Will the technology be coming for your job next? The question of whether marketing is more science or art has never seemed more relevant now that highly sophisticated cognitive learning technology is able to assume many of the tasks involved in marketing -- in some cases, even doing them better than a human could. But visions of a completely automated campaign may be premature, according to executives from IBM and other companies at the forefront of AI who weighed in on the technology's impact during a panel discussion at ad:tech New York last week. In good news for creative directors, the experts said cognitive technology has the ability to free up marketers to spend more time tackling bigger picture responsibilities, such as finding the inspiration for the right voice and vision to make an emotional connection with consumers. By laying the groundwork for significantly more sophisticated one-to-one marketing, AI could even create a need to beef up analytics, content and other areas for businesses that are able to gain a competitive edge through customer-centric marketing.

Sitting in a studio in Kensington, London, the designer Sebastian Conran walks me through a worst-case scenario. "Basically, what it's looking for is a break in routine," he explains, pointing to a drawing of an elderly woman, collapsed on the floor of her home. The e-sensor in the room notices that you've fallen over. MiRo is a robotic dog. There is an early model close to where we are sitting.

Some of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare were in diagnosis--it was a major push in expert systems, for example, where you aim to build up a knowledge base that lets software be as good as a human clinician. Expert systems hit their peak in the late 1980s, but required a lot of knowledge to be encoded by people who had lots of other things to do. Hardware was also a problem for AI in the 1980s. The promise of AI in diagnostics is that you can help people in locations where there aren't enough doctors. Computers are not as creative as human pattern matchers, but that fact also means they can be more consistent than people.

Vyacheslav is a PhD candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research uses social psychology and machine learning to understand networks of people and networks of ideas. Imagine a typical day in 2020: Your personal AI assistant wakes you up with a friendly greeting before preparing your favorite breakfast. During your morning workout, it plays new songs that perfectly match your musical tastes. For your driverless commute to work, it has pre-selected a few articles based on the duration of your commute and what you've read in the past.

Facebook has been forced to end a hugely controversial data sharing agreement with WhatsApp. The decision would have seen WhatsApp hand out information on all of its users to Facebook, letting the latter use data about people's chats to inform its advertising. It would also have gone the other way – allowing companies to send WhatsApp's to people based on things they've bought on Facebook, for instance. But now the UK's Information Commissioner's Office has told the company that it needs to bring that arrangement to an end because it does not have "valid consent" from its users. Facebook had looked to gain permission from its users to have their data used as part of the deal.

Miko, created in India by emotix, is your child's new companion -- a brain with loads of heart. You will be amazed with how much Miko can do -- be it chatting away about the facts of the world or adapting and responding to your child's needs. Miko has a wide pool of knowledge and an even wider pool of fun. About emotix: emotix is a consumer electronics company founded on the pillars of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet of Things. The core team of roboticists has been together since 2009, making some of the world's most widely acclaimed robots.

Billionaire CEO Yueting Jia told employees in a letter last week that the company's rapid growth was leading to stagnation and management problems at LeEco, and announced that he would invest $10 million into the company and cut his salary to 15 cents in order to keep LeEco steady as it expands into the United States and develops a self-driving car. But North American operations lead Brian Hui told the audience at TechCrunch China today that things aren't as dire as the letter made them seem. "If you read the letter, it's not about whether it's sustainable or not sustainable," Hui said of LeEco's growth. It's how you can spend your money wisely… You go through a very aggressive user base growth period before you enter a financially sustainable period. I think this is pretty normal, applying to any kind of startup." Although the letter led to rumors that LeEco would abandon the development of a self-driving vehicle, Hui said that work on the car was a "highest priority" and would ...

It seems to me that the hype about AI makes really difficult for experienced investors to understand where the real value and innovation are. I would like then to humbly try to bring some clarity to what is happening on the investment side of the artificial intelligence industry. We have seen as in the past the development of AI has been stopped by the absence of funding, and thus studying the current investment market is crucial to identify where AI is going. First of all, it should be clear that investing in AI is extremely cumbersome: the level of technical complexity goes out of the pure commercial scope, and not all the venture capitalists are able to fully comprehend the functional details of machine learning. This is why the figures of the "Advisors" and "Scientist-in-Residence" are becoming extremely important nowadays.

To better understand ISIS drones, I spoke with an investigator at Conflict Armament research, who requested anonymity given the sensitive nature of the work. When the investigator entered the workshop, there were no completed drones inside. Instead, they saw plywood fuselages and styrofoam wings, as well as a missile from a man-portable anti-air defense system, or MANPADS. "For us it implied that they were trying to arm it, arm their drones with something that would be light enough to be carried by a drone, but also that would have the right kind of explosives for potency," they said. Many of their finding were published in a report on the Islamic State's Weaponized Drones.

When aliens come, how will they get here? Well, unless they are sly infiltrators of the flesh, they will probably go for the kind of boastful, get-a-load-of-us craft that was immortalized by Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." He wrote, "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." That was true of "Independence Day," and it is doubly true of "Arrival," in which a dozen mountainous ovoids--charcoal gray and rough to the touch, like a pumice stone--show up at various locations around Earth. Rather than land, the vessels suspend themselves in dignified fashion, with their tips facing downward and not quite touching the ground.