The pharmaceutical business is perhaps the only industry on the planet, where to get the product from idea to market the company needs to spend about a decade, several billion dollars, and there is about 90% chance of failure. It is very different from the IT business, where only the paranoid survive but a business where executives need to plan decades ahead and execute. So when the revolution in artificial intelligence fueled by credible advances in deep learning hit in 2013-2014, the pharmaceutical industry executives got interested but did not immediately jump on the bandwagon. Many pharmaceutical companies started investing heavily in internal data science R&D but without a coordinated strategy it looked more like re-branding exercise with the many heads of data science, digital, and AI in one organization and often in one department. And while some of the pharmaceutical companies invested in AI startups no sizable acquisitions were made to date.

As part of our AI For Growth executive education series, we interview top executives at leading global companies who have successfully applied AI to grow their enterprises. Today, we sit down with Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft. As the CTO of Microsoft, Kevin drives the technology giant's AI strategy and services. In this interview, he focuses on the intersection of AI and IoT and reveals how enterprises have successfully leverage the combination of these two emerging technologies to drive real business value. He also shares insights from his visits to industries ripe for disruption by AI and automation and key learnings for how managers can best prepare their workforces for the future.

Yelp runs hundreds of experiments to ensure new features within its apps and website remain aligned with key business metrics. To launch, manage, and analyze the results of these experiments, the company's employees use Bunsen, a proprietary platform developed just under two years ago. During an interview on Wednesday at VentureBeat's Transform summit, Justin Norman, head of data science at Yelp, explained that Bunsen was born out of necessity. Historically, Yelp engineers themselves were responsible for experimentation, which meant they had to write custom code to compare the performance of different versions of products. As the company's portfolio grew over the years, this piecemeal approach became inefficient and expensive.

The ICML Outstanding Paper awards are given to papers from the current conference that are strong representatives of solid theoretical and empirical work in the field. This year the awards were announced at the special Test of Time session on Monday 13 July. You can read about the winning work here. There were two winners of the outstanding paper award. Learning from unordered sets is a fundamental learning setup, recently attracting increasing attention.

Jim McGowan, is the head of product at ElectrifAi, they specialize in extracting massive amounts of disparate data, transforming chaotic structured and unstructured data into actionable business insights. What is it that attracted you to the world of machine learning and AI? I first encountered Machine Learning while earning a doctorate for work in cognitive science. AI systems largely consisted of distilling an expert's experience down to a flow chart. This seemed intuitively to work, but the systems quickly grew too complex and weren't living up to their promise.

All times below are given in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). All plenary sessions will be recorded and made freely available on youtube. For those that cannot join the talks live, they can watch them the next day and join a live Q&A session with the speakers on the following day. This concerns the Test of Time talk (ToT), the three Early Career Award talks (EC1-3), and the Keynote talk.

Technology and artificial intelligence which were previously seen as a threat are now part of the solution to problems created by the coronavirus pandemic, according to technology analyst Josep Lluís Micó. La revolución digital en la época del coronavirus in its original Spanish title), tells Efe that digital change has been accelerated exponentially by Covid-19, which has posed a major challenge for science, shaken the most advanced economies and turned everyone's lives upside down. QUESTION: What do you think about the European Union's attitude towards AI before the pandemic? It was planning to limit its activity in areas such as health. Do you think that scenario will be affected by the pandemic?

Vecna Robotics, the autonomous mobile robot and workflow orchestration company, announced it has been recognized as the recipient of three industry accolades. The company has been inducted into the Spring 2020 MIT STEX25 startup accelerator cohort, named an RBR50 Robotics Innovations Award winner by Robotics Business Review and recognized by Supply & Demand Chain Executive as one of the 100 Top Supply Chain Projects of 2020 for its work with Milton CAT. These industry awards highlight the most innovative U.S. startups, leading robotics organizations and the most successful real-world supply chain use-cases. "This has been a historic year for Vecna Robotics," said Daniel Theobald, founder and CEO, Vecna Robotics. "We kicked off 2020 with a strong Series B financing round that helped accelerate our vision and product strategy that we'll continue executing on for the remainder of the year and beyond. These awards validate the commitment we've made to building world-class robotic platforms and orchestration software that helps businesses streamline their logistics operations. A special thank you to each organization for their recognition, and to the Vecna Robotics team for their hard work and dedication."

In the future, we won't be discovering new drugs or cures to cancer -- they will be designed by computers. And that process of bioengineering has only become more urgent as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the need to find a solution fast. Vijay Pande, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz's biotech fund, has been investing at the intersection of health care, biology and computer science for the last five years. Coronavirus has amplified the need for this kind of technology, but the pandemic also played a more important role: shifting the mindset of patients and doctors alike. People have become more attuned to what they need to do to stay healthy, while doctors are more open trying to new technologies and techniques, Pande told Protocol.

A battery pioneer has invented a new kind of battery that is 90 per cent cheaper to produce than standard lithium-ion batteries, and potentially much safer. Hideaki Horie – who has worked on battery technology since 1990 and led Nissan's development of the Leaf electric car – discovered a way to replace the batteries basic components in order to speed up and simplify the manufacturing process. "The problem with making lithium batteries now is that it's device manufacturing, like semiconductors," Mr Horie told The Japan Times. "Our goal is to make it more like steel production." Manufacturing the new batteries is significantly simplified by replacing the metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes typically found within lithium-ion units with a resin construction.