What can deep learning do?

Tesla founder Elon Musk believes he can rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid. Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during a news conference at the Adelaide Oval in Adelaide, Australia on July 7, 2017. Tesla will partner with French renewable energy developer Neoen to build the world's biggest Lithium IIon Battery, a 100MW battery that will be built in James Town, the South Australian government announced on the day. SAN FRANCISCO -- Elon Musk has so many irons in the fire, you can't see the fire. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted Friday that he is delaying the unveiling of a self-driving truck in order to focus his attention on smoothing out Model 3 production issues and helping devastated Puerto Rico switch over to solar power. "Tesla Semi unveil now Nov 16," Musk tweeted, pushing it back around three weeks from the original Oct. 26 event.

One of the biggest problems we face today is the impact we're having on the natural world. Covering 70% of our planet we still know so little about our oceans and how we can protect them from further destruction. We can see the devastation around us like deforestation and mass urbanisation etc., but the destruction of the oceans is so easily ignored as it remains largely unseen beneath the waves. It's so vital to keep our oceans healthy; they are home to millions of species of plant and animal, provide food, financial resources, and even produce half of the oxygen we breathe. Climate change and coral bleaching, pollution, and over fishing are just a few issues that need urgent attention in order to save our oceans.

Industry leaders are required to keep up with change. In regulated industries like the life sciences, ensuring the safety of all products--and therefore, the public--is a main priority. Change is the necessary component driving continuous improvement. Organizational leaders must have the necessary tools to keep up with changes to products, processes, or the market. The medical device industry has noticed this factor and uses it to save lives.

Melbourne was the final stop on this year's Salesforce Basecamp tour, and the final keynote of the event was given by Shaun Paga from Soul Machines, a New Zealand company specialising in building what they call "Artificial Humans". These are digital avatars with very detailed faces that respond to the emotional cues of the person they're talking to. Soul Machines was founded by Dr. Mark Sagar, who started out modelling body parts for medicine, then went into CGI, and has earned himself two Academy Awards for his work on Avatar and King Kong. After leaving the movie industry, Sagar set himself the task of building Artificial Humans, with the aim of radically advancing the interface between humans and computers. We've known for years that babies faces and behaviours have evolved to maximise valuable interactions with adults.

As both businesses and society today continue to embrace digitisation at an uncontrollable rate; fighting financial crime, money laundering and the funding of criminal activity are all growing in importance. The global phenomenon of digitisation has led to an increase in wire banking, thus raising pressure on banks and financial institutions to monitor and detect suspicious activity to prevent it coming to fruition. It is therefore crucial that the banking system today adopts the latest tools for a mature digital service, which include self-learning capabilities that are able to quickly adapt to the ever-changing banking environment. The recent narrative has been primarily focused on regulators ramping up demands for greater scrutiny of transaction monitoring, as well as threatening to impose hefty fines on non-compliant banks. In Australia, for example,The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that the Commonwealth Bank has come under extensive scrutiny following an internal review of the bank's breach of global anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism laws, with legal proceedings now being levelled against it.

– Digital wallets are becoming the new way to pay. Most interesting factor here is to know companies who are most successful in this field actually came out of payment industry with no prior knowledge or payment intelligence but rather came with Artificial Intelligence. How to pay and where to pay, when to pay etc. Disrupted the most unknown and unsecured payment methods like contactless payment systems. Does any one ask any question from these ventures weather their suggested methods are safer, secured or how much vulnerable than chip-enabled plastic cards, and what it might take for contactless systems to be used as widely as cash. How the data or sensitive data of a customer been treated and used in their systems.

Nuance Nina named Best Intelligent Assistant Innovation during September 27 AIconics Awards ceremony at The AI Summit, the world's largest conference to showcase AI solutions that are transforming organizations. The AIconics Awards are the only independently-judged awards that celebrate AI for businesses and Nuance Nina was selected as part of a competitive analysis of more than 300 entries. Nuance Nina and customers win Intelligent Assistant Awards during September 18 ceremony at the Opus Research IA Conference. Nuance was honored alongside customers FedEx and IP Australia, with partner Datacom, for delivering notable customer experiences through natural language understanding, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The Opus Research Intelligent Assistant Awards recognize leading brands who are utilizing virtual assistants to redefine digital commerce and customer care.

My colleagues and I had the privilege of attending Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) Analyst Day event held in Boston on September 21, 2017. There were several interesting and informative presentations covering topics such as the concept of Business 4.0 and how TCS is deploying Digital, deep domain expertise and its deep and vast portfolio of services and solutions to provide its customers with exponential value through mass customization, leveraging ecosystems to help its customers embrace and manage risk while maximizing business outcomes. As one of the ARC Analysts focused on upstream and midstream oil & gas it was great to learn more about how TCS is leveraging'cognitive automation' through its solutions such as Ignio, an product that provides some very powerful horsepower through its self-learning capability, empowered by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), that can move customers from predictive maintenance to prescriptive maintenance, thereby extending the life (and availability) of an asset such as a pump or compressor and also optimizing that asset's performance and the process for which it is being utilized. I know first-hand that TCS is successfully helping customers in Australia with pump optimization and increasing pump availability as well as, more importantly, helping to increase the customer's gas processing operations by saving over 100-man days per year, reducing pump downtime and increasing production. Harrick Vin, Global Head of Digitate, explained that he envisions advanced analytics platforms such as Ignio as being technology being augmented by people and one that is capable of learning over time.

Elon Musk the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has an interesting way of looking at both the world and the universe. Just this Friday Musk shared his plan to use a SpaceX rocket to transport people to points around the world in just 30 minutes. Maybe what he says is crazy. But no matter what stance you take on Musk's ideas, it's worth hearing them out. Below are 14 of Musk's craziest views on everything from Mars to artificial intelligence.