The search to improve and eventually perfect artificial intelligence is driving the research labs of some of the most advanced and best-known American corporations. They are investing billions of dollars and many of their best scientific minds in pursuit of that goal. All that money and manpower has begun to pay off. In the past few years, artificial intelligence -- or A.I. -- has taken a big leap -- making important strides in areas like medicine and military technology. What was once in the realm of science fiction has become day-to-day reality. You'll find A.I. routinely in your smart phone, in your car, in your household appliances and it is on the verge of changing everything. On 60 Minutes Overtime, Charlie Rose explores the labs at Carnegie Mellon on the cutting edge of A.I. See robots learning to go where humans can'... It was, for decades, primitive technology. But it now has abilities we never expected. It can learn through experience -- much the way humans do -- and it won't be long before machines, like their human creators, begin thinking for themselves, creatively.

Machine learning enables computers to learn from large amounts of data without being explicitly programmed to do so. We can already see how machine learning gives rise to new intelligent applications, from self-driving cars to intelligent assistants on our smartphones. Increasingly, businesses recognize the importance of using machine learning to transform their data assets into business value. However, many companies are unsure how machine learning can be applied to solve problems in an enterprise context. As the world's most relevant enterprise data is part of SAP's system and business network, SAP aspires to make all its enterprise solutions intelligent and help customers to leverage their data.

Carolina Huaranca is making a name for herself in Silicon Valley. During those three intensive days spent brainstorming new technologies, she realized she was not the only one. Huaranca was one of just two Latinos in a room of 100 people. Nonetheless, she gave birth to a start-up -- and a mission: to one day bring together Latinos so they, too, could have a shot at a career in the tech industry. Now as one of Silicon Valley's few Latina venture capitalists, Huaranca is making good on her promise by helping host Startup Weekend Oakland: Latinx Tech Edition.

The'Insight Economy': What will the world look like when ads have conversations? Has a Black Mirror episode predicted the future of video games? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

My colleague Amy Nicholson is the UK expert on Azure Machine Learning, the following blog post is after a quizzing session to get understand how to get started with Azure Machine Learning" Each student receives $100 of Azure credit per month, for 6 months. The Faculty member receives $250 per month, for 12 months. The Azure machine learning team provided a very nice walkthrough tutorial which covers a lot of the basics. This tutorial is really useful as it takes you through the entire process of creating an AzureML workspace, uploading data, creating an experiment to predict someone's credit risk, building, training, and evaluating the models, publishing your best model as a web service, and calling that web service. Now you need to learn how to import a data set into Azure Machine Learning, and where to find interesting data to build something amazing.

'Siri, catch market cheats': Wall Street watchdogs turn to artificial intelligence Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Python is widely used for data analysis and you might have considered learning it yourself (if not, or if you're still looking for that bit of extra motivation to get started, see why you should be learning Python below). Of course, learning on your own can be a challenge and some guidance is always helpful. Guidance to learn Python for working with data is exactly what this article will provide you with. We will discuss steps you should take for learning Python accompanied with some essential resources, such as the free Python for Data Analysis courses and tutorials from DataCamp as well as reading and learning materials. As a side note: we don't recommend that you only learn Python and forget about the rest.

Udacity, the education platform focused on helping workers gain skills they need for great careers in tech, has partnered with IBM Watson, Didi Chuxing and Amazon Alexa to offer a new nanodegree in artificial intelligence, the companies announced today at the IBM World of Watson conference. IBM Watson is co-developing the curriculum of the course with Udacity. Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing intends to hire students who successfully complete the nanodegree, as does IBM. And Amazon Alexa is serving as an advisor to Udacity in developing the new AI nanodegree. According to Udacity's founder Sebastian Thrun, who previously started Google's innovation shop Google X and its self-driving car initiative, the new AI nanodegree will be for students who already have a level of mastery in software development.

Udacity is partnering with IBM Watson, Didi Chuxing, and Amazon for a new "Nanodegree" program. Artificial intelligence, the machine learning technology that allows "smart" machines to take over human tasks like driving cars or ordering pizza, is quickly becoming the go-to technology for many industries to hire talent for, including health care, auto, and finance. Research firm Markets and Markets estimates the AI market will grow to more than $5 billion by 2020, given the rising adoption of AI across these industries. That's why online education company Udacity is debuting a new way for workers to learn skills needed to be experts in developing artificial intelligence for the likes of IBM and others. Udacity originally launched "Nanodegrees" to train people hoping to land technical jobs, such as software developing.

The descendants of Alexa and Siri might come with a surprisingly good sales pitch. I met an early version of such a persuasive chatbot at a tech conference in Pittsburgh recently. After some small talk and jokes, the bot, called Sara, recommended some other people for me to meet. The suggestions were in fact excellent, and if I hadn't just met with them already, I would've followed her lead. Sara was developed by Justine Cassell, director of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, who is studying ways for virtual agents to use subtle cues in conversation to build rapport with people and become more effective at conveying information or persuading them to do something.