I always think that people, especially in the scientific and engineering society, underestimate the importance of simple explanations of difficult concepts, especially concerning people that are new in the field, these books help on making difficult concepts seem not so difficult!

Microsoft launched on Tuesday, February 18, the first artificial intelligence laboratory at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies (ASE), one of the largest economic higher education institutes in Romania. In the new lab, which required an investment of EUR 50,000, the students can find more about machine learning, create and test AI algorithms, store and manage huge volumes of data, or develop applications and platforms themselves, local Republica.ro As of March 3, 11 cloud engineers from Microsoft Romania will hold courses aimed at helping students develop both technical and business innovation skills. The first course to be held in the new cloud lab will focus on the latest innovations in information technology using Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform. The next courses will focus on artificial intelligence, and the ASE students will be encouraged to develop their own projects.

Hive is a full-stack deep learning platform helping to bring companies into the AI era. We take complex visual challenges and build custom machine learning models to solve them. For AI to work, companies need large volumes of high quality training data. We generate this data through Hive Data, our proprietary data labeling platform with over 1,000,000 globally distributed workers, generating millions of high quality pieces of data per day. We then use this training data to build machine learning models for verticals such as Media, Autonomous Driving, Security, and Retail.

At a technical level, artificial intelligence seems to be the future of software. AI is showing remarkable progress on a range of difficult computer science problems, and the job of software developers – who now work with data as much as source code – is changing fundamentally in the process. Many AI companies (and investors) are betting that this relationship will extend beyond just technology – that AI businesses will resemble traditional software companies as well. Based on our experience working with AI companies, we're not so sure. We are huge believers in the power of AI to transform business: We've put our money behind that thesis, and we will continue to invest heavily in both applied AI companies and AI infrastructure. However, we have noticed in many cases that AI companies simply don't have the same economic construction as software businesses. At times, they can even look more like traditional services companies. Anecdotally, we have seen a surprisingly consistent pattern in the financial data of AI companies, with gross margins often in the 50-60% range – well below the 60-80% benchmark for comparable SaaS businesses.

"It's machine learning's job to find patterns based on the data you give it to help you focus on the data points most likely to lead to conversion." Elizabeth Gallagher, chief revenue officer at Lineate talks about how machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the game for ecommerce brands. With the use of predictive analytics, marketers can create personalized marketing campaigns. In this edition of MarTalk Connect, Gallagher shares the key data points marketers should use to provide personalized recommendations. She stresses how data-driven automation and machine learning are strategic assets to enhance the customer journey.

A Japanese medical advice app provider is making a limited time offer of a free app that allows users to seek advice from doctors about the coronavirus. The free service, in Japanese only, is provided by Agree, a company based in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture. It also operates a medical advice app called Leber. Users are asked to send information such as whether they have traveled to any places where COVID-19 has been confirmed or whether they have developed a fever. With about 120 doctors registered for the service, users receive advice in about 30 minutes about the urgency of their condition, such as if they are suspected of having pneumonia and if they should seek advice from a public health center.

That's at least based upon a new Logo-Maker tool just launched in beta by Israel-based freelance marketplace Fiverr. The tool claims to be able to "make a professional logo in just a few clicks," using artificial intelligence, so we put it to the test and used the tool to create some alternate logos for today's biggest brands, including Apple, Google, McDonald's, Uber, and even our own Fast Company logo, just for good measure. The designs are every bit as generic as you might expect. To craft a logo, the user chooses up to three industry keywords from a list to clue the AI into the industry your business is in. There was no "technology" industry option, so let's just say it was a bit difficult to properly describe Apple or Google.

The bouquet of AI, pushed by machine learning, computer vision and the Internet of Things (IoT), is speedily evolving as a significant universal purpose technology. Besides technology companies, it is currently being pursued across sectors ranging from manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, retail, financial services, banking, national defence, and security to public utilities. "We encourage our engineers in India to constantly push the boundaries of AI and machine learning capabilities, with applications from risk, marketing, customer service to autonomous infrastructure...," said Jayanthi Vaidyanathan – Senior Director Human Resources, PayPal India. "We have formulated several Leadership programs to build mid and senior leadership; programs that focus on soft skills of the individuals be it in influencing, brand building, communication, to name a few and also a structured job rotation program to continuously create opportunities for the top talent to diversify and equip themselves with newer skills," she said. The Ministry of Commerce and Industry constituted a task force in 2018 to study'How AI is reshaping jobs in India'.

Artificial intelligence has made big strides recently in understanding language, but it can still suffer from an alarming, and potentially dangerous, kind of algorithmic myopia. Research shows how AI programs that parse and analyze text can be confused and deceived by carefully crafted phrases. A sentence that seems straightforward to you or me may have a strange ability to deceive an AI algorithm. That's a problem as text-mining AI programs increasingly are used to judge job applicants, assess medical claims, or process legal documents. Strategic changes to a handful of words could let fake news evade an AI detector; thwart AI algorithms that hunt for signs of insider trading; or trigger higher payouts from health insurance claims.

Oliver Letwin's strange and somewhat alarming new book begins at midnight on Thursday 31 December 2037. In Swindon – stay with me! – a man called Aameen Patel is working the graveyard shift at Highways England's traffic HQ when his computer screen goes blank, and the room is plunged into darkness. He tries to report these things to his superiors, but can get no signal on his mobile. Looking at the motorway from the viewing window by his desk, he observes, not an orderly stream of traffic, but a dramatic pile-up of crashed cars and lorries – at which point he realises something is seriously amiss. In the Britain of 2037, everything, or almost everything, is controlled by 7G wireless technology, from the national grid to the traffic (not only are cars driverless; a vehicle cannot even join a motorway without logging into an "on-route guidance system"). There is, then, only one possible explanation: the entire 7G network must have gone down. It sounds like I'm describing a novel – and it's true that Aameen Patel will soon be joined by another fictional creation in the form of Bill Donoghue, who works at the Bank of England, and whose job it will be to tell the prime minister that the country is about to pay a heavy price for its cashless economy, given that even essential purchases will not be possible until the network is back up (Bill's mother-in-law is also one of thousands of vulnerable people whose carers will soon be unable to get to them, the batteries in their electric cars having gone flat).