Always a highlight of the advertising year, The Festival of Media is an international celebration of excellence in media, attended by almost 250 global brands, as well as agencies, media owners, and adtech companies. With awards recognising everything from the Best Use of New Technology to Creative Use of Data, it is also the ideal setting to observe the synergy of technology and creativity first-hand. GingerMay PR attended this year's event at the Cavalieri Hotel in Rome to gain deeper insight into the topics currently impacting the industry. Measurement and verification of digital advertising was a key theme throughout the festival, with panel sessions indicating that advertisers are finally waking up to the need to implement the same safeguards in digital they have long expected in offline media. Because digital has grown without accepted standards for so long, even the most basic measurements such as impressions and CPM seem like a step-up, but advertisers should be aiming higher.

Machines are eating humans' jobs talents. And it's not just about jobs that are repetitive and low-skill. Automation, robotics, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in recent times have shown they can do equal or sometimes even better work than humans who are dermatologists, insurance claims adjusters, lawyers, seismic testers in oil fields, sports journalists and financial reporters, crew members on guided-missile destroyers, hiring managers, psychological testers, retail salespeople, and border patrol agents. Moreover, there is growing anxiety that technology developments on the near horizon will crush the jobs of the millions who drive cars and trucks, analyze medical tests and data, perform middle management chores, dispense medicine, trade stocks and evaluate markets, fight on battlefields, perform government functions, and even replace those who program software – that is, the creators of algorithms. People will create the jobs of the future, not simply train for them, ...

Leading funders and researchers this week agreed that all their clinical trials for vaccines and devices would in future be publicly registered and the results published. The pledge -- made by nearly a dozen groups including the Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council -- is a boost for innovation and safety. Some estimates suggest that half of all trial findings, notably those that do not yield positive results, are not made public. This is a significant waste of research, burying information that could help to better direct future work, reduce dangers to patients and boost efficiency. In an era of big data and partnership between medical research and IT, there is considerable potential to improve number crunching and identify patterns in trial data.

A fair amount of our data science projects involve machine learning, and many parts of this workflow are repetitive. Model Diagnostics: Learning curves, partial dependence plots, feature importances, ROC and other diagnostics are extremely useful to generate automatically. AML is a powerful set of techniques for faster data exploration as well as improving model accuracy through model tuning and better diagnostics. The above case study highlights AML's capability to improve model accuracy, however we have realized AMLs other benefits as well.

Just as many readers are swapping paperbacks for tablets, many language learners are trading in their textbooks for apps so they can study on the go. One of the most popular language applications on the market is Duolingo, a program that "gamifies" learning by rewarding players with points and new levels after they memorize vocabulary words and grammar points. The app, which has over 170 million users around the world, currently offers over 20 language courses, including Spanish, Vietnamese and Turkish. But Japanese had been notably missing until this week, when it was released on Friday by the Apple store for iOS. Duolingo's landing page for its Japanese course showed that more than 60,000 people signed up to be notified the moment that lessons were finally added. Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said in a news release that Japanese was the most requested lesson in the company's five-year history.

While Spotify may still be having a difficult time achieving profitability, the company has the money to continue buying essentially whatever it wants, as the financing and fundraising never seems to stop. In 2016 alone, the powerhouse collected $1 billion in debt financing and another half a billion in a convertible note, and that is to say nothing of the untold millions that weren't revealed in fundraising rounds and the actual revenue brought in by the company on its own.

In recent years, we've seen a resurgence in AI, or artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Machine learning has led to some amazing results, like being able to analyze medical images and predict diseases on-par with human experts. Google's AlphaGo program was able to beat a world champion in the strategy game go using deep reinforcement learning. Machine learning is even being used to program self driving cars, which is going to change the automotive industry forever. Imagine a world with drastically reduced car accidents, simply by removing the element of human error.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff isn't just predicting that artificial intelligence will one day help run everyone's companies, he's already using it at Salesforce today. He's got a special, not-yet-released version of Einstein, the company's artificial intelligence tech baked into its products, helping him run his company, he told Wall Street analysts on Thursday during the company's quarterly conference call. He invites this version of Einstein, called Einstein Guidance, to his Monday morning staff meeting, where up to 30 top executives update him on their progress for the quarter. Einstein Guidance is designed to do forecasting and modeling. It's especially useful to make sure that managers aren't trying to snow him.

Retail and e-commerce is one of the most competitive industries. Besides some of the more major players such as eBay, Amazon, Walmart, and Target, thousands of smaller eCommerce products have flooded the market. In order to stand out among your competitors, win more customers, and, as a result, increase your revenue, you should keep an eye on the latest technological advancements. By adopting new technologies within your retail business, you will be able to grow your sales, increase brand awareness and customer loyalty, and improve your customer service. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

A few weeks ago the new U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took some public flak for suggesting, in response to an interviewer's question, that he was "not worried at all" that artificial intelligence would threaten the jobs of human workers, because in his view it is "50 or 100 years away." It's not clear why Mnuchin would say that, but with respect, I have to correct him. The original question to Mnuchin was rooted in popular worries that AI will eliminate jobs in the near future. However there's growing evidence that as companies embrace AI to stay competitive, which they will, in the end these changes will create more jobs than they destroy. Earlier this year, ServiceNow commissioned a survey of senior executives at 1,874 companies of varying sizes across numerous industries in seven global markets.