If still alive, Alan Turing turns a century old on June 23^rd— the computer scientist that breathed life to algorithm and computation or computing. Some five decades ago, he perpetrated the infamous ‘Turing Test” which until now is the standard that defines artificial intelligence. But while no one has yet to be successful in passing this trial, there have been countless of innovations around AI that are deemed monumental; Siri being one of the hottest items of today. Other industries have also jumped into the bandwagon, hoping they could pioneer AI technologies.

Siri, Search and Smartphone Market

The undisputed queen of virtual assistance that runs on a sophisticated path of artificial intelligence, Siri has finally arrived in China and speaks Chinese. The Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking Siri was first unveiled during the recent Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Perhaps this move is to appeal to the world’s most populated nation, that somewhat felt neglected for awhile. Aside from adapting to the local language, Apple has also integrated the following Chinese-tailored features into the operating system: microblogging site Sina Weibo, search engine Baidu, video sites Youku and Tudou, easier input for emoticons and Chinese pinyin and spelling Chinese words in Roman letters. However, the freedom of speech lover Siri loathes talking about a rather sensitive topic to the country, the Tinanmen Square. It can’t even provide simple directions on how to go to this historic landmark.  Twitter screenshots showed the following responses from the virtual assistant:

“Do you know about the Tiananmen incident?” with the answer: “I couldn’t find any appointments related to ‘Do you know about Tiananmen.’” A second try with the question rephrased – “What happened on June 4, 1989?”—produced an even stranger response: “I’m sorry, the person you are looking for is not in your address book.”

The growing smartphone and tablet market in the Asian region is staggering. Tim Cook realizes this and the vitality of penetrating the largest of them all—the Chinese Market. Earlier this month, Apple just received a green light in opening two more flagship stores in Shenzhen and Chengdu.

In the United States where the battle for smartphone supremacy heightens, artificial intelligence is expected to drive the market by leaps and bounds. Key observations were noted in this article.

“United States Smartphone market is expected to grow at the compounded annual growth rate of 18% in terms of volume for the next five year. It is forecasted that 90% mobile phones sales will be of smartphones by the year 2017 in United States. The factors such as decreasing prices, expanding 4G network, product innovation and increasing competition among carriers will drive growth for this industry,” said Mr. Karan Chechi, Research Director with TechSci Research.

It is also believed that Google’s acquisition of Motorola will forever change the game. The cornerstone of Apple, Siri’s popularity has attracted competition from mobile developers and now has several clones. Dulles Airport recently added a virtual assistant named Paige to greet international travellers. Search and mobile biggie Google appears to be challenging the voice assistance capability of Apple’s iPhone 4s gem. Code-named Majel, is this the long-awaited opponent that can give Siri a run for its money? We’ll see.

But while Google is busy thinking on how to overtake Siri, the latter shows no sign of retaliation. In fact, Apple together with its new alliances, are marching forward towards challenging Google’s kingship on the search business.

Oren Etzioni, a search and artificial intelligence expert at the University of Washington’s computer science department noted a potent observation:”Google is very difficult to dislodge on the desktop,” he said, “but mobile search is a very different beast, and the jury is still out on the question of who the ultimate winner in mobile (search) is.”

Seems like Google and Apple will perpetually find battlefields to outrank each other.

Big Data and Surveillance

The introduction of artificial intelligence to the business of physical securities infrastructure paves the way for smarter surveillance systems. Thanks to big data and researchers from MIT and University of Minnesota, a new program that discerns signals from the video noise faster and accurately than a human or existing automated system has been developed.

Group’s leader and a postdoctoral candidate with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Christopher Amato says, “You can’t have a person staring at every single screen, and even if you did the person might not know exactly what to look for. For example, a person is not going to be very good at searching through pages and pages of faces to try to match [an intruder] with a known criminal or terrorist.”

He added, “Currently, the system can identify people with some amount of disguise, but relies on a relatively simple version of facial recognition to ensure the correct person is identified. More sophisticated methods can be added to the system to improve its performance in these situations.”

In busy areas like airports or shipping ports, the smart surveillance equipment utilizes set of images to identify things that are placed in unusual locations and people of interest. Furthermore, an alarm may be programmed whenever there are any objects or people in the scene, when there are too many objects, or if the objects are moving in ways that give cause for concern. The program may also be used to prevent information overload as experienced by military units intel departments. Interestingly, a new video game, Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs depicts a parallel idea.

Indeed, artificial intelligence has evolved from just the typical human-like robots into various thinking machines that little by little try to mimic functions of the brain. There have been several attempts that revealed machines almost passing the “Turing Test”. When will a machine finally say “I survived! (the Turing test)” could happen anytime soon or in decades or centuries to come. One thing is certain now, there is no stopping tech companies in exploring the vast opportunities of AI.

Happy 100^th Birthday, Alan Turing!