PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It's impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone's face and chat with them even though they're on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery.

The amount of data produced every day grows tremendously in most real-life domains, including medical imaging, genomics, text categorisation, computational biology, and many others. Although it appears beneficial at the first glance (more data could mean more possibilities of extracting and revealing useful underlying knowledge), handling massively large datasets became a challenging issue and attracts research attention, especially in the era of big data. This big data revolution affected many research fields, including statistics, machine learning, parallel computing, and computer systems in general [1]. Storing and analysing the acquired historical information should allow predicting the label of an incoming (unseen) feature vector, containing some quantified features of a given data example. If the labels are categorical, then we are to tackle the classification task (it's regression otherwise).

Virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a number of new technologies are providing new opportunities for media agencies as well as e-commerce companies to grow new business and shift business models. JD.com unveiled its latest smart refrigerator model at the CES Asia yesterday, aiming at providing an industry chain solution for smart devices manufacturers. JD.com chief technology officer Zhang Chen told a keynote speech that it has also setablished a strategic partnership with Microsoft to drive artificial intelligence research and to enhance human-computer interaction experience. It would seek partnership that could complement each party's resources in terms of retail channel and technology. Last year, sales volume of smart devices at JD.com nearly tripled and the types of devices available also added 1.6 times from a year ago.

Malaysia's strategic investment fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd is making a strategic investment of 100 million into New Jersey-based Fractal Analytics, a leading global provider of analytics, to accelerate its growth. In a press release, Khazanah executive director Chinta Bhagat commented: "The availability of large amounts of real-time information and the ability to analyse it at scale, will transform how the world makes decisions. Fractal is one of the companies leading this change and with our partnership, it can dramatically accelerate its programmatic investments and acquisitions." TA Associates, a Boston-based global private equity firm and AIMIA, the world's largest loyalty firm and Gulu Mirchandani of Onida are some of Fractal's current investors. Fractal Analytics co-founder and chief executive officer Srikanth Velamakanni said, the investment will allow the company to step up development of its artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning-based software stack.

It is not often that you meet someone who looks at technology as a tool to make an impact on customers and in turn bring returns to business decisions. It is unfortunate that most of the business world puts customers second, but spend enormous amounts of money in acquiring them. The world of IT is not about information capture, it is about the "machine" learning continuously to understand the queries of clients or consumers – of the enterprise – when a transaction is made on the smart phone. Co-founder of Helpshift Abinash Tripathy is a technology proponent and believes that it can improve lives. But, he is vociferously against technology that focuses on trading – like ecommerce businesses that sell on discounts to capture consumer eye-balls.

When you get right down to it, developing vaccines is about data and luck. Scientists start with a set of variables--what drugs a virus responds to, how effectively, and for whom--and then it's a whole lot of trial and error until they stumble upon a cure. One of the most exciting possibilities in medical research right now is how technology like machine learning could help researchers rapidly process those enormous sets of data, more quickly leading to cures. This is already starting to happen: In a study published Wednesday in the journal Macromolecules, researchers from IBM and Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology reveal a breakthrough that could help prevent deadly virus infections. With the help of IBM super computer Watson, they hope their finding will soon make its way into vaccines.

MasterCard Inc. says new machine-learning technology has helped it quickly control three separate cyberattacks that targeted automated bank tellers, limiting the damage to about 100,000 each. The transaction-monitoring system, which also employs data visualization tools, caught the three attacks during the first two months of 2016, according to MasterCard. The company declined to identify the banks. The Safety Net system, rolled out globally late last year, analyzes more than 1.3 billion transactions per day involving MasterCard debit and credit accounts at banks, merchants and ATMs, using algorithms that assess customer behavior in real-time. In the three attacks this year, directed against two U.S. banks and one bank in South America, Safety Net identified anomalies such as large cash withdrawals or transactions outside the usual geographic area for a given account.

With improvements in facial-recognition technology and the increasing popularity of smartphones, the threat to one's privacy unexpectedly posed by Internet photos posted by strangers is growing day by day. To protect against unwanted scrutiny, trading company Nissey Corp., based in Sabae, Fukui Prefecture, has developed special glasses that thwart electronic facial recognition. The Privacy Visor is a set of white titanium goggles with lenses that have a mesh-like surface providing many tiny spaces to see through. "Since the view might not be clear, driving or riding on bicycles must be avoided," a Nissey spokesman warned. The glasses were jointly developed with the National Institute of Informatics, a research institute dedicated to information technology.

The Brooklyn Cruise Ship Terminal opened in 2006 - the same year that Twitter launched. So, you'd think that when one of the tech sector's biggest events - TechCrunch Disrupt New York - moved to the birthplace of hipsters, that cutting-edge development and a good amount of facial hair would be on display. But this year's New York Disrupt didn't seem very disruptive. TechCruch's biggest Disrupt conference in San Francisco, its London version, and past New York events have always attracted innovative technology developers. Jordan Crook, senior writer for TechCrunch, was unconcerned by what seemed to be a slow burn in the sector, even in areas like virtual reality and artificial intelligence. "It's easy to see with hindsight that what seemed to be a slow transition was really a massive shift," she says.

Apple has invested US 1 billion in China's largest ride-hailing company, Didi Chuxing, in a move that could give it an opportunity to participate in the local company's bid to build a data-driven ride-share platform. Didi, which is already backed by big local players like Tencent and Alibaba, said it has raised the Apple investment as a part of its latest funding round. The investment by Apple is the largest single investment Didi has ever received, it added. Apple has been indicating that such an investment was coming for some time now, said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. The company has already said that it plans to increase its services revenue and that the Chinese market is a key component of its overall strategy going forward, Moorhead said.