Daniel (Danny) Bobrow passed away peacefully at home with his wife Toni and daughters Kimberly and Deborah in Palo Alto, California, on March 20, 2017, having bravely fought a five-month battle with cancer. Danny was born to Ruth Gureasko Bobrow and Jacob Bobrow on November 29, 1935, in the Bronx, New York City. A gifted student, he attended Bronx High School of Science and went on to earn a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an MS from Harvard, and a PhD in Mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Marvin Minsky. His was one of the first MIT doctoral theses in Artificial Intelligence. A pioneer with a long and distinguished research career in Artificial Intelligence as a Research Fellow in the System Sciences Laboratory of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he is remembered as a mentor, friend, and role model for many.

If you pick up your iPhone and ask Apple's personal assistant software the age of Mets third baseman David Wright, you get a direct answer: Wright, born in 1982, is 34 years old. You also get some ancillary information: A photo, his height, a nickname that no one uses. Ask Google's artificially intelligent question-answering system, same deal. But until Monday evening if you were to ask the same question of Alexa, the Amazon system that powers the company's Echo devices, you got a much different response. David Wright, according to Alexa/Echo, is 234 years old -- by far the oldest person on the Mets roster or in professional baseball or in the recorded history of the human race.

Dave Mihelcic is the head of federal strategy and technology at Juniper Networks. If the recent spate of alleged Russian cyberattacks has taught us anything, security breaches can happen so quickly and stealthily, the damage will be done before anyone even realizes there was a hack. In fact, as malicious actors become more insidious, federal network security managers are finding the reaction time between identifying and mitigating potential threats has gone from minutes to milliseconds. Factor in the volume and complexity of the threats, and it becomes evident the challenge has grown well beyond what can be managed through manual intervention. To successfully combat these challenges, cyber operators should consider incorporating machine-learning capabilities into their toolkit.

An Uber Technologies Inc. executive who worked on the ride-hailing company's self-driving vehicle program has left the firm. He is the third executive to exit Uber in two months. The San Francisco company confirmed the departure of Sherif Marakby, Uber's vice president of global vehicle programs, who joined the company a year ago and left Monday. Uber did not say why he left. The company said in a statement that Marakby's "deep experience and knowledge of the automotive industry" helped Uber "tremendously in working to make self-driving cars a reality."

Machine Learning (ML) is an exciting new subfield of computer science. With origins in pattern recognition, today's hardware and software advances have made ML a new tool for many types of organizations I order to remain competitive. With today's hardware, massive amounts of data can be fed into a system, which can then use algorithms to determine possible outcomes of a task, and store that information for further use. As the amount of data that is ingested increases, the accuracy of the outcomes can improve. Similar to simulations that can give more accurate results with faster processing, more memory and improved algorithms, so can ML applications.

The latest technology to catch the fancy of a lot of businesses are chatbots--self-learning computer programs designed to have intelligent conversations with humans over the Internet. Several announcements were made recently by leading Indian banks and insurance companies about deploying chatbots. Fullerton India Credit Company Ltd. launched ASHA, a loan acquisition and fulfillment chatbot for Facebook Messenger that customers can chat with to apply, structure, submit documentation, and receive loan approvals, without downloading any other application. YES Bank launched an AI powered chatbot called mPOWER for FB Messenger for instant loan offering. HDFC Life Insurance launched an AI based chatbot that takes customers through a 60 seconds quiz and then computes their Insurance Quotient for the company's various insurance products, like tax planning, retirement, health, etc. Chatbots can be highly beneficial for both businesses and customers.

Tata Capital, the financial services arm of the Tata Group, unveiled its Artificial Intelligence (AI) based online Chatbot which, through its unique natural language and cognitive learning capabilities, understands and provides a response to individual online queries around its financial services products. Powered by a virtual agent (VA) engine, the online Chatbot represents a huge step forward by Tata Capital towards digitizing the customer journey, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The Chatbot is equipped to handle over 70% of the routine customer queries including product information, application tracking and sales & after-sales service. This will not only reduce the dependency on traditional customer servicing platforms, but also enable a better customer experience. The Chatbot's evolving data insights will also help Tata Capital track & measure customer queries, sentiments, satisfaction and more and will help Tata Capital devise a more customer-centric strategy.

It's been 15 years since a degenerative eye disease forced Erich Manser to stop driving. Today, he commutes to his job as an accessibility consultant via commuter trains and city buses, but he has trouble locating empty seats sometimes and must ask strangers for guidance. A step toward solving Manser's predicament could arrive as soon as next year. Manser's employer, IBM, and an independent carmaker called Local Motors are developing a self-driving, electric shuttle bus that combines artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and smartphone apps to serve people with vision, hearing, physical, and cognitive disabilities. The buses, dubbed "Olli," are designed to transport people around neighborhoods at speeds below 35 miles per hour and will be sold to cities, counties, airports, companies, and universities.

IBM said Anaconda will also integrate with the PowerAI software distribution for machine learning and deep learning so enterprises can take advantage of PowerAI performance and GPU (graphics processing unit) optimization for data intensive cognitive workloads. The agreement gives IBM another leg up in the fight to win business from data scientists and developers working on deep learning applications. Anaconda said it already has more than 16 million downloads. Offering the platform through IBM's Cognitive Systems unit will allow clients to quickly scale up the deep learning applications they develop using Anaconda. The advent of big data has been a bonanza for IT providers aiming to provide enterprises and other organizations with the tools to identify patterns in large data sets to convert information to actionable intelligence.