Competition between humans and artificial intelligence (A.I.) usually plays out in research papers. Occasionally, there's a public performance of a game of chess or Go in front of a staid crowd. Last month in Vancouver, British Columbia, however, I saw something entirely different. The Canadian city was playing host to The International, an annual tournament for the video game Dota 2 boasting a $25 million prize pool -- the largest in esports history. The event was raucous, tribal.

The Project is a New Zealand current affairs television program that produced a news segment on May 10, 2019 exploring the findings of a recent scientific paper, "Deep learning enables robust assessment and selection of human blastocysts after in vitro fertilization," in NPJ Digital Medicine by EIPM colleagues including Drs. The news segment aired during their "Fertility Week" programming, press play below to view:

Not all bubbles have negative consequences for the economy. An AI bubble is more likely to generate value than wreak havoc. With investments in artificial intelligence rising rapidly, especially in China and the United States, two questions arise: Are we heading toward an AI bubble? And if so, how bad would it be if the bubble were to burst? Having studied AI intensely for the past two years, our best guess to the first question is, yes, today's fascination with all things AI has most of the trappings of a financial bubble.

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. ICML is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of machine learning used in closely related areas like artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, and robotics. ICML is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. Between June 9 and June 15, 2019, at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center in Long Beach, California, ICML will host over 8,000 participants.

The world of business has a unhealthy attraction to chaos theory. Popular culture has driven companies and large cohorts of management into adopting chaos as their modus operandi. Amateur managers often resort to tactical game theory learnt as part of their management courses to compensate for lack of true insights into their workforce. This has created a crisis in team management for a workforce that was already struggling with bias, secrecy and general lack of trust. Will AI save us from bad management?

Ford Motor Company, along with General Motors, Toyota and Volkswagen, may have started out as automotive manufacturers, but they now refer to themselves as "mobility service" companies. Ford believes "freedom of movement drives human progress." While it is now a global company, Ford started out more than 100 years ago in Dearborn, Michigan. The company revolutionized manufacturing by introducing the moving assembly line and made car ownership possible for everyday folks and not just the wealthy. Today, the company focuses on technology first and uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in many ways from connected car solutions to the development of autonomous vehicles.

During his closing remarks at the I/O 2019 keynote last week, Jeff Dean, Google AI's lead, noted that the company is looking at "AI that can work across disciplines," suggesting the Silicon Valley giant may soon pursue artificial general intelligence, a technology that eventually could match or exceed human intellect. In today's pop culture, machines with artificial general intelligence (AGI) are typically portrayed as walking, talking human analogs replete with personalities -- from the Terminator's murderous intent to Vision's noble heroism. In reality, self-aware robots are a long way off. Nathan Michael, associate research professor and the director of the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that generalized AI systems will grow out from today's single-purpose "narrow" AIs. "General AI is representative of this concept of bringing together many different kinds of specialized AI," he explained. AGI isn't so much a singular standalone system -- it's no digital Athena bursting forth from Zeus' forehead -- but rather a threshold of capability derived from a collection of narrow AI's working together, Michael said.

Say hello to Joe Rogan: podcaster, entertainer of problematic views, and man who believes that feeding his all chimp hockey team a diet of bone broth and elk meat will give them the power to rip your balls off. Or, at least that's what the unaware listener might believe after listening to an entirely AI-generated clip of the popular podcaster. Unlike Rogan's typical totally coherent rants, this one is a total fabrication. "The replica of Rogan's voice the team created was produced using a text-to-speech deep learning system they developed called RealTalk," explained the researchers behind the clip in a blog post, "which generates life-like speech using only text inputs." This obviously calls to mind deepfakes, the video editing tech that can convincingly edit videos to make it look like people did or said things they in fact did not.

ObEN is an artificial intelligence company that is building a decentralized AI platform for Personal AI (PAI), intelligent 3D avatars that look, sound, and behave like the individual user. Deployed on the Project PAI blockchain, ObEN's technology enables users to create, use, and manage their own PAI on a secure, decentralized platform - enabling never before possible social and virtual interactions. Founded in 2014, ObEN is a K11, Tencent, Softbank Ventures Korea and HTC Vive X portfolio company and is located at Idealab in Pasadena, California.

Rapid technological advances have created opportunities for smaller companies to serve customers around the world and effectively compete with larger companies for new customers. These smaller companies are rapidly going global, deploying a variety of technology-enabled solutions such as automated call centers, customer service bots, and digital marketing intelligence. But these advances, designed to facilitate customer interaction and service in new ways, can present a danger. Companies that embrace the various forms of new customer-focused technology risk losing a personal connection with their customers and a nuanced understanding of their needs. When it comes to understanding how your company can better serve customers, email surveys are no substitute for real human contact.