Retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee recently went up against ALPHA, an artificial intelligence developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate. In fact, all the other AI's that the Air Force Research Lab had in their possession also lost to ALPHA…and so did all of the other human experts who tried their skills against ALPHA's superior algorithms. And did we mention ALPHA achieves superiority while running on a 35 Raspberry Pi? Saying that Lee is experienced when it comes to aerial combat is a remarkable understatement. He is an instructor who has trained with thousands of U.S. Air Force pilots. he is also an Air Battle Manager who has been fighting against AI opponents in air combat simulations since the 1980s. Yet, he was not successful in winning against ALPHA.

During the recent Consumer Goods Forum global summit here in Cape Town, I had the opportunity to briefly chat with Vivienne about some of the issues confronting the digital disruption of this industry sector. [The original transcript has been edited for clarity and space.] Named one of 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine, Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur. She co-founded Socos, where machine learning and cognitive neuroscience combine to maximize students' life outcomes. Vivienne is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where she pursues her research in neuroprosthetics. In her free time, Vivienne has developed a predictive model of diabetes to better manage the glucose levels of her diabetic son and systems to predict manic episodes in bipolar suffers. She sits on the boards of StartOut, The Palm Center, Emozia, and the Bay Area Rainbow Daycamp, and is an advisor to Credit Suisse, Cornerstone Capital, and BayesImpact. Dr. Ming also speaks frequently on issues of LGBT inclusion and gender in technology. Every once in a while I have the opportunity to discuss wide-ranging topics with an intellect that stimulates, is passionate and really cares about the bigger picture. Those opportunities are more rare than one would think. Although set in a somewhat unexpected venue (the elite innards of consumer capitalism) her observations on the inescapable disruption that the new wave of modern technologies are prescient and thoughtful. Ed: In a continent where there is a large focus on putting people to work, how do you see the challenges and disruptions resulting from AI, robotics, IoT, VR and other technologies playing out? These technologies, as did other disruptive technologies before them, tend to replace human workers with machine processes. Vivienne: There is almost no domain in which artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation will not have a profound and positive impact. Medicine, farming, transportation, etc. will all benefit. There will be a huge impact on human potential, and human work will change. I think this is inevitable, that we are well on the way to this AI-enabled future.

Frances O'Connor expected questions about what it was like to work with Steven Spielberg. And perhaps queries about exactly how Spielberg managed to take over his good friend Stanley Kubrick's dream project, A.I. Artificial Intelligence – writing and shooting in less than two years a dark, futuristic fairy tale that Kubrick had not been able to pull together in two decades. What the 31-year-old Australian actress didn't expect were tirades from reporters about the way her A.I. character, Monica Swinton, discards her robotic surrogate son, David (Haley Joel Osment). Monica can't handle David's intense form of programmed love – and she'd rather abandon him to wander a cruel future world than see him destroyed by his manufacturer, the fate of all returned robot merchandise in A.I.'s harsh universe. The resulting Sophie's Choice/Medea dilemma all but short-circuited one female TV journalist, who appeared before O'Connor trembling with indignation.

Israeli machine-learning radiology firm Zebra Medical Vision said today it raised 12 million to support the development of imaging algorithms being designed for automatic reading and diagnosis of medical imaging data. The round was led by InterMountain Healthcare, and joined by existing investors, Zebra Medical Vision said. As part of its investment, InterMountain Healthcare plans to work with Zebra to accelerate its development. "We are privileged that 1 of the top healthcare systems in the U.S. has placed such confidence in our team and our platform. In an environment where computing power and machine learning frameworks are becoming a commodity, the ability to quickly and efficiently curate large quantities of data from a world class integrated healthcare provider can make the difference between simplistic tools and insights that can truly add clinical value and positively impact patient care," CEO Elad Benjamin said in a prepared statement.

Is AI ready for primetime? In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, he stated that machine learning showed great promise for cybersecurity, but that the necessary technology was probably five years out. If machine learning is currently so successful in other areas of society, why isn't it ready for cybersecurity? Machine learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence, a field of computer science that started in 1958 when Marvin Minsky founded the Artificial Intelligence lab. Everyone, including DARPA, was pouring money into it.

Computers Don't Know When You Are Happy--Apple Is Adding a Previously Unseen Dimension To Your Device From the moment you are born, assuming normal eyesight, we open our eyes and fixate on the 43 muscles that control 1000s of nuances of facial expressions and emotion intent in the face of our parents. They inform a reaction to how to interpret the world, an extended sensor to help learn the basic emotions and reactions to the world around us. "Emotient is the leading authority on facial expression recognition and analysis technologies that are enabling a future of emotion aware computing." In the Spring of 2013 a team of scientists and researchers at the Machine Perception Lab at University of California, San Diego, was forming the technology and the basic elements of what was to become Emotient. The founding team were widely regarded as spearheading the use of machine learning for facial expression analysis with over 20 years of experience pioneering machine learning and computer vision technology for facial behavior analysis. The team has published hundreds of peer reviewed scientific publications, starting in 1995, which have been cited by thousands of other researchers in the field. Building around the work of Paul Ekman, Ph.D.[1] a pioneer in the study of emotions and facial expressions, and a professor emeritus of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California Medical School (UCSF) where he has been active for 32 years, Emotient used AI to machine learn his ground breaking research in micro-emotions.

Justine Cassell has taken her virtual assistant Sara on a road trip. They're in Tianjin, China, where Carnegie Mellon University's associate dean of technology strategy and impact traveled to offer a glimpse of tomorrow at this week's Annual Meeting of New Champions. Sara, for "socially aware robot assistant," has spent the past several days greeting hundreds of people coming to the event, hosted by the World Economic Forum, at a station showcasing the office of the future. A life-size face and torso on a big-screen TV, Sara served as the front end to the event app. That presentation might make you think of Max Headroom, the stuttering AI character from the 1980s show.

Anki, a company that made a splash with AI-controlled Overdrive toy racing cars in 2015, now has a follow-up product called Cozmo. It's a palm-size robot that will hit home with fans of the film Wall-E. And, much like Wall-E, Cozmo's expressiveness could be the magic that makes it feel like part of the family. Anki was known for the artificial intelligence that powered its smart (toy) cars, and now gives that AI a cuddly personality. Cozmo can recognize and remember your face and your name, making it feel almost like a pet dog.

A factory in China replaced 60,000 of its human workers with robots. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes that artificial intelligence must "respect human autonomy," but Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana told Bloomberg BNA that this robot workforce is "coming faster than anybody realizes." With robots primed to swoop in and take about 5 million jobs by 2020, it's about damn time we braced ourselves for our new workforce. A draft report from the European Parliament suggested a few tips on how us mere humans can get ready for the ever-increasing automated workforce, CNN reported. In the event that "advanced robots" begin to displace us in "large numbers," CNN reported, the European Parliament report suggests that the European Commission make the owners of the aforementioned roboworkers pay taxes or give to Social Security.

MedyMatch Technology, a startup from Israel that specializes in medical imaging analysis for emergency medicine, has its first U.S. hospital partner. Capital Health, a two-hospital system in New Jersey, will deploy MedyMatch's artificial intelligence-based analytics in the emergency department and help the Tel Aviv-based vendor develop a clinical decision support tool for stroke care. To accomplish the latter, Capital Health, based in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, has agreed to provide MedyMatch with anonymized data from patients, the organizations said Monday. "The data Capital Health will provide will allow us to move closer to providing this decision support tool which can help ensure appropriate diagnosis, critical for treatment," MedyMatch Chairman and CEO Gene Saragnese said in a prepared statement. Saragnese was CEO of Philips Imaging before joining the startup a year ago.