About two years ago, Simon Smith started counting the startups trying to bring artificial intelligence to drug development. Smith, an AI startup executive himself, found about 30 of them. Now? His tally is up to 148. Smith's list is incomplete -- some companies are still in stealth mode, and others are hard to classify because they straddle the line between AI and traditional biotech -- but its rapid growth is a clear sign of an industry on the rise. With big checks from venture capitalists and exploratory deals with drug makers, these startups are trying to cut costs and speed up progress in everything from discovering therapeutic targets to enrolling patients in clinical trials.

After a career as a film composer in L.A., Drew Silverstein moved to New York where he co-founded Amper Music. To combine the highest levels of artistry with groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology to empower anyone to create unique music, instantly. In 2017, Amper raised $4 million in seed funding and is now at the cutting edge of the race to crack AI music. Hot Press caught up with the Amper CEO in Rome, after his recent TEDx Talk, to find out what AI means for our future music consumption, how it will affect our approach to songwriting, how to collaborate with a digital version of yourself, the exploitation of intellectual property by Facebook and Google, the probability of robot composers with feelings, and why he predicts AI to be the greatest creative revolution in the history of music. MARK HOGAN: What is Amper? DREW SILVERSTEIN: Amper is an AI composer, performer and producer that creates unique and professional music in a matter of seconds. The music can be tailored to content or it can be standalone. Our mission is to enable anyone around the world to express themselves creatively through music regardless of their background, expertise or access to resources. Because fundamentally, every person is creative – by the fact that we're people. But just being creative doesn't mean we have the ability to express our creativity. Singing in the shower is easy.

The World Artificial Intelligence (AI) Conference kicked off on Thursday in Shanghai, where tech industry leaders like Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Tesla's Elon Musk are mingling with government officials and top scientists to discuss the future of AI. Here are some of the three-day conference's highlights so far: Shanghai plans to sign over 70 deals with leading tech companies and institutions, including a tie-up between the Pudong district government and telecommunications giant Huawei to build a 5G "innovation center." Didi says it could soon put passengers into driverless cars, and that self-driving tech has already cut accidents involving Didi drivers by 15% in the first half of the year. Ma and Musk traded thoughts in a 50-minute conversation -- but couldn't see eye to eye on how much we should fear AI and whether traveling to Mars is a worthy goal. China's Ministry of Science and Technology has added 10 companies including telecommunications giant Huawei and surveillance-technology maker Hikvision to a major national AI development program.

Billionaire Jack Ma, long an outspoken advocate for China's extreme work culture, says that people should be able to work just 12 hours a week with the benefits of artificial intelligence. People could work as little as three days a week, four hours a day with the help of technological advances and educational system reform, the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Thursday. He spoke on-stage with Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. who is building manufacturing facilities in the city. Ma cited electricity as an example of how developments in technology can free up time for leisure. "The power of electricity is that we make people more time so that you can go to karaoke or dancing party in the evening. I think because of artificial intelligence, people will have more time enjoying being human beings."

Suneel Grover is an Advisory Solutions Architect supporting digital intelligence, marketing analytics and multi-channel marketing at SAS. By providing client-facing services for SAS in the areas of predictive analytics, digital analytics, visualization and data-driven integrated marketing, Grover provides technical consulting support in industry verticals such as media, entertainment, hospitality, communications, financial services and sports. In addition to his role at SAS, Grover is an professorial lecturer at The George Washington University (GWU) in Washington DC, teaching in the Masters of Science in Business Analytics graduate program within the School of Business and Decision Science. Grover has a MBA in Marketing Research & Decision Science from The George Washington University (GWU), and a MS in Integrated Marketing Analytics from New York University (NYU).

Instead of a human grabbing the wheel to help a self-driving shuttle in a jam, a university is looking to remote drivers. Oregon-based teleoperations company Designated Driver is working with Texas A&M University's self-driving shuttles in downtown Bryan, Texas, to remotely control the ride on a fixed half-mile route through the town's shopping district. TAMU and the city of Bryan launched the shuttles last year with a safety driver and safety navigator in the front driver and passenger seats. With Designated Driver coming in with its cameras and communication system, only the safety navigator is needed – mostly for checking on passengers and making sure everyone's buckled up. SEE ALSO: This is what it's like to control an autonomous car from miles away Designated Driver CTO Walter Sullivan said in a phone call this week that with the new set-up it's "driving remotely but almost as if they're in the vehicle."

In many ways, artificial intelligence (AI) is already influencing digital marketing in general, and content marketing in particular. But the truth is, there is so much more to come – so many more changes and improvements that AI will surely bring to content marketing. In this blog post, I'm going to explore some of these changes in order to try to understand what the future holds – read on to discover the 3 ways that artificial intelligence will change content marketing. Before I can discuss the effects of artificial intelligence – also known as AI, machine intelligence and in some cases, machine learning - on content marketing, it's important to first understand what exactly artificial intelligence is. So, what is AI, exactly? Techopedia defines it as "an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans.

Blockchain technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) are the most discussed topics in disruptive technologies among over 300 CEOs of leading companies around the world, reports IT Brief on August 27, 2019. Per the report, the revolutionary distributed ledger technology (DLT) as well as AI, and IoT are the three major topics in the area of disruptive technologies that were discussed by CEOs of blue-chip companies around the world, in the first quarter of 2019. The data was reportedly culled from Globaldata, a data and analytics company that uses its CEO Influencer Platform to monitor the topics discussed by over 300 CEOs on Twitter and was able to discover that discussions about the advancements in technology, the pain areas, and new fields of innovation are the key interests of top executives globally. Amandeep Gill, GlobalData's influencer research head while highlighting on the CEOs' level of interest in new technologies reiterated that: "Most CEOs agree that AI will have a huge impact on their organizations by enhancing the extraction of data to augment the adequacy of their activities and upgrade the customer experience." Other areas leading CEOs have shown an interest in include the healthcare industry where the benefits of AI to health care providers and patients have garnered more attention.