A Nobel Prize-winning economist has warned that the rise in robotics and automation could destroy millions of jobs across the world. Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on health, wealth, and inequality, told the Financial Times he believes robots are a much greater threat to employment in the US than globalisation. Addressing the theory that Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential elections was fueled by a backlash against globalisation, Deaton told the FT: "Globalisation for me seems to be not first-order harm and I find it very hard not to think about the billion people who have been dragged out of poverty as a result. I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are." He added: "It's hard to think that Mark Zuckerberg is actually impoverishing anyone by getting rich with Facebook. But driverless cars are another matter entirely."

I'm the Chief Data Officer at VideoAmp, a startup focused on cross-screen advertising. I led the team to build a data platform on Apache Spark that handles over 300,000 requests per second, and machine learning pipelines that process close to a petabyte of data. Previously, I was the Chief Data Scientist for Pasadena Labs, a machine learning startup for online marketing. I got my PhD in Machine Learning from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where I focused on Deep Learning and Behavioral economics.

Every year, financial services magazine Euromoney gives out numerous awards for excellence to firms in many categories, at country, regional, and global levels. The story of its digital transformation is all the more remarkable because one of its goals for its technology – in fact, for the entire bank – is to disappear from view. DBS is a midsized Asian bank with about 22,000 employees, created by the Government of Singapore in 1968 to help modernize the island nation. However, when DBS brought in Paul Cobban, who is now Chief Operating Officer, Technology and Operations for DBS, to spearhead the bank's transformation in 2009, they were far from best – in fact, they were among the worst. Cobban recalls an eye-opening story from his first day at the bank. "I was in a taxi and I mentioned I worked at DBS," Cobban recalls.

Fassbender also cautions against colonisation, while Kurzel speaks about mainstream snobbishness towards the gaming community.

Ten years after its U.S. launch, Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened its first Canadian datacentre, located in Montreal, at the beginning of December to much fanfare. In this video interview (two more interviews, on cloud security and the democratization of IT, can be seen here and here), ITWC CIO Jim Love and Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels discuss AI services and experimentation (hint: they have little, if anything, to do with Hollywood AI) during the company's Dec. 8 AWS Canada (Central) launch event in Toronto. The new Canada Region is currently available for multiple services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Regions are Amazon Web Services' way of describing its own data centre model.

My last interview for this year is with Steve Lohr. Steve Lohr has covered technology, business, and economics for the New York Times for more than twenty years. In 2013 he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. We discussed Big Data and how it influences the new Artificial Intelligence awakening. Steve Lohr: Both Google and Microsoft are contributing their tools to expand and enlarge the AI community, which is good for the world and good for their businesses.

Editor's note: The following is an interview with Columbia University Professor Andrew Gelman conducted by Marketing scientist Kevin Gray, in which Gelman spells out the ABCs of Bayesian statistics. Andrew Gelman: Bayesian statistics uses the mathematical rules of probability to combines data with "prior information" to give inferences which (if the model being used is correct) are more precise than would be obtained by either source of information alone. Classical statistical methods avoid prior distributions. In classical statistics, you might include in your model a predictor (for example), or you might exclude it, or you might pool it as part of some larger set of predictors in order to get a more stable estimate. These are pretty much your only choices.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an important and evolving concept that is having significant impact within the Customer Experience industry -- and it's a topic that is being talked about on a seemingly daily basis at this point. But is AI really ready for primetime in customer care? 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. 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.

Unlike most other lists of top experts, this one is a hand-picked selection, not based on influence or Klout scores, or the number of Twitter followers and re-tweets, or other similar metrics. Each of these experts has his/her own Wikipedia page. Some might not even have a Twitter account. All of them have had a very strong academic and research career in the most prestigious places. Jeffrey Hawkins is the American founder of Palm Computing (where he invented the Palm Pilot) and Handspring (where he invented the Treo).

Yoo Kwang-yeol, commissioner of the Korea Financial Intelligence Unit, said his agency is currently working to upgrade the main system that stores and analyzes information regarding hundreds of millions of financial transactions in order to increase accuracy of capturing suspicious transactions out of normal ones. "We are considering an uptake of the artificial intelligence technology to improve the current intelligence system by benchmarking advanced systems in countries like Australia and Canada," Yoo said in an interview with The Korea Herald. Yoo Kwang-yeol, commissioner of Korea Financial Intelligence Unit speaks during an interview at his office in Gwanghwamun, central Seoul, Dec. 6. Ahn Hoon/The Korea Herald For this, a group of KOFIU experts paid a trip to Australia earlier this month to learn from the Australian financial intelligence system. "AI can help improve efficiency of sorting out suspicious financial transactions and accuracy of analyzing related account information," Yoo said.