The numbers are mind-boggling: 11.5 million documents in total, comprising 4.8 million emails, 2.1 million PDFs, 1.1 million images and 320,000 text files. To put it in context, the amount of data in the Panama Papers leak was 2,000 times the amount in the WikiLeaks State Department cables in 2010. Trying to sift through data like this manually would be a Sisyphean task, so technology was required. Enter the little-known Australian company Nuix. The software company has worked with the D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for over four years, giving them free access to their software that can take huge troves of unstructured data and turn it into an indexed and searchable database.

If Facebook announces the "Messenger Bot Store" at F8, as many predict, it would be arguably the most consequential event for the tech industry since Apple announced the App Store and iPhone SDK in March 2008. Even Steve Jobs could not have foreseen the impact of what he described as "a new application that lets users browse, search, purchase and download third party applications directly onto their iPhone". By the time the App Store opened for business in July 2008, approximately 6 million people worldwide owned an iPhone. By the end of the year, the number of iPhone owners had more than doubled, and in each of the following years iPhone sales doubled and then doubled again. The App Store ecosystem – which now has more than 1.5 million iOS apps – heralded the arrival of a new "mobile" era.

The roots of modern Artificial Intelligence, or AI, can be traced back to the classical philosophers of Greece, and their efforts to model human thinking as a system of symbols. More recently, in the 1940s, a school of thought called "Connectionism" was developed to study the process of thinking. In 1950, a man named Alan Turing wrote a paper suggesting how to test a "thinking" machine. He believed if a machine could carry on a conversation by way of a teleprinter, imitating a human with no noticeable differences, the machine could be described as thinking. His paper was followed in 1952 by the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the brain as neurons forming an electrical network, with individual neurons firing in all-or-nothing (on/off) pulses.

A video of a newly discovered bug in Apple's iOS 9.3.1 operating system is making the rounds, showing that it's possible to access an iPhone user's contacts and photos without entering a passcode or scanning a fingerprint. It does require a very particular set of circumstances. For one, you have to allow Siri to have access to your Twitter account, which should require your passcode or fingerprint. You also have to have a phone that can use Apple's pressure-sensitive Force Touch, namely an iPhone 6S or iPhone 6S Plus. Finally, at least according to the video, you have to find a tweet that contains someone's e-mail address (or just something formatted like an e-mail address) in order to use 3D Touch and call up the contacts menu.

Artificial Intelligence is starting to play a big role in our daily life, and judging by recent developments in the field, it looks like the importance of AI will only increase in time. While some people worry that advancements in AI could replace jobs in the long run, it's difficult to argue with the idea that artificial intelligence can bring countless benefits in numerous fields, ranging from production to automotive and healthcare. Needless to say, companies have different takes on machine learning, and artificial intelligence is used in more than one way. In Facebook's case, AI will start playing a role in making social media interaction more meaningful to blind and visually impaired Facebook users who, starting today, can use a new feature called "automatic alternative text" in order to get a more detailed description of Facebook photos. One of the main reasons why Facebook enjoys as much popularity as it does today is because of photo sharing.

You may not have the resources to do everything, and you may not have the capacity, the bandwidth, the processing power to do everything in an individual product, so you have to make selections," says Tom Kerber, an analyst with Parks Associates. "Limiting those choices to the critical few is important." Meanwhile, consumers are left to untangle a spider web of product integrations. Samsung SmartThings devices, for instance, are controllable through Amazon's Alexa system, but not through Siri. August smart locks are controllable through Siri, but not through Alexa.

We opened Watson to the world a few years ago so we could put our cognitive technology directly in the hands of developers across every industry and geography. We did this by creating an AI platform that's based on advanced science yet simple for developers to adopt, and is designed to scale. In just a short time, more than 80,000 developers are already innovating on the Watson platform, building with our APIs and creating novel solutions for healthcare, finance, legal, sports and more. In some cases, developers are solving some of society's greatest challenges, in others they're tackling smaller initiatives to gain better insights from data. We're constantly motivated and inspired by what they're creating.

Salesforce.com's automation efforts got a boost Monday with the news it has acquired AI startup MetaMind. Salesforce will integrate MetaMind's technology into its own services for new marketing-automation and personalization capabilities, according to a blog post from MetaMind founder Richard Socher. "We'll extend Salesforce's data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform," Socher wrote. Socher's personal Web page now lists his title as chief scientist at the customer relationship management giant. MetaMind's products will be discontinued on May 4 for users of its free versions, and on June 4 for paid users.

While the internet of things (IoT) is changing the automotive industry, most young US internet users still prefer a traditional car to a self-driving vehicle, according to October 2015 research. Nielsen polled 1,133 US children and teens ages 8 to 18. More than half of respondents in grades 3 through 5 said they prefer traditional vehicles. US children and teens in older grade levels also preferred traditional cars. For example, 59% of respondents in grades 6 through 8 said they preferred traditional cars, while 41% in that age group said they favored self-driving cars.

A wave of innovation has made it possible for people to get their banking done without walking into a branch if they don't want to. People can now deposit checks using a smartphone or digitally fire off cash to friends using Venmo. The end result is a pretty sweet experience for consumers...but an imminent threat to people who work at bank branches. The downsizing of the bank workforce is about to accelerate as more technology takes over jobs humans used to do, according to a new Citigroup report. Another 30% of bank jobs could be lost between 2015 and 2025, mainly due to retail banking automation, Citi warned.