When Dan Lopresti and his colleagues talk about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) during their upcoming panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), be prepared to imagine a better world. In this world, the full potential of AI is unleashed to benefit society: health care is personalized and accessible through a friendly robot companion; education is customized to offer individualized plans for retraining and skills-building; and, businesses, large and small, operate with previously unheard-of efficiency and provide a level of customer service that can only be dreamed of today. "The question is what are we going to see over the next ten or twenty years break loose as a result of the research, which is assuming the research gets done because of investments made," says Lopresti, a professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University. Lopresti is also the incoming Vice Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council which, along with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), spearheaded the creation of "A Twenty-Year Community Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Research in the U.S." Lopresti will participate in a panel with the authors of the Roadmap and leaders of the initiative that led to it, Yolanda Gil (University of Southern California and President of AAAI) and Bart Selman (Cornell University and President-Elect of AAAI), on Saturday, February 15th at the AAAS annual meeting in Seattle. The Roadmap lays out a case for the best use of resources to fulfill the promise of AI to benefit society.

Slack may have unleashed a new demand among the working world to have better tools to chat to each other about their projects and more, but it's also unleashed something else: a torrent of competing products from other tech firms that sell to the enterprise. Today comes the latest in that trend: BroadSoft, a company known for its cloud-based unified communications services, is launching Team-One, a platform for people to chat to each other, bringing in links and data from other projects, and more. Team-One is making its debut today, but it's built on a product that existed before. Earlier this year, BroadSoft acquired a Slack competitor called Intellinote, which it has now integrated with its bigger platform, including its calling and videoconferencing products, adding in new features such as artificial intelligence and bots to help you source data to get your work done. Apart from being a reflection of just how popular collaboration products have become among businesses, the launch of Team-One also another sign of how Slack's early success in this market is getting attacked by competitors from many angles. The startup has seen some of its fast growth slow down, which presents an opportunity for some of those rivals with established customer bases to move in, or for Slack to demonstrate that it definitely is better than the rest.