Chris Skinner is surprised when he hears that he's popular among bankers. Surprised because the messages he delivers are often uncomfortable. Skinner intends to push bankers out of their comfort zone. While never a banker himself, Skinner has worked on banking projects for several technology companies before establishing his niche as a fintech blogger (TheFinanser.com) His specialty is discerning relevant chords amid all the noise regarding technology and its impact on financial services.

Baidu, a technology-based media company, is the leading Chinese language Internet search provider. Parent company Baidu, Inc. today announced that its international mobile ad network, DU Ad Platform, has successfully bolstered their offerings for developers and advertisers across the globe. Adding to its existing features, the DU Ad Platform now supports both video ads and trigger ads on Android, as well as native ads on iOS. The announcement was made at Baidu's 2017 "AI-Enabled Ad Platform" conference in Beijing. Johnson Hu, GM of Baidu's Global Business Unit said, "We're thrilled to help advertisers reach their audience even more accurately, and enable developers to effortlessly maximize their revenues." The DU Ad Platform uses an AI-enhanced technology called the "Peak Selection Algorithm", which automatically maximizes revenues from ad campaigns, and its inventory covers more than 2 billion users across 200 countries and regions.

The smokestack of a refinery stands next to the Mantaro River in La Oroya, Peru. One of the things that has intrigued me the most about deep learning image cataloging algorithms is their ability to watch the world go by at scale each day through the incredible volume of news and social media images that are generated from every corner of the world and essentially generate a live ground truthed catalog of what's happening moment by moment. Of particular interest for disaster response and environmental monitoring is the ability of such algorithms to recognize imagery of flooding, drought, smog, litter, destruction, violence and other indicators of ongoing ground and air pollution and sudden natural disasters. What might a system look like? Two years ago I met Kadi Kenk, Head of Partnerships for "Let's do it" which is a social good organization founded in Estonia in 2008 that bills itself as a "social movement against trash."

Yes, the death of travel agents at the hands of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been greatly exaggerated yet again. NB: This is an analysis from Larry Smith, partner, Thematix . For those who know HAL from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. But thanks to graphics processing units (GPUs), big data, and better algorithms, AI is now everywhere, today. Almost 50 years after the movie, at the TravelFest Travel 2.0 event in New York City, I had the pleasure of moderating the Artificial Intelligence in Travel panel that included Kunal Kapoor from the IBM Watson ecosystem group, Gillian Morris, CEO of Hitlist.

In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the phrase "uncanny valley" (不気味の谷 in the original Japanese) to denote the phenomenon that when a machine seems close-but-not-quite human, it triggers a negative response. We especially see this effect in animated films, such as The Polar Express. While everyone working on human-computer interaction has to watch out for the uncanny valley, chatbots are especially vulnerable to it. Chatbots, by design, strive to be human-like in their interactions. But it's far too easy to mismanage human expectations and deliver a negative experience.

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robots are the sights and sounds of science fiction books and movies. Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, first introduced in the 1942 short story "Runaround," became the backbone for his novel I, Robot and its film adaptation (Figure 1). Although we are still far away from achieving what movie producers and sci-fi writers have envisioned, the state of AI and ML has progressed significantly. AI software has also been in use for decades but advances in ML, including the use of deep neural networks (DNNs), are making headlines in application areas like self-driving cars. The movie I, Robot has robots that should be following Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

Depending on your point of view, working in the marketing industry these days is either exciting or frightening. Technology innovation is happening so fast that it's almost impossible to keep up with, and for every new opportunity created, an entire set of challenges come with it. No technology represents this paradox better than the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which might be the single most important innovation shaping the future of the advertising industry. AI basically gives computers the ability to think like humans, meaning that for advertisers it can automate a lot of the processes that humans normally have to do -- things like buying the right media, targeting the right users, personalizing the creative, optimizing bid rates, and so on. Computers can take in more data and process it much faster than humans, so they can do all those tasks substantially more effectively and efficiently.

Walt Disney World in Florida appears poised to launch the highest-profile commercial deployment of driverless passenger vehicles to date, testing a fleet of driverless shuttles that could cart passengers through parking lots and around its theme parks. According to sources with direct knowledge of Disney's plans, the company is in late-stage negotiation with at least two manufacturers of autonomous shuttles – Local Motors, based in Phoenix, and Navya, based in Paris. It's unclear whether contracts would go to both or just one of the companies. The sources, who asked not be identified to avoid offending Disney, said the company plans a pilot program later this year to transport employees in the electric-drive robot vehicles. If that goes well, they said, the shuttles would begin transporting park visitors sometime next year.

In the movies, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence usually leads to robotic cyborgs going haywire, machines that threaten humanity, or a choice between a red or blue pill. The plotline almost always assumes the worst will happen. Instead, AI has tremendous potential to help improve performance for nonprofits and social good organizations and drive meaningful change in the world. But first we need to separate the buzz words and bravado from the real transformation that is taking place with AI for nonprofits:. Artificial Intelligence is, at its heart, enabling machines to process information and learn.

Robots are likely to replace 50 percent of all jobs in the next decade, according to Kai-Fu Lee, founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures and a top voice on tech in China. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the wave of the future, the influential technologist told CNBC, calling it the "singular thing that will be larger than all of human tech revolutions added together, including electricity, [the] industrial revolution, internet, mobile internet -- because AI is pervasive." "It is the decision engine that will replace people," Lee said, adding that AI capabilities far exceed those of humanity.