When the engineers had at last finished their work, Eugenia Kuyda opened a console on her laptop and began to type. "This is your digital monument." It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda's closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way.

AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program powered by Google's DeepMind, defeated South Korean world Go champion Lee Sedol convincingly with a 4-1 score earlier in the year. It seems that DeepMind is now moving on to a bigger challenge, going from an ancient board game into a modern strategy video game. At the ongoing BlizzCon 2016, Blizzard and Google announced a collaboration to open up StarCraft II as an AI and machine learning environment for researchers around the world. StarCraft II is one of the most fiercely competitive video games that is played professionally, and according to the DeepMind team, it will provide an interesting testing environment for research in AI as it "provides a useful bridge to the messiness of the real-world." "The skills required for an agent to progress through the environment and play StarCraft well could ultimately transfer to real-world tasks," said Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist for DeepMind who was once the top-ranked player of the game in Spain.

The Drum's latest documentary, produced in association with Teads, 'The Automation of Creativity' explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising. Automation will claim 50% of all jobs in the next 30 years, according to Rice University professor Moshe Vardi, but creativity is impossible to automate, right? Adland will surely escape this robot advance? Such a binary argument fails to take into account the huge leaps artificial intelligence (AI) and other such technologies are making. Why, when it is being used in film-making, music and even journalism, should advertising avoid the onslaught?

So, you bought into the current machine learning craze and went on to collect millions/billions of records from this promising new data source. Now, what do you do with them? Too often, the abundance of data quickly turns into an abundance of problems. How do you extract that "magic essence" from your data without falling into the common pitfalls? In her session at @ThingsExpo, Natalia Ponomareva, Software Engineer at Google, provided tips on how to be successful in large scale machine learning.

"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection." Over the last couple of years, I have seen a lot of handwringing among the Technorati about how innovation is dead and that, from now on, there will only be boring iteration. The Mobile Revolution caused a dynamic shift in the way people interact with computers in ways that we can both measure … and have no idea it is even taking place. Smartphones gave rise to the apps economy and endless opportunity. But, as all cycles do, the luster of the Mobile Revolution is beginning to fizz out. It's incredibly difficult to build a new app and become a success, smartphones have become commodities and the cloud is so ubiquitous that people hardly give it a second thought anymore.

The overall goal is to target treatment specifically to each individual so that clinical outcomes for that individual are optimized. One direction of attack is to use patient data to discover decision rules which specify the treatment to use as a function of a vector of features from the patient. Regression and classification are important statistical tools for estimating such rules based on either observational data or data from a randomized trial, and machine learning can help with this because of its ability to artfully handle high dimensional feature spaces with potentially complex interactions.

Sherry Coutu spends much of her time above the Atlantic, shuttling between Cambridge and Silicon Valley in search of the brightest talent in the technology sector. When it comes to artificial intelligence -- one of the fields expected to make the biggest difference to the way we live our lives over the coming decades -- she believes that Britain has an edge. "There is a huge amount of evidence to show that we are No 1," said the Canadian-born tech guru, who has lived in Britain since 1993. But, she added, "we are still growing fewer companies than we should". Artificial intelligence (AI) is an overused term. Some big companies attempt to pass off basic systems that simply provide automated responses to consumers as an "AI solution".

It is early Saturday morning. Sun is slowly rising and the air is magically yellow, the kind of morning glow you only get in October when the leaves are slowly turning. I love this time of the year, this time of the day, this time of the week when there is time enough to enjoy your extra-large cup of black, fresh brewed, strong coffee. I am browsing through my social media apps. My very personalized feeds quickly make sure I am up to date with what my closest network of friends and family are up to.

The White House released its much anticipated document last May, entitled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." Sent from the Office of the President and the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology (or NSTC), the report is 58 pages of research, documentation, and recommendations on how the United States government plans to respond to artificial intelligence (AI) moving forward. The report was developed by the NSTC's Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence "which was chartered in May 2016 to foster interagency coordination, to provide technical and policy advice on topics related to AI, and to monitor the development of AI technologies across industry, the research community, and the Federal Government," according to the report. The NSTC hosted five public workshops, as well as putting out a public Request for Information. The information drawn from those six sources informed the eventual recommendations of the committee.

From Chess to Go, board games have been the first frontier of artificial intelligence research for decades. Now, the team at Google's DeepMind wants to take AI to a whole new level in order to beat the online strategy game, StarCraft II. DeepMind announced its decision to partner with StarCraft's creator, Blizzard, at a conference in California. The two groups say that they look forward to programming a computer to react to strategic problems in real time. "DeepMind is on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be told how," wrote DeepMind in a blog post.