Autonomous drones, lasers, and computer rendering play increasingly vital roles in filmmaking, but what makes Liam Young's moody, futuristic films so unusual is these technologies are not tools, but stars. The Australian architect-turned-filmmaker considers his films In the Robot Skies, Where the City Can't See, and Renderlands Trojan horses bringing these technologies into mainstream consciousness in a positive, even creative, way. If people give, say, LIDAR, any thought, it's probably within the context of autonomous vehicles or that lawsuit against Uber. But Young sees a compelling story. "We tell stories about what these technologies might mean," he says.

Corporate giants like Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple and Salesforce are competing in the race to acquire private AI companies, with Ford, Samsung, GE, and Uber emerging as new entrants. Over 200 private companies using AI algorithms across different verticals have been acquired since 2012, with over 30 acquisitions taking place in Q1'17 alone (as of 3/24/17). This quarter also saw one of the largest M&A deals: Ford's acquisition of Argo AI for $1B. In 2013, Google picked up deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto. This acquisition reportedly helped Google make major upgrades to its image search feature.

To function effectively in this knowledge economy, you need to read through trillions of data points. You basically need to go back to school every day to answer the questions that hit your desk. That is the challenge of the knowledge economy. And that is where I believe we can do something different in security with AI and cognitive.

For a while already we have been working with a large enterprise client, helping them to migrate their on-premise workloads to the cloud. Of course, as added value to the process, they are also migrating their legacy development processes to the modern, better, agile DevOps approach. And of course, they have built a modern Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline consisting of Bitbucket, Jenkins, Artifactory, Puppet and some relevant testing frameworks. "It is all great!", you would say "what is the problem?". Because I am on all kinds of mailing lists for this client, I noticed recently that my dedicated email inbox started getting more and more emails related to the CI/CD pipeline.

But as you sift through mountains of information, it appears mostly skewed toward better and faster web and mobile app development. Look for details on how the thinking can be applied to the wicked world of data science or analytics and you'll be hard pressed to find much at all. This seems odd, because a sustainable business isn't just carved out on the back of web and mobile apps. It's also dependent on intimately understanding customer data and pivoting towards the opportunities revealed - with yes, web and mobile apps. It's not rocket science; it's data science, and web-scale companies understand it's fundamental for mega efficient business operations.

Arithmetically, the problem is a combination of collapsing productivity and insufficient capital investment. On February 19, 2017, the New York Times ran a feature story on recent changes in the United States oil industry.2 The focus was on the recent "embrace" of technological innovation in the industry after the 2014 plunge in the global oil market. This was just one of a rash of such pieces in the popular press, relying, as is typical of such writing, on a smattering of skewed, decontextualized data, a healthy serving of the anecdotal, and a host of the worst tech journalism clichés ("a few icons on a computer screen," "a click of the mouse," video game marathons as job training, a compulsory reference to drones). Zeroing in on the effects of these changes on workers in west Texas, the article's upshot is unobjectionable enough: as oil prices recover, output rises, and production becomes more capital-intensive, many workers who lost jobs in the downturn will be replaced by machines. These workers, often Latino, are sure to be forced out of these semi-skilled, relatively well-paid jobs into other sectors of the labor market, where their skills and experience will serve little purpose. At first blush, the situation seems dire. We are told that some 30% of jobs in the industry were lost after the oil market crash of mid-2014, when employment in the industry was at its peak.

Artificial intelligence is likely to bring benefits in post-trade processing for capital markets before distributed ledger technology such as blockchain is widely adopted. Vijay Mayadas, head of strategy and fixed income at Broadridge, told Markets Media that post-trade processing in capital markets generates huge amounts of data so workflows will benefit from intelligent automation and machine learning. He said: "There is huge interest in tackling the 5% of exceptions that cause 95% of settlement failures and costs. We are running a number of pilots and expect adoption sooner than blockchain." Mayadas is responsible for strategy, acquisitions, partnerships and growth-related activities at Broadridge including the firm's blockchain initiatives.

Microsoft is currently testing a new AI chatbot – Ruuh. Described as a "desi AI who never stops talking" the bot is only available to users in India and in English only. However, the company confirms that the chatbot will be available to other markets as well. Microsoft launched the AI chatbot on February 7 but filed for a trademark for Ruuh on March 15. According to the description provided on Ruuh's Facebook page, "Ruuh is a chatbot provided to you for entertainment purposes. She is English speaking and only available to users in India. Do not rely on her statements as advice, counseling or endorsements."

Samsung's new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8, was unveiled this week with one particularly cool feature. It will unlock by simply identifying your face with its front camera. But now it seems that a mere photo of you will do the honors. The South Korean electronics giant did not comment specifically on the fact that its new product could be fooled, but stressed in a company statement that important payment and other data remains locked behind security layers that are more robust, such as iris and fingerprint authentication. "It is important to reiterate that facial recognition, while convenient, can be only used for opening your Galaxy S8 or S8 and currently cannot be used to authenticate access to Samsung Pay or Secure Folder," Samsung said.

Samsung looks to move on from its disastrous Note 7 with the new Galaxy S8. Samsung's new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8, was unveiled this week with one particularly cool feature. It will unlock by simply identifying your face with its front camera. But now it seems that a mere photo of you will do the honors. The South Korean electronics giant did not comment specifically on the fact that its new product could be fooled, but stressed in a company statement that important payment and other data remains locked behind security layers that are more robust, such as iris and fingerprint authentication.