people in a communist regime. The aim is to capture territory and annihilate the enemy stones by surrounding them.

In what could be the last time that a human taunts a robot with a hockey stick and lives to brag about it, the latest demonstration of the Atlas Robot has prompted renewed fears about the future of intelligent machines. Born in 2013, Atlas is a DARPA-funded robot developed by Boston Dynamics. Its latest iteration stands at a very human-proportioned 5'9, weighing 180lbs. Like Lee Majors circa 1974, each successive version of Atlas has gotten better, stronger, faster than it was before. Aside from scaring the bejesus out of genius technophobic Oxbridge physicists, it's intended to perform tasks in emergency situations too dangerous for humans.

The World Economic Forum kicks off today, and the theme of this year's gathering of the world's leaders, celebrities, billionaires and the merely wealthy will be what it calls the "Fourth Industrial Revolution." That's its term for the accelerating pace of technological changes, especially those that are "blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres" -- the combination of things like artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and 3-D printing. To go with that theme, the WEF has released research looking at the effect all that change will have on jobs. It projects that by 2020, 7.1 million jobs are expected to be lost, and two million gained, with a net impact of five million jobs lost in the next half decade. "Davos Robot Eclipses Davos Man as Gloom Descends on World Elite," Bloomberg wrote in covering the news of this year's theme, which will be the topic of 20 sessions over the four-day conference.

The robots haven't just landed in the workplace--they're expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts. One multi-tasker bot, from Momentum Machines, can make (and flip) a gourmet hamburger in 10 seconds and could soon replace an entire McDonalds crew. A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn't just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp--it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust. And just this week, Google won a patent to start building worker robots with personalities. As intelligent machines begin their march on labor and become more sophisticated and specialized than first-generation cousins like Roomba or Siri, they have an outspoken champion in their corner: author and entrepreneur Martin Ford.

Quaker has a new robot chef and her name is Alexa. The 135-year-old maker of oats is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to help consumers make an oatmeal method as old as Quaker itself: overnight oats. Working with agency partner Organic, Quaker has built its first ever app for Amazon's virtual assistant, which is available through products like the Echo speaker. The app, which debuted on Sunday at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, helps users find and make recipes for overnight oats, a trend that came as a bit of a surprise to the household brand that arguably knows oatmeal better than anyone. The idea for the app began a few months ago, after Quaker's social media team noticed there was a resurgence of an age-old tradition of cooking oats the night before and then letting them cool in the refrigerator overnight to be eaten cold the next morning.

IDC defines Digital Transformation as the continuous process by which enterprises adapt to or drive disruptive changes in their customers and markets by leveraging digital competencies to create new business models, products and services. Digital Transformation empowers organization to take advantage of all their existing digital assets in new ways, allowing enterprises to re-envision their entire business, including customer experience, operational processes and financial models. This is achieved by tapping into their DARK DATA, that valuable 80% of data assets that are not being utilized by organizations, which includes emails, internal documents, customer claims, and any other text based data. In 2016, and over the next several years, Cognitive Computing and IoT are two critical building blocks for digitally transforming today's organization into tomorrow's thinking businesses. By 2018 over 50% of enterprises are expected to embed cognitive capabilities in their apps and services (IDC March 2016).