Criteo is organizing the Machine Learning in the Real World workshop. This workshop aims at bringing together people from the industry and from academia to better understand which machine learning algorithms are used in practice and what we can do to improve them. Anyone who is involved in applying machine learning on real world data is welcome. This event is primarily intended for people with technical fluency in machine learning to help each other advance the state of the art. If you are interested in learning about the basics of the field, there are plenty of other great events in Paris which are probably more appropriate.

What Did You Miss at the Deep Learning Summit Last Week?

This year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) celebrates 50 years of the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious technical award in the computing industry. The Turing Award, generally regarded as the'Nobel Prize of computing', is an annual prize awarded to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". In celebration of the 50 year milestone, renowned computer scientist Melanie Mitchell spoke to CBR's Ellie Burns about artificial intelligence (AI) – the biggest breakthroughs, hurdles and myths surrounding the technology. EB: What are the most important examples of Artificial Intelligence in mainstream society today? MM: There are many important examples of AI in the mainstream; some very visible, others blended in so well with other methods that the AI part is nearly invisible.

Artificial intelligence has become the pet anxiety of luminaries like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking. They have all expressed concerns about our Promethean quest to develop machine intelligence, and those concerns seem to be spreading every day. But there's another dimension of technological change that ought to worry us every bit as much as AI, if not more so. Bioengineering has already allowed human beings to take control of their own evolution. Whether it's emergent cloning technologies or advanced gene therapy, we're quickly approaching a world in which humans can -- and will -- change the way they live and die. Michael Bess is a historian of science at Vanderbilt University and the author of a fascinating new book, Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in a Bioengineered Society. Bess's book offers a sweeping look at our genetically modified future, a future as terrifying as it is promising. "We're going to give ourselves a power that we may not have the wisdom to control very well," he told me.

At 2:40 a.m., my phone woke me up. At least one of us was always on shift, and that night in September of 2010, I had volunteered to respond to automated text messages from our alert system. As a graduate student at the time, I (Jonah) had helped build the first quick-response alert software pipeline for two gravitational-wave observatories, called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) and Virgo. This system was designed to search for astrophysical signals in data as it arrived, to alert people who could check if a signal seemed valid, and share the message with astronomers around the world if needed. Every alert carried the possibility of a positive detection--humanity's first direct observation of waves traveling through the fabric of spacetime, predicted by Einstein in 1916. I got out of bed and made a sleepy-eyed walk to the small workstation we kept in our apartment. I didn't know it, but the alert was the beginning of a professional and emotional rollercoaster. I logged into our event database and started browsing plots. The plots showed an unusually loud signal.

Professor Yann LeCun is a force to be reckoned with in the world of artificial intelligence. With approximately 20 years in the field, the director of Facebook's AI lab has authored over 180 academic papers. One of his most notable pieces of work came in 1988, when he helped to develop a piece of AI software known as a "convolutional neural network" that could recognise handwritten numbers. Trained on a data set of thousands of characters, this revolutionary system detected visual patterns directly from the pixel. Essentially, it let computers open their eyes and use data to learn on their own.

Artificial Lawyer caught up recently with Dan Rubins, the Founder and CEO – and also the CTO – of Legal Robot, one of the new breed of AI-driven document review start-ups. We discussed how he moved from working in a medical services company to joining the fray as a legal AI pioneer, how working on smart contracts may be where the company eventually ends up and why there's a big world of opportunity out there. The San Francisco-based founder of Legal Robot, Dan Rubins, is not a lawyer by background. But, his experiences have taught him a lot about the inefficiencies of document review, while his long term interest in technology and programming has also helped. Perhaps, most fundamentally, Rubins is a self-proclaimed engineer.

There is no consistent definition of digitization. Every industry and every department perceive it and react differently. How would you define digitization with respect to your industry? Michael Wei: Digitization has been the major shifting force for the last 4 decades, and it will continue to be a critical force in the next several decades ahead of us. The scope and impact are substantially wider than what we perceive, that's where I think the inconsistency comes from – each player stems from its own roots to look at digitization and has reached a definition from a partial view.

At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host Ken Stillwell, CFO and Senior VP of Pegasystems. Before we begin, I'd like to read our Safe Harbor Statement. Certain statements contained in this presentation, including but not limited to, statements related to future earnings, bookings, revenue and mix of license revenue may be construed as forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The words expects, anticipates, intends, plans, believes, could, estimates, may, targets, strategies, intends to, projects, forecasts and guidance, and other similar expressions, identify forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date the statement was made and are based on current expectations and assumptions. Because such statements deal with future events, they are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results for the fiscal year 2016 and beyond could differ materially from the Company's current expectations. Factors that could cause the Company's results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements are contained in the Company's press release announcing its Q3 2016 earnings, and in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2016, its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015 and other recent filings with the SEC. Although subsequent events may cause the Company's view to change, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, since these statements may no longer be accurate or timely. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Alan Trefler, Founder and CEO of Pegasystems. I'm pleased it was a strong Q3, overall. Q3 is generally provide limited visibility given vacations and schedules especially in Europe. And I had spoken about Brexit on the last call and I'm pleased to say that concerns have not materialized with the exception of currency of course. And I'm pleased to see the continued progress we're making towards having less lumpy quarters despite the inherent lumpiness of this business, even in the face of those currency headwinds. Those currency headwinds caught a couple of points off of our results.

As the ethical and policy issues surrounding artificial intelligence and other computing technologies take center stage, global law firm K&L Gates LLP has made a gift to help ensure Carnegie Mellon University's leadership in this emerging field. The $10 million gift will establish the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies. The funds will support new faculty chairs as well as three new Presidential Fellowships for doctoral students; a biennial conference; the K&L Gates Presidential Scholarship Endowed Fund to recognize undergraduate students' outstanding achievements and potential for further excellence; and an annual K&L Gates Prize to be awarded to a graduating CMU senior. "We are deeply grateful to K&L Gates for this generous support," said Carnegie Mellon President Subra Suresh. "It is not just technology that will determine how this century unfolds. Our future will also be influenced strongly by how humans interact with technology, how we foresee and respond to the unintended consequences of our work, and how we ensure that technology is used to benefit humanity, individually and as a society. "By its history and its current leadership in these fields, Carnegie Mellon is uniquely positioned to examine these questions, and make lasting contributions.