In 1977 when Star Wars introduced the world to C-3PO and R2D2, artificial intelligence (AI) seemed as fantastical as that galaxy far, far away. But at Ignite this year when Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, took to the keynote stage it was very clear that AI is right at our feet. Instead, their vision for AI enhances the many tools we use already use at work and in our everyday lives! At day two of the conference, I had the pleasure of talking with Alan Lepofsky, Principal Analyst of Collaboration Software at Constellation Research, who was even more excited than I was about the whole thing, Check out our interview to hear more about Microsoft's new direction and what a future powered by AI tools might be like for people and businesses everywhere. Dux: Hey everybody, this is Dux.

David Kenny took the helm of IBM's Watson Group ibm in February, after Big Blue acquired The Weather Company, where Kenny had served as CEO. In the months since then, the Watson business has grown dramatically, with well over 100,000 developers worldwide now working with more than three dozen Watson application program interfaces (APIs). Fortune Deputy Editor Clifton Leaf caught up with Kenny in mid-October, when IBM Watson's General Manager was in San Francisco, getting ready to open Watson West--the AI system's newest business outpost--and to launch the company's second World of Watson conference, a gathering of its burgeoning ecosystem of partners and users, in Las Vegas on Oct. 24. FORTUNE: We hear a lot of terms on the AI front these days--"artificial intelligence," "machine learning," "deep learning," "unsupervised learning," and the one IBM uses to describe Watson: "cognitive computing." KENNY: Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, which essentially is a set of algorithms. Deep-learning uses more advanced things like convolutional neural networks, which basically means you can look at things more deeply into more layers. Machine learning could work, for example, when it came to reading text. Deep learning was needed when we wanted to read an X-ray. And all of that has led to this concept of artificial intelligence--though at IBM, we tend to say, in many cases, that it's not artificial as much as it's augmented.

Last Thursday, I had the honor to be one of the warmup acts for President Obama at the White House Frontiers Conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here is the prepared text and slides from the talk I delivered there. As you'll see if you watch the video, what I ended up saying isn't exactly what I had written out in advance, but it is reasonably close. Let me know if you like this format for sharing talks.) Hearing that Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, how could I not begin this talk with his famous line, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

The largest actors union in Hollywood officially called a strike early Friday morning against several prominent video game companies after the two sides failed to reach an agreement on an increase in compensation for performers who do voice-over and motion-capture work for popular games. SAG-AFTRA said Friday the work stoppage began at 12:01 a.m. Friday and covers games made by the companies that went into production after Feb. 17, 2015. Many of the most sophisticated games take years to develop and bring to market, and employ large casts of actors over that development process. Members of SAG-AFTRA are planning to picket one of the companies -- Electronic Arts -- at its location in Playa Vista on Monday.

Salesforce has a history of staying close to the cutting edge of technology, so it shouldn't be surprising that it announced an artificial intelligence initiative recently, it dubbed Einstein. We caught up with some key members of the Einstein team at Dreamforce earlier this month and asked them to explain the new technology for us. Einstein isn't a product so much as a set of intelligence functionality that underlies the entire Salesforce platform, and while the types of functionality that it's enabling now are somewhat limited, the idea is to provide a base on top of which the company can continue to add new capabilities into the future. Today, Einstein can provide information like predictive lead scoring and opportunity insights, which alert a rep how a deal is trending -- the kinds of information many CRM applications have been offering for some time -- but as the technology develops, the company sees a much bigger role for it. As John Ball, GM of Einstein at Salesforce explains, it's really aimed at making life easier for users.

In the past half decade, artificial intelligence and machine learning have made significant leaps into the mainstream and into our daily lives. According to research firm Markets and Markets, the artificial intelligence market is set to grow to 5.05 billion by 2020 thanks to the increased applicability of various AI technologies into everything from finance to healthcare to retail. Today, doctors can diagnose Sepsis with an AI algorithm, for instance, and researchers can track endangered species through AI-enhanced photo capture systems. Clearly, these new self-learning and ever-improving technologies have limitless potential in a number of innovative industries. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Technology Engagement Center (C_TEC) recently hosted a panel discussion during its TecNation 2016 event that focused on where we stand with Artificial Intelligence and how it will affect our lives and unlock our potential in the long run.

Stephen Hawking has warned artificial intelligence could be the greatest disaster in human history if it is not properly managed. The world famous physicist said AI could bring about serious peril in the creation of powerful autonomous weapons and novel ways for those in power to oppress and control the masses. Hawking suggested AI could be the last event in the history of our civilisation if humanity did not learn to cope with the risks it posed. But the cosmologist and professor also said AI could have great benefits and potentially erase poverty and disease. Actress Gemma Arterton attends'Their Finest' Mayor's Centrepiece Gala screening during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square Actress Nicole Kidman attends the'Lion' American Express Gala screening during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square A woman holds up a Prince symbol during the Prince Official Tribute concert at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota Chaka Khan perform during the'Official Prince Tribute-A Celebration of Life and Music' concert at Xcel Energy Center in St Paul, Minnesota Jessie J performs during the'Official Prince Tribute-A Celebration of Life and Music,' concert Nicole Scherzinger, former lead singer for the Pussycat Dolls, performs during a tribute to late musician Prince, at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton sits with Ellen DeGeneres of the Ellen Show in Burbank, Los Angeles, California Writer/film subject Jonas Mekas takes part in a Q&A following the'I Had Nowhere To Go' screening Writer/film subject Jonas Mekas and film critic Amy Taubin take part in a Q&A following the'I Had Nowhere To Go' screening during the 54th New York Film Festival at The Film Society of Lincoln Center Gina Miller arriving at the High Court in London, where she is leading a legal challenge over Theresa May's right to trigger article 50 without a vote in Parliament Director Paolo Sorrentino and Jude Law walk the red carpet at'The Young Pope' premiere at The Space Cinema Actress Michelle Williams attends the'Manchester By The Sea' International Premiere screening during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square Ellie Goulding joins'Nike Training Club' at Nike Sydney in Sydney, Australia Bono and Larry Mullen Jr. of U2 perform during the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital benefit concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, California "We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. So it's a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence," Hawking said at the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at Cambridge University on Wednesday.

I had thought my job was safe from automation--a computer couldn't possibly replicate the complex creativity of human language in writing or piece together a coherent story. I may have been wrong. Authors beware, because an AI-written novel just made it past the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan. The novel this program co-authored is titled, The Day A Computer Writes A Novel. It was entered into a writing contest for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award.

Getting ready to step into the self-driving Ford Fusion in Dearborn, MI. These technological advances, which are dependent on the machine learning branch of AI, rely on the data collected by car companies--data from real miles driven, such as with Tesla's Autopilot, data from simulations of autonomous driving, and data from test situations, such as Uber's driverless fleet in Pittsburgh. Big data, said Michael Cavaretta, director of analytics infrastructure at Ford Motor Company, means data that is "too big to easily handle within your computational resources." It's about looking at datasets with "high velocity, high volume and high variety," he said. And as computers have become more powerful and storage is cheaper, grappling with this data has become more difficult.

Topic identification is a top-of-the-list need for organizations working with large volumes of online, social, and enterprise text. Along with entity resolution, relation extraction, summarization, and sentiment analysis, topic modeling is a key natural language processing (NLP) function. Premise number 2: Applied NLP -- text analytics -- remains as much art as science, requiring a combination of domain and technical expertise. How better to explore topic modeling and NLP advances than via an interview with a leading practitioner? This article features an interview with Lev Konstantinovskiy, a data scientist who is community manager for gensim, which offers open-source topic modeling for Python programmers.