The term Artificial Intelligence was originally coined by John McCarthy in 1955, defining it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines". Now more than a half a century old, the field of AI and machine learning is finally achieving some of its oldest goals by being used successfully in areas such as data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and search engines. Tech giants have all been investing heavily in AI and Machine Learning. In 2010 Facebook introduced facial recognition technology, and in 2013 Mark Zuckerberg dedicated a lab to AI research. In 2014 Google bought artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for 400 million ( 263 million), making it one of the largest tech acquisitions to date.

Google has a special way to improve the quality of search results: artificial intelligence (AI.) The company uses a type of AI known as machine learning to figure out what its users really want to search for. Machine learning is where a computer gradually teaches itself how to perform a task. One example of that is Google DeepMind, which learned how to play retro arcade games over time. Google's machine learning system for search is called RankBrain, and it tries to figure out what a user is searching for.

The search base at Go is too enormous and too vast for a brute force approach to have any chance of succeeding… The search process itself is not based on brute force, more on something akin to imagination…. Humans are not able to make the precise tree-based computation that computers are able to perform. Humans have a limitation in the number of Go games they are able to process in a lifetime… It is at least conceivable that AlphaGo could, given enough processing, given enough training, given enough search power, reach a level that's beyond any human. The machine knew the move wouldn't make sense to all those humans. And yet it played the move anyway, because this machine has seen so many moves that no human ever has….

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. The number of new malware variations that pop up each day runs somewhere between 390,000 (according to AV-TEST Institute) and one million (according to Symantec Corporation). These are new strains of malware that have not been seen in the wild before. Even if we consider just the low end figure, the situation is still dire. Especially when it comes to advanced persistent threats (APTs), which are the most sophisticated mutations of viruses and malware, which are very effective at going completely undetected by many of the cybersecurity technologies in use today.

When the average person on the street hears the words Artificial Intelligence, they usually think sentient robots coming to take their job, and potentially their life. Which is understandable, partly because films like Terminator have conditioned us to think like that, and partly because it could well be true. Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk say it might happen, and they're very rarely wrong about anything. When people hear Machine Learning on the other hand, the tendency is not so much to grab a weapon and hide under the bed until the robot apocalypse comes. It's to express a healthy reverence for how such algorithms will benefit technology and make our lives easier.

What it's about: If you've been looking for the latest indicator that machine learning and AI are about to burst out of the lab and into the mainstream, look no further: Rolling Stone, not exactly a must-read in the tech industry, is serving up a big two-part feature on "the artificial intelligence revolution." Part one went online this week, and it's well worth the read. Author Jeff Goodell dispenses with some of the entertainment and media tropes around AI--bow down before your robot overlords, and so on--in favor of what AI, like so much of modern software, is really all about: Algorithms. "Algorithms are to the 21st Century what coal was to the 19th Century: the engine of our economy and the fuel of our modern lives," Goodell writes. "In the world of AI, the Holy Grail is to discover the single algorithm that will allow machines to understand the world--the digital equivalent of the Standard Model that lets physicists explain the operations of the universe."

Artificial intelligence (AI), one of 20 core technologies I identified back in 1983 as the drivers of exponential economic value creation, is rapidly working its way into our lives from Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's M, to Google's Now and Apple's Siri. An example of how far AI has come is the recent news that a Google supercomputer, using its advanced AI software, was able to win a stunning 3-0 victory in a man vs. machine face-off against Go grandmaster Lee Sedol, one of the game's all-time champions. For those who are not familiar with Go, it is a 3,000-year-old game that is widely considered to be the most complex game ever invented because it is reported to have more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Until just a few months ago, it was thought that a computer could not defeat a human grandmaster for at least another decade due to the game's complexity. How did Google's AlphaGo program advance so much faster than many expected?

Each are British artificial intelligence and machine learning startups bought by US tech giants--HP, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, respectively. Alongside growing VC funding in AI, US tech firms are snapping up British-founded startups, leading to concerns that the UK is losing the best of its artificial intelligence to Silicon Valley just as it becomes a key technology. Simon Walker, partner in corporate technology at law firm Taylor Wessing, said the sale of AI startups to US firms isn't new and doesn't look like it'll stop soon. "It is obviously disappointing that the AI cannot be retained in the UK," he said. "However, top-of-the-market AI, such as that developed by companies such as SwiftKey and DeepMind, requires huge investment and a significant platform for its use and it is only very large tech companies which have the necessary resources and platforms."

Social networking giant Facebook is using its artificial intelligence (AI) technology and resources to map the entire Earth and launch the world's most detailed population maps that will help it beam cheap internet to remote areas. To begin with, the Facebook AI team crunched 14.6 billion images of maps from across 20 countries, including India, covering 21.6 million sq kms to come up with the first detailed map of human settlement for these countries. "This is an impressive project from our team developing solar-powered planes for beaming down internet connectivity and our AI research team. Many people live in remote communities and accurate data on where people live doesn't always exist," wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a latest post. The 20 countries mapped were Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

During a press event in Cupertino on Monday, Apple announced the latest version of tvOS, which is available now. The updated Apple TV software adds new voice search, dictation and support for Apple's Live Photos. While the Apple TV has had support for Siri, lack of voice search has been a sore spot for users. Now, Apple is fixing that with the ability to use Siri to search the App Store with your voice as well as dictate username and password information. The update also adds support for iCloud Photo libraries and Apple's Live Photos so you can access more of your photos from the Apple TV.