The definition of civility typically revolves around the rules, mores and assumptions for how we deal with each other. The previous talks in this series have focused on that kind of civility in a variety of human activities including sports, education, business and law enforcement. But I'm going to be talking about something that is not human--the increasingly clever computing technology that surrounds us. And how we think about, relate to and interact with this technology. For the title of this talk, I chose the most evocative term, artificial intelligence, or AI for short. It was "cooked up," as its author the mathematician John McCarthy once told me, for a grant proposal he wrote in 1955. He was seeking funds for a conference the following summer at Dartmouth College. It was a brainy marketing pitch.

CrowdFlower is announcing that it has raised 10 million in Series D funding. The round was led by Microsoft, with participation from Canvas Ventures and Trinity Ventures. The San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of 38 million, according to CrunchBase. CrowdFlower launched at the TechCrunch50 conference back in 2009, billing itself "labor as a service" tool using platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to help businesses tap a remote, crowdsourced workforce for mundane tasks like photo moderation. Founder and CEO Lukas Biewald (who I've known and been friendly with since college) said that the company's current focus is on a new artificial intelligence product.

The insurance company's policy is basically a standard agreement with four additional areas of coverage for autonomous vehicles. The first covers owners if they are involved in an incident that is the result of an update or security patch not being applied with 24 hours of it becoming available, while another will indemnify a policyholder if those systems then fail altogether. Should a car fail to relinquish control in the event of a manual override or the car gets hacked, Adrian Flux says it will cover that too. Right now, the policy is designed for people who already utilize driverless features in their existing car, things like automatic braking or assistive lane changing. The company also notes that it would also cover drivers utilising Autopilot in the Tesla Model 3.

Lenovo recently released a new combination desktop program/Windows Store app that helps add even more power to Cortana on Windows 10 PCs. Lenovo's Reachit lets you take Cortana into places it's never been before by connecting the digital assistant to your files within the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive. Lenovo released Reachit in beta form in 2015, but now it's available for anyone to use. First, you install the Windows Store version of Reachit. Once you've done that, you'll be prompted to install a desktop program as well.

This project aims at a minimal benchmark for scalability, speed and accuracy of commonly used implementations of a few machine learning algorithms. The target of this study is binary classification with numeric and categorical inputs (of limited cardinality i.e. not very sparse) and no missing data, perhaps the most common problem in business applications (e.g. If the input matrix is of n x p, n is varied as 10K, 100K, 1M, 10M, while p is 1K (after expanding the categoricals into dummy variables/one-hot encoding). This particular type of data structure/size (the largest) stems from this author's interest in some particular business applications. If your software tool of choice is not here, your can benchmark it with minimal work with the following instructions.)

There's a lot of sci-fi-level buzz lately about smart machines and software bots that will use big data and the Internet of things to become autonomous actors, such as to schedule your personal tasks, drive your car or a delivery truck, manage your finances, ensure compliance with and adjust your medical activities, build and perhaps even design cars and smartphones, and of course connect you to the products and services that it decides you should use. But there's another path that gets much less attention: the real world. It too uses AI, analytics, big data, and the Internet of things (aka the industrial Internet in this context), though not in the same manner. Whether you're looking to choose a next-frontier career path or simply understand what's going on in technology, it's important to note the differences. A recent conversation with Colin Parris, the chief scientist at manufacturing giant General Electric, crystalized in my mind the different paths that the combination of machine learning, big data, and IoT are on.

In a promotional video for Amazon's Echo virtual assistant device, a young girl no older than 12 asks excitedly: "Is it for me?". The voice-controlled speaker can search the web for information, answer questions and even tell kids' jokes. An investigation by the Guardian has found that despite Amazon marketing the Echo to families with young children, the device is likely to contravene the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), set up to regulate the collection and use of personal information from anyone younger than 13. Along with Google, Apple and others promoting voice-activated artificial intelligence systems to young children, the company could now face multimillion-dollar fines. "This is part of the initial wave of marketing to children using the internet of things," says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group that helped write the law.

Artificial Intelligence has permeated almost every industry, either in word or deed, in the last couple of years. From financial institutions to ride-hailing services such as Uber, companies are clambering over one another to take advantage of this technology to stay ahead of the competition. However, one area which Artificial Intelligence has been unable to find a platform in, until very recently, has been the legal sector. There is a belief that the legal sector, particularly when it comes to the courtroom environment, is reserved exclusively for sharp-suited lawyers, who have trained for years to be able to build and present a case in order to persuade a jury of their peers of the validity of their argument. However, the tide might now be turning.

Almost 12 months after releasing the public preview of Spark for Azure HDInsight Microsoft has announced general availability of the proposition to the industry, as well as extending Cortana's offering to the Xbox. Making the announcement on the Azure blog, Oliver Chiu, Product Marketing Manager for Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing, outlined the improvements made on the offering as well as the company's efforts to make big data easy and more approachable. The company claims the Hadoop and Spark cloud service is now an enterprise-ready solution which is fully managed, secured, and highly available. "Since we announced the public preview, Spark for HDInsight has gained rapid adoption and is now 50% of all new HDInsight clusters deployed," said Chiu. "With GA (General Availability), we are revealing improvements we've made to the service to make Spark hardened for the enterprise and easy for your users. This includes improvements to the availability, scalability, and productivity of our managed Spark service."

Whether you believe that the rise of artificial intelligence heralds the fourth industrial revolution or not, you certainly can't deny that it's set to have a major impact on the way we do business. If we are to harness all that potential for the common good, then we need to create strategies that will enable us to benefit while minimizing the risks. One area where AI could have a profound impact is security. The average cost of a data breach is 3.8 million according to the 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study from the Ponemon Institute. No wonder, then, that the enterprise has been heavily investing in cybersecurity.