Alpha: 'AI who beats Human Pilot in Tests' and in these lengthy tests; as usual the human subject is prone to getting tired. The Computer AI known as ALPHA does not get tired and is one of recent AI developments that reveal just how good the Artificial intelligence is getting. I have written on AI for some time now and it is evident the next stage of development that men will shoot for is AI use in many different areas. But areas where these AI robots, and instruments can work with humans as an aid. This is all fine and good until the Robot or AI instrument starts learning on it's own.

A Baxter robot of Rethink Robotics picks up a business card as it performs during a display at the World Economic Forum, in China's port city Dalian Thomson Reuters "There's just doesn't seem to be many blacksmith jobs these days." At first glance, this would be a ridiculous thing to say. We live in a modern society and machines do a way better job of making things from metal anyways. What if machines are better at driving long-haul trucks? What if machines are better servers at McDonald's?

Cannes Lions this year saw the ad industry expanding its creative capabilities. Over 13,500 delegates from about 90 countries descended on Cannes again this year hoping for a Lion in one of 17 categories. With awards honoring work from design to creative data to radio, the ceremonies reflected a complex industry drawing on a broader range of creative disciplines than in the past, but also facing unprecedented challenges in making campaigns work across channels. "There's never been so many channels or points of interactions, or agencies working on various parts of that," said Keith Weed, chief marketing and communications officer at Unilever. "It's important to make sure the brand experience does not get fragmented."

Stealthy MedyMatch emerged in February with plans to improve emergency room care using cognitive analysis and artificial intelligence. Now, in its first collaboration with a U.S. hospital, the company is developing its first real-time decision-support tool using data from New Jersey-based Capital Health. Under the agreement, Capital Health will supply Israel-based MedyMatch with anonymized data to help it develop the tool, which will target stroke patients. It will analyze medical images and provide the ER radiologist with information to help him or her determine the course of treatment. It combines "deep vision, advanced cognitive analytics and artificial intelligence" to analyze images and identify anomalies that may be invisible to the human eye.

German engineering powerhouse Siemens today announced that it has set up an innovation unit named'next47' (as the company was founded back in 1847) to "foster disruptive ideas more vigorously and to accelerate the development of new technologies", more specifically in the fields of artificial intelligence, blockchain, autonomous machines and what it calls'decentralized electrification'. Effective October 1, 2016, the unit intends to pool all of Siemens' existing startup activities, fuelled by 1 billion in funding for the first five years. Siemens CTO Siegfried Russwurm will head the new unit on an acting basis. "Siemens itself was a startup in 1847 – founded in a rear courtyard in Berlin," said Joe Kaeser, president and CEO of Siemens. "With next47, we're living up to our company founder's ideals and creating an important basis for fostering innovation as we continue Siemens' development." Next47 will have offices in Berkeley, Shanghai and Munich and cover all regions of the world from those locations.

One additional note: unlike the wall-of-equations that make up most machine learning papers, the IML literature is profoundly inviting and largely friendly to non-experts. I encourage you to dive into the original papers wherever a particular topic piques your interest. I've gathered links to all of the papers in Knox's syllabus here to make doing so especially convenient.

Here are upcoming meetings and conferences, for July 2016 and beyond. Save 10% with the KDNUGGETS registration code. Aug 29 - Sep 1, Image Processing, Computer Vision and Machine Learning based on Optimization and PDE. Use code CDOINSUR to save 10% on registration. Sep 23, MLconf Atlanta Machine Learning Conference - mention "KDNuggets" and save 18%.

About 20,000 packages an hour are sorted by machine at JD.com's largest robot-run warehouse in Shanghai, China. The company has three million orders a year ranging from smartphones and televisions to nappies. BBC Click's Dan Simmons finds out how the company can deliver items within a few hours and sometimes within minutes.

Bots have officially taken over, and they're about to make our lives a whole lot easier. In April, Facebook introduced bots for Messenger, but the world's most popular social media platform is not the only company to open a "bot store" with consumer functions, and virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa are steadily increasing in both popularity and functionality. With Kik, you can chat with Michelangelo and see the climate conditions through Yahoo! With Operator, shopping is as easy as sending a text, and Pana, the online travel agency, turns a simple chat conversation via text into real bookings. In fact, everyone from 1–800-Flowers and the NBA to Taco Bell is jumping on the chatbot bandwagon.

In the not-so-distant future, children will be amazed by stories that we allowed relative strangers to steer one tonne machines, relying on human skill and instinct over the capabilities of computers. The field of artificial intelligence has a transformative capability over many things that govern our daily lives. Consider self-driving cars: about 33,000 people are killed in automobile accidents in the US every year and most fatalities can be traced back to humans. Companies across technology and automobile industries are pouring millions of dollars into using AI to drive new breakthroughs in this field. Already, cars by Tesla have limited self-drive capabilities and we will soon see this rapidly increasing.