For the IT sector, the concept of digital transformation represents a time for evolution, revolution and opportunity, according to Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) president Robert Watson. The new president for the technology association made the statements at last week's IDC Directions and CanadianCIO Symposium in Toronto. The tech trends event was co-hosted by ITWC and IDC with support from ITAC. Notable sessions included the ITWC-moderated Digital Transformation panel -- which featured veteran CIOs discussing the digital transformation opportunities and challenges-- and IDC Canada's Nigel Wallis outlining why Canadian business models should shift to reap IoT rewards. Digital transformation refers to the changes associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society; the overarching event theme focused on digital transformation as more than mere buzzword, but as process that tech leaders and organizations should already be adopting.

The problem is that if robot labor is cheaper and more reliable than human labor, why bother with the latter? The payback period for industrial robots (the time it takes for their extra costs to be paid off) is falling sharply. For a welding robot to be used in a Chinese factory, for example, the period has fallen from 5.3 years in 2010, to 1.7 years in 2015, say analysts from Citi. By 2017, they say it could be as low as 1.3 years. And more robots in factories equals fewer jobs for humans.

Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook, Intel, and Salesforce are all hustling to either invest in new artificial intelligence technology or acquire it outright both in New York and in other hubs across the USA. Lumped into this category are a variety of innovations, including image processing, natural language, machine learning and predictive APIs (application program interface). To find out how much activity has been going on within the AI sector in Silicon Alley, the New York Business Journal tapped PitchBook for help. PitchBook expects that as more AI technology gets integrated into different categories -- business intelligence, e-commerce, and healthcare -- the number of deals this year will surpass 2015 totals, both in terms of volume and capital invested (see the infographic above). According to previous coverage, a wide majority of deals across the U.S. (between 2010 to 2015) were seed stage, accounting for 50 percent of overall activity in 2015.

Artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, cognitive computing -- whatever you want to call machines that are capable of understanding and acting upon their environment -- is no longer solely the purview of highly credentialed lab directors and deep-thinking computer scientists. It has entered mainstream consciousness, and the public expects IT to play a leadership role as machine learning enters our workplaces, our living spaces and our lives. Chances are that you are not. Most executives, in the opinion of New York Times technology columnist John Markoff, are "ill prepared for this new world in the making." People have been thinking about automated work forever.

Computing giant IBM has always had big plans for its brainy thinking computer named Watson. Since Watson beat human players at the TV game show "Jeopardy" in 2011, the company has given Watson a varied series of job assignments: Cancer researcher, fitness coach, customer service rep. It has even learned Japanese, designed dresses and provided the brain for a talking toy dinosaur. Now Big Blue says it will train Watson to fight cybercrime. The company says its security division will team up with a group of eight universities to teach the cloud-based computer, programmed to learn subjects in a manner similar to the human brain, on the complicated subject of cyber security.

The White House is going to spend the summer researching how the government should deal with artificial intelligence. When you consider that we've got drones flying everywhere, robots automating jobs out of existence, and self-driving cars right around the corner, it's about time. The administration is pitching its new AI research program as an "interagency working group" that will "learn more about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence," which is a welcome move--researchers in the field have been calling for a "Federal Robotics Commission" for the last couple years, and this at least looks like a small step toward that future. With companies like Google, Uber, and Tesla getting close to wanting to put self-driving cars on the road, drone companies hoping to begin to automate the devices, and AI-driven software taking jobs left and right, it's clear AI is going to have a significant impact on our society. AI is going to continue to make everything a lot more seamless, which is great, but we're also probably going to have to start thinking about things like a basic income for people whose jobs are automated away.

There are some human attributes robots could never replace - or at least that's what you might hope. But one university has brought that into question by replacing one of their teaching assistants with a machine. Student Tyson Bailey began to wonder if Jill was a computer and posted his suspicions on Piazza. 'We were taking an AI course, so I had to imagine that it was possible there might be an AI lurking around,' said Bailey, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 'Then again, I asked Dr. Goel if he was a computer in one of my first email interactions with him.

Amazon's digital assistant, the Echo, next to a can of Pringles potato chips, whose size it is often compared to. SAN FRANCISCO -- The smartphone's grip over our every moment may be slowly loosening as digital assistants leap into speakers and other devices that bring the Internet into the public sphere. So far, the field belongs to Amazon's Echo and its voice-activated assistant Alexa. An early hit since it became widely available a year ago, it is still in only a sliver of homes. But its interactions, distinctly different from smartphone use, have caused academics to take notice.

Traditionally, materials scientists have used a combination of trial-and-error and intuition to discover and perfect new materials with advantageous properties. Increasing chemical complexities make this strategy prohibitively time-consuming. To speed up the process, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory attempted to marry machine learning with targeted experiments. The team's "informatics-based adaptive design strategy" successfully accelerated the materials discovery process. "What we've done is show that, starting with a relatively small data set of well-controlled experiments, it is possible to iteratively guide subsequent experiments toward finding the material with the desired target," Turab Lookman, a physicist and materials scientist at Los Alamos, said in a news release.

Troparé has developed the ability for its clients to discover unbiased patterns, insights, and trends in their data; perform thorough analysis; and use this information to make accurate, micro-targeted predictions, all without having to write a single line of code. As a result, marketing and sales departments can attract, retain, and grow their most profitable customers and maximize campaign spending, without having to rely on IT. "Data has become the new life-line of modern day marketing. However, unless marketing departments have the tools to unify data and perform correct analysis on a large scale, simply having enormous amounts of data is useless without tremendous reliance on IT," said Greg Carpenter, CEO of Troparé. The second platform addition, (fuzzy) data matching & appending, is developed as an extension to the industry's widely-acknowledged struggle of data integration. The solution allows customers to easily combine, match, and append their own data with second and/or third party data derived from disparate sources.