They say the best investors know how an event in one corner of the market impacts a company in another. New mining laws in Colorado require thousands of workers to wear a certain type of hardhat,...

In the back kitchen of Mountain View's newest pizzeria, Marta works tirelessly, spreading marinara sauce on uncooked pies. She doesn't complain, takes no breaks, and has never needed a sick day. Marta is one of two robots working at Zume Pizza, a secretive food delivery startup trying to make a more profitable pizza through machines. It's also created special delivery trucks that will finish cooking pizzas during the journey to hungry customers if approved by the Santa Clara County Department of Environmental Health. Right now Zume is only feeding people in Mountain View, California, but it has ambitions to dominate the 9.7 billion pizza delivery industry.

Pathologists still do the bulk of their diagnosis of metastatic cancer cells in tissue and lymph nodes by hand, putting slides under a microscope and looking for signature irregularities they're trained to see. Recent advances in computer technology, however, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), have begun to teach machines to do this kind of detection with growing rates of improvement. Now, a research team from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School have developed a form of AI that can interpret these pathology images with accuracy levels of 92.5 percent. Moreover, when the two are used in combination, the detection rate approaches 100 percent (approximately 99.5 percent). Their AI method is a form of deep learning, in which the system attempts to replicate the activity of the human neocortex through artificial neural networks.

Like many people, I start most mornings digging myself out of an inbox that often feels like more trouble than it's worth thanks to the seemingly infinite amount of newsletters I receive. And although these newsletters cross verticals as varied as marketing, technology, advertising and the agency world, lately each one has a headline that includes artificial intelligence. Not surprisingly, all of us are curious to know how this growing field of technology is going to infiltrate our professional and personal lives. Across every industry, people are afraid that AI is going to steal jobs. As a marketer I don't think we have any urgent concerns over job security.

In a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a computing system developed by Google researchers in Great Britain has beaten a top human player at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern contest of strategy and intuition that has bedeviled AI experts for decades. Machines have topped the best humans at most games held up as measures of human intellect, including chess, Scrabble, Othello, even Jeopardy!. But with Go--a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess--human grandmasters have maintained an edge over even the most agile computing systems. Earlier this month, top AI experts outside of Google questioned whether a breakthrough could occur anytime soon, and as recently as last year, many believed another decade would pass before a machine could beat the top humans. But Google has done just that.

This post is authored by Sudarshan Raghunathan, Principal Development Lead for modules in the Microsoft Azure ML Studio team based in Cambridge, MA. In his blog post last month, John Langford wrote about the open source Vowpal Wabbit (VW) machine learning (ML) system. He highlighted some of the main advantages of VW, e.g. its performance and ability to handle large sparse datasets, which make it particularly popular both within and outside Microsoft for applications such as sentiment analysis and recommendation systems. When we initially released the public preview of Azure ML in July this year, we exposed a small subset of VW functionality as part of our Feature Hashing module. The latter transforms datasets with text features into binary using the feature hashing algorithm (Murmur hash) implemented in VW.

The fatal crash of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S in Autopilot mode has turned up pressure on auto industry executives and regulators to ensure that automated driving technology is deployed safely. The first such known accident, which occurred in Florida in May, has highlighted tensions surrounding efforts to turn over responsibility for braking, steering and driving judgements to machines. It may delay the US government's plan to outline guidelines for self-driving cars this month. The cause of the Model S crash is still under investigation by federal and Florida state authorities, which are looking into whether the driver was distracted before his 2015 Model S went under a truck trailer. Shares of Tesla and Mobileye NV, the maker of the camera vision system used in the Model S, rose on July 1 as analysts said the accident was likely a short-term setback.

The End of Talent Management as We Know It.

I've just run my second briefing on intelligent assistance. Much happened in the few months between sessions. This time, the second half of the day was dominated with stories about bots and their use cases on messaging platforms. It also included the amazing things now possible via automated voice which Amazon's Alexa Challenge exemplifies. Meanwhile IBM's Watson continues its conquest of carbon life forms with the trashing of an extraordinarily talented Go grand master.

Artificial Intelligence - is it something that's closer to reality than we realize? The answer is most certainly yes. Up until now AI has been the stuff of science fiction, but that's not going to be the case for much longer. Megacorporation Google is stepping in to bring on the future with its moves towards creating AI. SEO Leads To More Than Search Rankings Google is creating the foundation for AI by enticing companies to create high quality content to rank high in SEO.