The call for proposals is open for the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference NY 2017 now through January 18, 2017. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode I spoke with Vikash Mansinghka, research scientist at MIT, where he leads the Probabilistic Computing Project, and co-founder of Empirical Systems. I've long wanted to introduce listeners to recent developments in probabilistic programming, and I found the perfect guide in Mansinghka.

Chinese search giant Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) is often dismissed as a slow-growth tech stock that has run out of room to grow. Its heavy investments in expanding its ecosystem into adjacent markets have weighed down its bottom line growth, making the stock seem like dead money. Despite those challenges, however, I recently started a new position in Baidu for four main reasons. That dominant position enables it to expand its ecosystem in the same way as Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google. Its sprawling ecosystem now includes Baidu Maps, video streaming site iQiyi, its Duer voice assistant, the Baidu Wallet payment platform, numerous portal sites, and various O2O (online-to-offline) services in its "monolithic" mobile app.

This essay appears in today's edition of the Fortune Brainstorm Health Daily. Get it delivered straight to your inbox. Those of you who read the Fortune CEO Daily--penned each morning at an ungodly hour by my boss, Alan Murray--got a taste of what seems like a fascinating panel on artificial intelligence at Davos. The panel included Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind (gobbled up for a song by Google in 2014), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Dow CEO Andrew Liveris, and the cognitively impressive head of IBM Watson, David Kenny, whom I interviewed at length in October. You can find Alan's full post from this morning here.

Do you think AI will decrease human labor? So if foreseeable technologies materialize, then then the need for human labor could decrease. Technology always puts existing jobs under strain. This doesn't immediately mean that human labor as a whole is under threat. Generally, other professions grow to fill the loss, often creating more jobs than the ones that are lost.

Masaya Nakamura, who pioneered game arcades and founded the video game company behind the smash-hit Pac-Man, has died at 91. Nakamura founded gaming company Namco -- part of what today is known as Bandai Namco -- in 1955. His Jan. 22 death was confirmed a week later on Bandai Namco's website on Monday. After starting with two mechanical horse rides on a rooftop, Namco went on to pioneer amusement parks and game arcades, the Associated Press reports. The company released the coin-operated game Pac-Man, designed by Namco engineer Toru Iwatani, in 1980. The game expanded into consoles before being merchandised into a television series, a film and various theme parks.

The founder of video game company Bandai Namco, which released cult game Pac-Man, has died at the age of 91, the firm has announced. Masaya Nakamura established Nakamura Manufacturing, which went on to become the Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company (Namco) in 1956. He started out installing two electric horses on the roof of a department store in Japan as amusement rides. He was known as the "father" of Pac-Man because it was a Namco release in 1980. The game was developed by Toru Iwatani and in 2016 was named the highest-grossing arcade game of all time by the website US Gamer.

Masaya Nakamura, the founder of game developer and distributor Namco Ltd. and known as "the father of Pac-Man," died Jan. 22, Bandai Namco Holdings Inc. announced Monday via a corporate website. The cause of death was not announced. After graduating in 1948 from Yokohama Kogyo Senmon Gakko (now Yokohama National University), he founded Nakamura Seisakusho in 1955, which was renamed Namco in 1977. The company developed numerous hit video games, including "Galaxian," "Pac-Man" and "Ridge Racer," that could be played on home consoles or in entertainment facilities such as game centers. Namco merged with Bandai Co. in 2005 to form Bandai Namco Group, and its game production assets were branched into Bandai Namco Games Inc. in 2006, which is now known as Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc. Nakamura was a chairman and a supreme adviser of Bandai Namco Entertainment since 2006.

Owing to the data deluge and the Cambrian explosion of machine learning techniques over the past decade, one might have expected the transformation of marketing strategy into a predominantly quantitative discipline by now. The fact that it hasn't happened yet, and the observation that marketing is still influenced by a lot of qualitative inputs can be ascribed to two reasons, in my opinion. The first and principal reason continues to be institutional inertia. Second, there is a significant communication and knowledge gap between data scientists and marketers, owing to their relative lack of familiarity with the other side's perspectives and paradigms. The successful marketer of the next decade is someone who is conversant with management theories of Kotler[1] as well as machine learning advances by Hinton[2]/LeCun[3]/ Ng[4].

Do you think you can tell a piece of music composed by artificial intelligence (AI) from one created by a human composer? Before you read any further, let's find out. The following audio consists of two fragments, one written by AI, the other by a human. If you didn't get it right the first time, no worries--we'll have a couple more mini-quizzes like this below. The AI that wrote the fragment above has been programmed by Jukedeck, a UK-based startup working on machine-made music that won the competition at TechCrunch Disrupt London in 2015.