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Our company is a science-oriented company, and the core belief is that behavior - human or otherwise - can be mathematically expressed. Yes, people make irrational value judgments, but they are driven by common motivation factors, and the math expresses that. I look at the so-called "big data phenomenon" as the instantiation of human experience. Previously, we could not quantitatively measure human experience, because the data wasn't being captured. But Twitter recently announced that they now serve 350 billion tweets a day. What we say and what we do has a physical manifestation now. Once there is a physical manifestation of a phenomenon, then it can be mathematically expressed. And if you can express it, then you can shape business ideas around it, whether that's in government or health care or business.

AMHERST, Mass. - As computer scientists this year celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the mathematical genius Alan Turing, who set out the basis for digital computing in the 1930s to anticipate the electronic age, they still quest after a machine as adaptable and intelligent as the human brain. Now, computer scientist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an expert in neural networks, has taken Turing's work to its next logical step. She is translating her 1993 discovery of what she has dubbed "Super-Turing" computation into an adaptable computational system that learns and evolves, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than classic Turing-type computers. She and her post-doctoral research colleague Jeremie Cabessa report on the advance in the current issue of Neural Computation. "This model is inspired by the brain," she says. "It is a mathematical formulation of the brain's neural networks with their adaptive abilities." The authors show that when the model is installed in an environment offering constant sensory stimuli like the real world, and when all stimulus-response pairs are considered over the machine's lifetime, the Super Turing model yields an exponentially greater repertoire of behaviors than the classical computer or Turing model. They demonstrate that the Super-Turing model is superior for human-like tasks and learning.

Artificial Intelligence is not yet HAL from the 2001: The Space Odyssey…but we are getting awfully close. Sure enough, one day it could be as similar to the sci-fi potboilers being churned out by Hollywood. If that's your idea of what artificial intelligence is all about, then you aren't far off the mark. In layman's terms, artificial intelligence is about creating intelligent machines through the use of intelligent computer programs. Most, if not all of artificial intelligence (AI) tries to mimic human behavior. The scale of ambition is different, but artificial intelligence programming is a full-fledged field in the cutting edge of science today. If you have some interest in the world of tomorrow, check out these websites to grasp what artificial intelligence is all about.

Tech predictions focusing only on technology miss a key component: people.