The Microsoft Build 2017 conference starts tomorrow in Seattle! You can watch the conference live starting at 8:00AM Pacific Time and get the scoop. Only a few days to go before we reach zero bugs. Great progress has been made, but we are still 163 bugs away from zero. In February we took a camera crew to the Microsoft Alumni Network's big .NET 15th birthday bash and caught up with team members past and present.

How does one become a hacker, neuroscientist, pilot, radio host and storyteller? "A random sequence of events with no planning, that you try to weave into a story in hindsight." Thus does neuroscientist and Kellogg School of Management Marketing professor Moran Cerf describe his life's path. It's an observation that many successful people will appreciate. Rather than strategy driving implementation, strategy often emerges from actions, experiments and unexpected events -- and if we're smart, a lot of awareness and learning along the way.

The girls were dancing on a neon tank, wearing sequined bikinis lit up by red and green laser light. A strobing fixed-wing aircraft passed overhead like the acid-trip kissing cousin of a Mitsubishi A6M Zero, with more sequined women dangling from it, trapeze-style. Flashing robots had preceded them -- wheeling through the room, pumping their fists at the crowd -- while the audience, seated on tiers of glittery red plastic swivel chairs, waved glow sticks. As the music throbbed, twin walls of video screens threw up bizarre images. The Technicolor dream machine the women were using as a stage displayed, at the end of its barrel, a rainbow-colored star -- just where, on an ordinary tank, the death comes out. But this was no ordinary tank. It was a fixture of the one-hour show that takes place three times a night at Robot Restaurant, a kind of eye-melting Japanese dinner theater, a cabaret show of such migraine-inducing decadence that Las Vegas falls silent before it. On this hot Tokyo night in July 2013, two Americans, Roger Ver and Nicolas Cary, sat in the crowd. As far as Cary could tell, they were the only gaijin in the place. He was drinking a beer, while Ver, as usual, was abstaining. Their unappetizing bento boxes sat untouched: you don't go to Robot Restaurant for the food. In the midst of the cartoonish spectacle -- earlier, a woman wielding an oversized mace had ridden in on a stegosaurus to battle two heavily armored robots -- they had business to discuss.

I spoke with Michael Johnston, Lead Inventive Scientist at Interactions, about frequently asked questions about AI and Machine Learning as they apply to customer care. How do you define Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? Artificial Intelligence refers to the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. Put another way, AI technologies are algorithms that attempt to mimic things that humans do. Machine Learning, on the other hand, is the science and engineering of giving computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed -- algorithms that learn from data.

Even though Uber's self-driving efforts in the United States might have hit a massive snag, the ride-hailing giant is still planning to put a foot forward with its ongoing plans. It has now decided to set up another Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) office, but this one is being set up outside the country. As announced today, a new R&D center is coming up in Toronto and will be spearheaded by local AI researcher Raquel Urtasun. The said ATG office won't be focusing on the development of cameras, sensors or outfitting the vehicles themselves. Instead, the team led by Urtasun will be working on the software aspects of the system i.e artificial intelligence and machine learning. This means the said research won't exactly muddle with the existing hardware developed at the U.S ATG office.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can recognize your speech like Siri or identify images like Facebook, but these types of machine intelligences are built on statistical approximation, using loads of data to make educated guesses. Though statistical approximation was a significant technological advancement for devices, experts at Future Lab's AI Summit in New York City believe that it is time to expand the bounds of artificial intelligence--to democratize it--by "engineering knowledge." For Puri, that is the next level of AI--its ability to not only say what something is, but to reason and understand the intent of its being, to answer the'why' question. "Working with kids gives you grounding. They ask questions because they are not shy," says IBM Watson's Chief Architect, Dr. Ruchir Puri, in an interview with EdSurge.

Twitter is currently, yet again, ablaze at the mere thought coming from the one we call Musk. Elon Musk recently tweeted out, and has previously expressed, that the so-called neural lace, is a way for humanity to propel itself forward into its own evolution, and as a way to deter ourselves from becoming "obsolete" in the ever growing world of the artificial intelligence. As soon as I heard of the plans for a neural lace though, my alarm bells started chiming, because as utopian as it all may sound, I think all it will do is open up a direct channel for A.I. to invade our human brain, and in some way or another, whether positive, negative, or neutral, make use of the awesome equipment we carry in our wetware. What is this "lace" you speak of? In simple terms it is an interface between hardware, software, and wetware, marrying the human brain to digital components, so as to increase the bandwidth of human processing power, and decompress the means of person-to-person communication, although I think person-to-many would not be far behind too.

Where is the next big marketing disruption coming from? I caught up with a host of digital experts at the CMO Digital Insight Summit to find out. Tucked away on Scotland's wild and rugged west coast, Turnberry has a special place in golfing folklore. Famous for the legendary'Duel in the Sun' between Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus at the 1977 Open Championship – an epic display of both sport and sportsmanship – the resort has seen its fair share of intense competition over the years. And in many ways, that made it the perfect setting for the recent CMO Digital Insight Summit.

What do you think when someone says'artificial intelligence'? Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way from concept to reality in a short space of time and, despite being a buzzword for the last couple of years, is now mainstream enough that all the main tech players are developing their own products and services to help us through our daily lives. Google has recently developed a context-aware personal assistant simply called the Google Assistant, which can engage in two-way conversations with the user and help with everything from turning the lights on, to playing the latest tunes from Spotify, all without touching a button. Facebook, on the other hand, has taken the different approach of implementing smart chatbots into their Messenger app to make it easier and more convenient for users to check things like the weather and the news, without having to leave the app they're using for conversations. The potential of AI is finally starting to be realised - although there is a long way still to go.

COLUMBUS, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Astute Solutions was named the winner of a Gold Stevie Award in the New Software category in the 15th Annual American Business Awards today. The consumer engagement software firm's chatbot product, Astute BotTM, won the top honor in its category. The American Business Awards are the nation's premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations – public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small. This year, the American Business Awards received more than 3,600 nominations in a wide variety of categories from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry.