The IBM CEO has been at Big Blue for more than three decades, we wanted to know how she keeps engaged, about IBM's future with artificial intelligence and what career tips she might have for young women interested in technology. These are questions she answered via email, just prior to the opening of HIMSS17, where she delivered the keynote. Q: You've been at IBM since 1981. How do you keep it fresh? A: As IBM has done throughout its 105-year history, we remain dedicated to leading the world into a more prosperous and progressive future.

With the growing popularity of chatbots, Facebook (FB) has set out on a bot search mission. The company is calling on IT (information technology) developers in the Middle East and Africa to participate in a challenge that would develop bots for its Messenger app (application). The company has lined up monetary and mentorship rewards for winners and finalists in the bot challenge, which begins later this year. Chatbots are particularly popular among Millennials and Generation Xers. According to Business Insider, 59.0% and 60.0% of US Millennials and Generation Xers, respectively, had tried chatbots as of late 2016.

This paper shows that a perturbed form of gradient descent converges to a second-order stationary point in a number iterations which depends only poly-logarithmically on dimension (i.e., it is almost "dimension-free"). The convergence rate of this procedure matches the well-known convergence rate of gradient descent to first-order stationary points, up to log factors. When all saddle points are non-degenerate, all second-order stationary points are local minima, and our result thus shows that perturbed gradient descent can escape saddle points almost for free. Our results can be directly applied to many machine learning applications, including deep learning. As a particular concrete example of such an application, we show that our results can be used directly to establish sharp global convergence rates for matrix factorization. Our results rely on a novel characterization of the geometry around saddle points, which may be of independent interest to the non-convex optimization community.

A question that would have been thought of as ridiculous 25 years ago, has now become an actual worry for many workers across the world. The AI revolution is well underway and soon it will not only be the simplest tasks done by machines, but professions such as banking, law and medicine also under threat from superior machine intelligence. When it comes to the automated workforce, people are mainly worried that robots will take their job (a 31 per cent chunk to be exact). The next big worry about the future implications of AI is humans will end up relying on robots (selected by 23 per cent) which could end in disasters that used to be confined to dystopian sci-fi films – Think The Terminator series. Additionally, 20 per cent of those surveyed said they were anxious that robots will play a bigger role in the military.

While many firms are looking to the moon for mining opportunities, one Australian firm believes there could be precious metals a lot nearer to home. Deep-sea robots will be sent to mine mineral deposits in the deep ocean in 2019 in a test for a controversial new scheme. As land-based mineral stores are becoming depleted, the ocean floor is becoming a more attractive mining prospect, containing gold, copper and other precious metal deposits used to make electronics, renewable energy tools and even medical imaging machines. But deep-sea excavation may have a negative impact on deep ocean marine life, as robot mining may destroy their homes and disturb these sensitive species. The Canadian mining company Nautilus Minerals plans to send robots to mine deposits rich in copper and gold in the waters of Papua New Guinea.

Join NewVoiceMedia and Call Centre Helper as they discuss the effects of Artificial Intelligence on the contact centre. Artificial Intelligence has been threatening to transform the Contact Centre. But, how much of this talk is hype? And, how much is likely to happen? Could this lead to the decline of contact centres as we know it?

Recent American news events range from horrifying to dystopian, but reading the applications of our fast.ai I was blown away by how many bright, creative, resourceful folks from all over the world are applying deep learning to tackle a variety of meaningful and interesting problems. Their passions range from ending illegal logging, diagnosing malaria in rural Uganda, translating Japanese manga, reducing farmer suicides in India via better loans, making Nigerian fashion recommendations, monitoring patients with Parkinson's disease, and more. Our mission at fast.ai is to make deep learning accessible to people from varied backgrounds outside of elite institutions, who are tackling problems in meaningful but low-resource areas, far from mainstream deep learning research. Our group of selected fellows for Deep Learning Part 2 includes people from Nigeria, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Singapore, Israel, Canada, Spain, Germany, France, Poland, Russia, and Turkey.

Imagine you're part of a great swelling crowd, one of 60,000 people who fill up the cauldron of noise and chaos that is a sold-out football stadium. For you and everyone around you, the game is an open-air gathering place, a chance to steam and scream and worry about nothing except the other team's menacing D. To the security officials responsible for your safety, it is a constant source of worst-case-scenario planning. They install metal detectors; they enlist a kennel's worth of bomb-sniffing dogs; they plant concrete pillars around the perimeter to keep out cars; they train personnel in the dark art of bag searching; they even obtain a temporary flight restriction from the FAA to keep all aircraft above 3,000 feet for a radius of 3 miles. They spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to keep you safe, yet they know that none of it can stop a 3-pound off-the-shelf drone from flying in and dropping something on the crowd. Whatever it is, you'll never see it coming, and because there is currently no legal way to bring down a drone with any accuracy or reliability, there's nothing anyone can do but wait for it. In the summer of 2015, Ross Lamm and Dave Romero watched just such a scenario unfold from within a skybox at a large university stadium. The head of security for the college, fearful of the damage drones could do, had decided to run a simulation of a drone attack inside his 60,000- capacity football stadium.

A young elephant delicately lifts the barrier blocking the railroad tracks in India's Chapramari Wildlife Sanctuary and slips under. Once across the tracks, it gingerly steps over another obstruction. "It looks as though this elephant has done this before," says Joyce Poole, an elephant behavior expert and co-founder of Elephant Voices. Elephants have long been famous for their smarts--they have long-term memory, can use tools, and maintain complex social groups. But increasingly, elephants are being recognized for their problem-solving abilities.

Like death and taxes, the inevitable question I cannot escape when on the road is, "Will artificial intelligence (AI) spell human extinction?" We humans have a natural fear of the unknown, so the question is, well, natural. The sentiment comes largely from countless movies portraying robots (with self-awareness AI) turning on their human makers and emotionlessly eliminating them. We fear what we do not understand, and AI (or self-learning) algorithms are far from dinner table conversation for most people. So do we have anything to fear and, if so, when will we need to build that cabin in the Canadian Rockies?