The first time the public laid eyes on Google Glass, there were more questions than praise. The main concern would be security and privacy. How can you feel safe partying in a club when a man wearing Google Glass walks in and stealthily take photos and videos of what’s happening inside? Theater owners would also be apprehensive of letting a man sporting this Jarvis-like eyewear inside the cinema houses for fear of easily recording contents. Google has some work cut out for them in terms of making sure they do not violate community standards.

Peter Cohan wrote on his Forbes.com blog, “Once Glass goes on sale, its use to abet violations of personal privacy, appropriation of corporate intellectual property and trade secrets, and dangerous driving are likely to raise more of society’s hackles.”

Together with the dream of setting lose driverless cars on the roads, Google has been relentless in expanding their AI market. While both entails sizeable amount of investments, the tech giant is dead serious in pursuing these innovations. From search, mobile and now to artificial intelligence, Google’s team is so passionate about playing offense and broaden its market shares. This makes it more exciting to see where the company is heading next. The people are anticipating. The spark that Apple is lacking big time right now, and hoping to retrieve soon.

Apparently, Google’s style of market leadership, which is playing offense, is winning vs Apple’s defensive tactics. To add to this rivalry is Google Now app is getting several rave reviews from users. Many find it more useful than Siri. Thanks to Google Fellow Jeff Dean for applying what they call deep learning to this virtual assistant app.

AI Superchef

From supercomputing powers of Watson to Deep Blue AI proficiencies, IBM goes to the kitchen. Yes, you heard it right. IBM is now exploring its creative and delicious side with Dr. Lav Varshney, a research scientist for the company’s Services Research segment. Varshney and his team designed a learning system that adds another dimension to cognitive computing: creativity.

In his article published last December 2012, he stressed that this AI chef is not intended to displace human in the kitchen. This innovation will reach out to help those with eating disorders and weight problems. He said, “My team believes if you can optimize flavor while meeting nutritional constraints, you can mitigate health issues. For food service companies, creative computers can come up with flavorful meals that also meet predetermined nutritional objectives – so rather than throwing the meal away and heading for a bag of potato chips in the vending machine, students would eat a healthy meal they actually enjoy.”

AI will cross reference three databases information including a recipe index (a giant recipe book), hedonic psychophysics (tells whether people will love the flavour) and chemoinformatics (marries the first two databases). This creative computing is geared to interplay flavour, texture and presentation to delight human’s senses.

“Nothing is really crazily bad, though there are certainly things we’ve tried making that weren’t spectacular, like a mideastern mushroom stroganoff. Out of the 20 most recent dishes, 17 or 18 have been really good,” Varshney adds.

Japan and Their Robots

The world’s robot capital, Japan is once again turning the unthinkable into vivid reality. A new robot developed by Tokyo Institute of Technology possesses an artificial brain neural algorithm that allows a machine to assess a problem and solve it from what it’s learned from the environment. The neural network is named SOINN (Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network). What is more fascinating is that it can even learn what it needs from browsing the internet. The recent demonstration shows HIRO (a SOINN powered robot) making a cup of tea.

From processing knowledge from milieu, Japanese robotics explores the sense of smell. Japanese scientists has created a robot that can tell you if you are bad breath. It says things like “Your breath is kind of stinky” or “This is bad; Unbearable”.

The new artificial intelligence also sees great potential in inductive reasoning, rather than the deductive method. The revolution has triggered the marriage of neuroscience and AI, and made good use of software engineering.