By now, Machine Learning is soundly in the public domain as its wide impact is being felt across many industries around the world as they go through digital transformations. Although the spearheading ML applications have come from the usual suspects such as Internet companies and software firms, the waves of automation and data-driven decision making have been recently crushing on the shores of the Legal Services industry (article in Spanish). A typical law firm in the Western world employs tens or even hundreds of attorneys specializing in different practice areas e.g., intellectual property, corporate, civil, criminal, constitutional law. The business of legal services remains perhaps the very definition of a human-driven industry essentially relying on increasing the employee count to be able to scale to higher revenues. Such growth no doubt may present some efficiencies, but there's no evidence of strong network effects letting few players dominate the market.

Canada was the business world's best-kept secret. Progress and innovation in Canada -- especially in artificial intelligence, clean technology and health care -- has been monumental for decades. Yet, we stayed humble through those years of innovation. That is, until the country embraced its position as a destination for commercial investment and a world leader in artificial intelligence. Now, Canada is empowering new companies to compete on the global stage, hosting massive technology industry events featuring the world's best innovators and attracting international talent to work on world-changing innovations.

Nicole Camarillo was touring the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland in early 2017 when a young captain--I'll call him Matt, due to the sensitivity of his position--crossed her path. I've got to talk to that kid, Camarillo remembers thinking. Just weeks before, she'd seen Matt deliver a presentation on a tool he was developing to counter enemy drone strikes in the Middle East. The technology, he explained, was being developed on a "shoestring budget." As executive director of talent strategy at the US Army Cyber Command, a relatively new branch of the Army, Camarillo's job is to convince top employees in Silicon Valley that they should sacrifice their stock options and six-figure salaries and apply their technological know-how in the Army instead.

Medtech startup AliveCor announced this morning it has pulled in $30 million from Omron Healthcare and the Mayo Clinic and is launching an artificially intelligent stroke prevention platform for doctors called KardiaPro. AliveCor already has an FDA-cleared mobile app called Kardia to accompany its $99 standalone EKG reader device. However, a partnership last year with the Mayo Clinic involving 4,500 patients for a major study on stroke prompted the company to build the new platform, which is a premium offering for doctors who want to monitor the EKG readouts of patients at potential risk for stroke or other heart-related diseases. KardiaPro will track a number of factors for at-risk patients, including weight, activity and blood pressure and then runs them through the AliveCor AI technology to suss out potential triggers doctors may not detect on their own. The platform then feeds what AliveCor CEO Vic Gundotra refers to as a "personal heart profile" for patients that can then be used to send alerts to the doctor to help them determine the next course of action. AliveCor raised $13.5 million previously from Khosla Ventures, Qualcomm and Burrill and Company.

The nearly 6,000-pound (2,700-kilogram) delivery includes genetically identical mice for a study of gut bacteria, and the round robot Cimon (pronounced Simon). Slightly bigger than a basketball, the AI robot from the Germany Space Agency is meant to assist German astronaut Alexander Gerst with science experiments. Cimon's brain will constantly be updated by IBM, so its intelligence -- and role -- keep growing.

The advantages of the banking sector from artificial intelligence include seeking operational efficiency; means to detect and predict human behavior; and for lowering operational costs. This also signals further progress with the digital transformation of the Indian banking sector. For example, advent of mobile technologies and the end-users' trust levels in relation to banks security has pushed some Indian banks to adopt technologies such as fingerprinting for customer safety and compliance. This process of transformation has led PwC India's leader banking and capital markets, Shinjini Kumar to state recently: "Many Indian banks, like their Asian counterparts, are geared to use the advantage of local talent and leapfrogging technology to create forward looking digital strategies. However, there is a lot of ground to cover on creating Omni-channel experience and enhancing processes from the customer's point of view."

When the 2008 Summer Olympics were about to open in Beijing, China, government authorities grew increasingly concerned about the city's notorious pollution problem. Rather than risk the health of athletes and guests at the games, dozens of nearby factories were ordered closed and driving restrictions reduced traffic by 90 percent, according to state news reports. While the moves were considered radical and impacted the region's economy, the Beijing government felt it had little choice. Today, Beijing is saturated with sensors that can measure CO2 content and other pollutants. Data from the sensors is now combined with information from the city's weather service and run through algorithms developed by IBM's Almaden Laboratory in Silicon Valley that help to predict whether or not the city is going to be impacted by high levels of pollution.

Pepper is a 4ft tall approximation of a human being developed in France, and now manufactured and marketed by the Japanese-owned corporate giant SoftBank Robotics. If you went to the recent Robots exhibitions at London's Science Museum or the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, you will be aware of what he (Pepper has been given a male pronoun, for some reason) can do. Using a screen on his chest, he tells interactive stories, approximates the basics of conversation, and performs everyday gestures – all the while, according to his creators, "recognising the principal human emotions and adapting his behaviour to the mood of his interlocutor". I have met Pepper on three occasions: the fact that my two children were so entranced spoke volumes not just about his capabilities, but the easy charm his inventors have wired into him. More than 100 SoftBank mobile phone shops in Japan are already employing Peppers to interact with their customers; last week brought news that HSBC is doing the same thing in its flagship US branch in Manhattan.

SpaceX's Friday-morning mission to the International Space Station (ISS) will include a new crew member quite unlike any other. The name of the new addition is CIMON (pronounced Simon) and it's being sent to act as a mobile autonomous assistance system. Think HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon's GERTY, and Holly in the BBC's Red Dwarf. Developed by Airbus and Germany's DLR space agency, and powered by IBM's Watson supercomputer, CIMON will be the first form of artificial intelligence (A.I.) to arrive on the space station, where it will aid the astronauts with their research work and presumably become their buddy, as well. CIMON, which stands for Crew Interactive MObile companioN, is about the size of a volleyball and has a display built in. It can see, hear, talk, and comprehend, and its A.I. smarts mean that the more it interacts with crew members, the more abilities it will develop.

WASHINGTON – Hey, did my congressman really say that? Is that really President Donald Trump on that video, or am I being duped? New technology on the internet lets anyone make videos of real people appearing to say things they've never said. Republicans and Democrats predict this high-tech way of putting words in someone's mouth will become the latest weapon in disinformation wars against the United States and other Western democracies. This technology uses facial mapping and artificial intelligence to produce videos that appear so genuine it's hard to spot the phonies.