Grant Imahara visits Cyberdyne, a robotics company located near Tokyo, to see HAL in action. No, not that HAL--it stands for Hybrid Assistive Limb and works with the brain and the body to augment mobility. The process, called cybernic treatment, can help people recover lost bodily functions. Dr. Yoshiyuki Sankai, CEO and President of Cyberdyne speaks with Grant about what makes the technology unique, how it works, and its real-world results. During his visit, Grant gets a demonstration of HAL.

This article is the second part (click here for part one) in our series about the role of AI in customer support. The explores how digitization, digital self-service, and distributed digital advisors are disrupting a series of industries and creating a series of business opportunities to realize transformative value propositions, business models, services, and new revenue streams. The second-part delves further into the impact of AIOps and machine automation on a range of different careers and considers how we can prepare further for the occupational changes of the future. Many of the critical building blocks of computing -- microchip density, processing speed, storage capacity, energy efficiency, download speed, etc. -- have been improving at exponential rates over the last decade According to the authors of The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: "We've also recently seen great progress in natural language processing, machine learning (the ability of a computer to automatically refine its methods and improve its results as it gets more data), computer vision, simultaneous localization and mapping, and many of the other fundamental challenges of the discipline." Administration tasks have evolved to largely self-service over the last few decades with technology removing the need for typing pools, copyists, and mailroom clerks.

To pursue his education, Mumbai-born Professor Subra Suresh travelled to the US with less than $100 in his pocket, toting a half-filled suitcase. His story is one of the power of education, a value instilled in him by his mother from an early age, he notes. Suresh rose to become the first Asian-born academic to lead the National Science Foundation, an American agency with an US$8bn research budget, and joined Singapore's Nanyang Technological University in January as its new President. GovInsider caught up with him to learn more about his vision for the university. In one of his first moves, the university has partnered with Chinese tech giant Alibaba to set up a joint AI research institute – the first of its kind outside of China.

Errol Morris feels that Thomas Kuhn saved him from a career he was not suited for--by having him thrown out of Princeton. In 1972, Kuhn was a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Princeton, and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gave the world the term "paradigm shift." As Morris tells the story in his recent book, The Ashtray, Kuhn was antagonized by Morris' suggestions that Kuhn was a megalomaniac and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an assault on truth and progress. To say the least, Morris, then 24, was already the iconoclast who would go on to make some of the most original documentary films of our time. After launching the career he was suited for with The Gates of Heaven in 1978, a droll affair about pet cemeteries, Morris earned international acclaim with The Thin Blue Line, which led to the reversal of a murder conviction of a prisoner who had been on death row. In 2004, Morris won an Academy Award for The Fog of War, a dissection of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a major architect of the Vietnam War. His 2017 film, Wormwood, a miniseries on Netflix, centers on the mystery surrounding a scientist who in 1975 worked on a biological warfare program for the Army, and suspiciously fell to his death from a hotel room. The Ashtray--Morris explains the title in our interview below--is as arresting and idiosyncratic as Morris' films.

Last week, an emotional Elon Musk described how he was working so hard to keep production of the Tesla Model 3 on track that he missed his own birthday. "All night – no friends, nothing," he told the New York Times, apparently "struggling to get the words out". Musk had, he said, been working 120-hour weeks, often not leaving the factory for three or four days. When he did get home, he said, the choice was between no sleep or taking an Ambien, an insomnia drug intended for short-term use (and blamed by some of Tesla's board members for his erratic night-time tweeting). Musk has long been celebrated by the business press for his work ethic.

Due to its nearly limitless potential, artificial intelligence is at the forefront of much of this research, and Microsoft has been making headlines with new technologies, major acquisitions, and innovative ideas. The tech giant has long been moving toward a cloud-based future, and investment in AI is helping solidify its path toward becoming the AI leader in a number of fields. Here are a few technologies Microsoft has invested in recently and the potential impact they'll have on the company's future and society as a whole. Traditional computer hardware can perform complex tasks quickly. However, most hardware is tuned primarily for general-purpose performance, and systems that demand effective real-time performance often rely on specialized hardware, as milliseconds saved can be critical in certain scenarios.

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As the number of e-commerce customers is rising, so are the instances of consumer frauds, causing huge loss to online retailers. But, the founders of Gurugram-based start-up ThirdWatch Data Pvt Ltd say their fraud analytics product is bringing down frauds by 30-40 per cent since its launch in December 2017. In recent times, arrests have been made in Hyderabad and Rajasthan for defrauding Flipkart of products worth a few lakhs. Amazon India too has faced consumer frauds. Shashank Agarwal, Co-founder, ThirdWatch, said customer frauds can happen at two levels -- return to origin (RTO) and abuse of promo codes.

Valérie Pisano sips a cappuccino in Montreal's Caffè Italia, an unassuming gem in the heart of the city's Little Italy, and a place that she has known since she was a child. "Coming here is all about history and stability," said the newly appointed president and chief executive of Mila (formerly the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms), the Quebec epicentre of Canada's artificial-intelligence revolution. With a soccer match on the TV screen above and the steamy blasts of an espresso machine punctuating her words, Ms. Pisano spoke about the need to stay connected to the past while leading an organization that is literally inventing the future. "What we're trying to create is completely new, completely emergent… And as society quickly pivots to this new era, we need to ask, how do we anchor ourselves in the roots of who we are and what we stand for as humanity?" The future Ms. Pisano sees emerging is just around the corner – not just figuratively, but literally.