Teaching a computer to "think" the way the human brain does means feeding it huge amounts of real-world data so that it can learn, analyze, predict, and solve problems. But in this brave new world of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, there are no ethical guidelines, no regulations, and no parameters to govern how this data is collected and used. Artificial intelligence is a computer science branch that aims to develop computers that can learn and solve problems, much as a human brain does. When BM's AI supercomputer Watson is enlisted to help doctors tailor therapy to breast cancer patients, it needs to consume high volumes of medical data before it can provide better insights into personalized treatment options and their outcomes. Every time you pick a Netflix movie or ask your digital voice assistant to call a friend, you are dealing with AI.

Having listened to the 5 episodes from the initial release I can tell this will be interesting, forward thinking listening material. It mixes science/tech with business and maintains an awareness of our culture and society. And of course it comes with the high quality and production value of the WSJ. Recommend giving it a listen.

The theatrical release of James Cameron's sci-fi film Terminator 2, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg with a computer brain, had a crucial scene deleted. The scene, part of the extended release of the movie, shows young John Connor and his mother opening up the head of the cyborg to switch its computer brain from "read only to "learning" mode. The cyborg (Schwarzenegger) then picks up human values and mannerisms as the movie progresses. For movie buffs, the deleted scene is worth seeing for special effects and also to catch a glimpse of Linda Hamilton (playing John's mother Sarah Connor) with her twin sister Leslie playing her image in a mirror. In the theatrical release, where the scene is omitted, the cyborg just tells John that its brain is a "neural-net processor, a learning computer", without mentioning any on/off options. That was back in 1991. Today, in 2017, a learning computer is much more of a reality. While artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) concepts have been around since the 1940s and 1950s (See ABC of AI, ML and Deep Learning), the availability of huge amounts of data is making the difference now. A "learning computer" does not need to travel back in time -- like in the movie -- and many are solving real problems in India. For example, in healthcare, ML is helping oncologists sift through huge amounts of cancer cases and suggesting preferred treatment; in education it is predicting who might drop out of school; and in fashion it is forecasting colours that can dominate the next season. Retail, transportation and financial services have adopted ML in different forms. The "learning switch" is turned on in India. "Every large organisation was sitting on data.

Father's Day is just around the corner (June 18, in case you forgot), and this year consumers could change things up by getting dads tech gifts. Instead of ties and home tools, consumers can look to Father's Day deals from Amazon and Best Buy for new ideas for the weekend holiday. Amazon is selling the JBL Flip 4 Waterproof Portable Bluetooth Speaker for $99.95, down from $110.95. The gadget can wirelessly connect up two devices, which means people can take turns playing music. Most importantly, the speaker is waterproof, which is convenient for summer days at the beach.

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USA Today reporter Rachel Sandler asked people in San Francisco if apps are as popular as Apple says. Do people even care about apps anymore? Let's step back in time for a moment and imagine going back to using foldable maps or Web printouts for directions, hailing cabs (or even taking a bus!), and no social tools to share those daily self-portraits. Shazam is the most recent. Apple kicked off its big Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose this week with a humorous video showing what that app-less world might be like.

It's not as delightfully inventive or surprisingly philosophical as "The Lego Movie," but the Batman-themed spinoff is every bit as funny and a lot more action-packed. "The Lego Batman Movie" gets some added zing from a cast of characters that includes not just the "Bat family" of Robin (Michael Cera) and Batgirl (Rosario Dawson) but also the Justice League, a fair number of DC villains and -- just for the heck of it -- King Kong, Sauron and Lord Voldemort. So far, this is the most "anything can happen" comedy of 2017. "Kill Switch" (available June 16) Dan Stevens continues his evolution from "Downton Abbey" hunk into science-fiction/fantasy star here, where he plays an ex-NASA pilot who takes a job with a private company exploring a mirror Earth. The film's big gimmick is the whenever the hero is in the world known as "The Echo," the perspective shifts to first-person, replicating the feel of a video game.

With all the attention Artificial Intelligence (AI) attracts these days, a backlash is inevitable – and could even be constructive. Any technology advancing at a fast pace and with such breathless enthusiasm could use a reality check. But for a corrective to be useful, it must be fair and accurate. The industry has been hit with a wave of AI hype remediation in recent weeks. Opinions are surfacing that label recent AI examples so mundane that they render the term AI practically "meaningless" while others are claiming AI to be an "empty buzzword."

The first time I learned about LSTMs, my eyes glazed over. It turns out LSTMs are a fairly simple extension to neural networks, and they're behind a lot of the amazing achievements deep learning has made in the past few years. So I'll try to present them as intuitively as possible – in such a way that you could have discovered them yourself. Imagine we have a sequence of images from a movie, and we want to label each image with an activity (is this a fight?, are the characters talking?, are the characters eating?). One way is to ignore the sequential nature of the images, and build a per-image classifier that considers each image in isolation.

We've been taught by movies since HAL refused to open the pod bay doors to be wary of artificial intelligence. Although the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in 1968, research house Gartner predicts that mainstream adoption of smart machines – those that utilize AI, cognitive computing, machine learning, or deep learning – will reach 30% by large companies in 2021. AI becoming reality within the next few years does not have to mean, however, that the smart machines AI brings will guarantee negative interference or impact on the human way of life. "You can't really stop progress," said Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and the engineer behind the Apple II, the world-changing first mainstream personal computer, in a conversation with Design News . "Learning, science, being able to make things that never existed before--You can never stop that. Those things can turn out to have bad aspects. Study the atom and you get the atomic bomb. Learn how to build machines that can make clothing and you could have a lot of people out of work and people have to do other things."