From New York National Guard: "A bomb disposal robot, piloted from a distance, examines a downed drone with explosive material tethered to it during training." Looks like that bomb was ... frozen in its tracks. Look, I'm not going to beat the lede from the New York National Guard, so here it is in full: The remote-controlled robot bumped across the divots of the grassy field until it reached the downed toy drone. Its camera gazed up and down as it examined the explosive device nearby, in a Taylor Swift lunch box tethered to the drone. The drone, the robot, the lunch box, and the explosive device were part of an exercise called Raven's Challenge.

It happens hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm clock, we pick a shirt out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the fridge. In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science have to say about the true source of this experience? In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago, the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made a choice when we actually didn't or think we made a different choice than we actually did.

Using its Xbox Kinect 3D sensor, a camera, a laptop and a laser pointer, Watch-Bot observed a week's worth of human activity in a kitchen and an office. During that time, it collected 458 videos -- about half of which included someone human deliberately "forgetting" to do something. The team then made Watch-Bot analyze the videos and use its unsupervised learning algorithm to determine which human actions were intentional and which ones -- like leaving the milk out on the counter -- were accidental. Using probabilistic learning models, Watch-Bot was able to independently figure out which actions the humans were forgetting. When Watch-Bot does notice the clumsy human in the room forgot to do something, it quietly highlights that item with the laser pointer until it is put away or dealt with.

Google yesterday confirmed rumors that it has been working on a custom chip designed to speed up computing related to its artificial intelligence efforts. The result, it said at its I/O developer conference, is a chip it calls a Tensor Processing Unit. It's designed to work with TensorFlow, an open source software library for developing AI applications. The TPU chips, Google says, are designed to be built into its existing computing infrastructure and are already in use boosting the performance of services like Street View and voice recognition. They also played a part in Google's AlphaGo software that defeated the human champion at the board game Go.

Artificial technology has recently been viewed as an asset of precision medicine that can outsmart several diseases. With the advancement and sophistication of modern technology, artificial intelligence has seamlessly coalesced into the field of medicine. In fact, AI technology has recently been viewed as an asset of precision medicine that can outmaneuver tough medical problems. The presence of artificial intelligence in the field of medicine is nothing new. Last month, a team of scientists at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA has developed a new technique using artificial intelligence to efficiently detect cancer cells without damaging blood samples, as previously reported.

Before we get on to the business of the review, I should confess that I have never been able to get past a dozen or so screens of the video game "Food Fight." I have never been able to chuck more than a pie or two at the murderous chefs. I have never figured out why a handful of peas will take down the white-toqued aggressors while a banana seems to whirl right past their heads. I have never reached the moment, beloved of the game's aficionados, where I manage to whiz slice after slice of watermelon at my adversaries, which seems to be the best way to rack up enough points to register on the leader board. I feed token after token into the machine.

I time my dodges carefully, angling just right to catch the boss as he lunges where I'm no longer standing. Then I jump back, down an estus flask and restore my health, staying a whisker out of reach. But this time I've miscalculated. The game forces me to watch as my outmatched, under-levelled character meets the business end of an axe in a frustratingly long cinematic sequence. I start again, this time favouring the monster's unarmed side.

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CTO Corner is BITS's monthly publication covering emerging trends and technologies in the financial services industry. Artificial Intelligence (AI), defined as the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages, has been around for over 60 years.1 In his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Alan Turing opens with: "I propose to consider the question'can machines think?'"2 He proposed a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior, equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human being, which is now known as the Turing Test.3 AI as an academic discipline began at the famous 1955 Dartmouth conference organized by John McCarthy from Stanford University and Marvin Minsky from MIT.4 This CTO Corner explores both the potential for AI to transform the financial services industry and challenges it presents.

MindMeld, a pioneer in conversational AI technology, is today releasing the MindMeld for TV platform, which the company bills as the first solution designed for television and over-the-top content providers -- like Netflix and Hulu -- to deliver best in class discovery through a conversational interface. That company boasts investors and customers like Google, Samsung, Intel, Telefonica, IDG, Spotify, and other major global brands. Since MindMeld provides data services and the underlying tech-for-voice interface, the company couldn't explain exactly which products in market are 100 percent powered by their technology. But the company's voice platform is fast, alarmingly accurate, and likely baked into tons of products we interact with in some form or another. MindMeld was founded in 2011 and is backed by over 15 million in funding.