Researchers have created a'Bot Dylan' computer that is capable of writing its own folk music. The system uses artificial intelligence to compose new tunes after it was trained using 23,000 pieces of Irish folk music. This allowed the machine to learn the patterns and structures that make for a catchy tune before it created its own pieces of music that we showcased at a concert in London this week. It marks a significant step forward for the capabilities of artificial intelligence. The new computerised composer can compose new tunes after being trained using 23,000 pieces of Irish folk music.

In this video interview with Quartz, AI expert Kai-Fu Lee talked about some of the issues raised by last year's hit HBO TV show Westworld, which was about a futuristic theme park hosted by robots, where human visitors pay to live out their fantasies. Lee is a famous venture capitalist in China and a former Microsoft and Google executive. He has an undergrad degree in computer science from Columbia and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, where he did pioneering work on machine learning and speech recognition.

Antwerp (Belgium) – May 16, 2017 – Today, at the imec technology forum (ITF2017), imec, the world-leading research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technologies, demonstrated the world's first self-learning neuromorphic chip. The brain-inspired chip, based on OxRAM technology, has the capability of self-learning and has been demonstrated to have the ability to compose music. The human brain is a dream for computer scientists: it has a huge computing power while consuming only a few tens of Watts. Imec researchers are combining state-of-the-art hardware and software to design chips that feature these desirable characteristics of a self-learning system. Imec's ultimate goal is to design the process technology and building blocks to make artificial intelligence to be energy efficient so that that it can be integrated into sensors.

In this new episode of Real Smart Marketing, we've asked this big question to 4 of our favorite influencers. If you're like me, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear AI might be this: But as I've come to realize, what we're talking about is a lot less creepy. AI is changing the face of SEO, but not like that. We're talking about algorithms that enable machines to make connections and "learn" to process data and apply its learning in future tasks. Basically, improvements in artificial intelligence like deep learning and natural language processing mean that search engines are becoming smarter and more human-friendly.

Joy Buolamwini is a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League – an organisation that aims to challenge the biases in decision-making software. She grew up in Mississippi, gained a Rhodes scholarship, and she is also a Fulbright fellow, an Astronaut scholar and a Google Anita Borg scholar. Earlier this year she won a $50,000 scholarship funded by the makers of the film Hidden Figures for her work fighting coded discrimination. How did you become interested in that area? When I was a computer science undergraduate I was working on social robotics – the robots use computer vision to detect the humans they socialise with.

IBM are not doing "cognitive computing" no matter how many times they say they are. I was chatting with an old friend recently and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language.

A future with highways full of self-driving cars or robot friends that can actually hold a decent conversation may not be far away. That's because we're living in the middle of an "artificial intelligence boom" -- a time when machines are becoming more and more like the human brain. That's partly because of an emerging subcategory of AI called "deep learning." It's a process that's often trying to mimic the human brain's neocortex, which helps humans with language processing, sensory perception and other functions. Essentially, deep learning is when machines figure out how to recognize objects.

The big point here is that we are improving the optimization approach by adding clever noise into the gradient. By sampling different truncation lengths, the gradient estimate we obtain becomes stochastic. It doesn't come as much of a surprise that adding noise does slow down the training procedure. However, as mentionned, the noise we introduce is not any noise: it provides unbiasedness. Notably, this means that ARTBP considers some minima that Truncated Backprop does not see as minima, as it is biased.

We all know that the growth of music distribution is moving fast from transaction to streaming subscriptions. The music value chain is adapting. With millions of songs streamed trillions of times, advanced technologies are necessary for consumers to find and discover their favorite songs and for music artists to find their fans and interact with them. Will the music industry be able to leverage digital technologies to adapt and be profitable? We can get some serious tips from Techstars, an accelerator with a current portfolio of about 7.8 billion. On Thursday, its new program, Techstars Music, partnered with major players including labels Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, to demo its darling music startups at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles.

A WBS Professor of Practice, Mark is an Experienced Professional Consultant with a track record in top 1000 Companies in over 20 countries and across multi public, private and start-up sectors. A recognized International thought leader in Digital, company strategy, Telecoms, Digital markets and M&A strategies, CxO practices and author of books and international papers. Mark's work and views have been published in the FT, NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, Bloomberg, AP, Mail, NewScientist, Nature, Scientific American and many channels around the world, TV and Radio including BBC, Sky, ITV, Al Jazeera and many others. Mark supports Warwick with industrial best practice through interests and expertise areas. In 2017 Mark is due to publish - The 4th Industrial Revolution: responding to the impact of artificial intelligence on business.