The AI innovators who are blazing a trail into our future

It's going to be a pivotal year for artificial intelligence (AI). And 2016 began with British AI firms asserting dominance over the sector. In February, Southwark-based predictive keyboard company SwiftKey was purchased by Microsoft for 250 million ( 173m) – one of the highest exits ever for a UK company. Around a month later, another UK-made smart machine, DeepMind's AlphaGo, trounced professional player Lee Sedol in a five-game match of Go – an ancient and complicated board game – in a historic first. Within a few months, AI has stopped being fodder for futurists' conversations and charged headlong into the here and now. Advances in neural networks and machine learning, and the availability of vast data sets, are bringing about an AI surge that has just started gaining momentum.