TechCrunch (Oct. 8) -- After decades of subtle developments that largely went unnoticed by much of the working world, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken center stage in the last few years as a “hot” technology. Eyal Amir, an associate professor of computer science at Illinois, focused on AI research. “More generally what you see as a trend is for different pieces of data coming together, and that we give the computers a little bit more autonomy,” Amir says. “We start trusting the ability of the computer to do basic tasks and to have knowledge that we don’t have.”