"If you've created a conscious machine," says Caleb to Nathan toward the beginning of Ex Machina, when Caleb discovers Nathan is on the verge of creating an artificial intelligence indistinguishable from human intelligence, "it's not the history of man. Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland, is an intriguing film about the wonders and dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). Garland's tale is stylishly told, beautifully photographed, and aided by a clever script that subverts standard cinematic clichés. It is also suffused with religious themes and theological motifs--unsurprisingly, because ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the prospect of human beings creating human-like beings of their own has almost invariably raised the issue of "playing God." In Ex Machina, Caleb is a computer coder brought to Nathan's secret research facility to apply the Turing Test to Nathan's AI--that is, to test whether a human interacting with the robot would be able to tell that the AI is ...

"Our research shows that a growing number of customers actually prefer self-service channels to answer questions, resolve issues or complete transactions. Yet, automated handling often hits limitations when it comes to handling complex queries or'remembering' information previously mentioned in a conversation," says Dan Miller, Opus Research lead analyst. "As intelligent assistant technology evolves; we anticipate the emergence of highly specialized'intelligent advisors' that know when and how to involve a live agent. Inbenta's Hybrid Chat is the beginning of this progress." "As a transactional e-commerce-based company, having a superior digital customer support program is essential. You wouldn't make your brick and mortar customers search your store without helping them, so why not give them a personalized experience virtually," says Andreia Ferreira, Live Chat Manager, Ticketbis.

It also means the recipients of such tales of fantasy are often thrown off the scent of the story they should be following. Those stories were followed up by one of the most breathtaking pieces of myopic'journalism' I've seen from TechCrunch in quite a while." It would be equally knee jerk to make excuses for one of the true darlings of the enterprise startup crowd, a BI vendor that is positioning itself as "the world's first business cloud." That's the Domo rabbit hole a naive tech journalist can get bamboozled in. You can call Den Howlett a lot of things, but naive tech journalist ain't one of'em. Here he resists the temptation to roast in order to weigh out the pros and cons in detail. But the key is not whether Domo screwed up their PR, but whether they are ready to backup their enterprise ambitions. Den likes the micro-service hub potential, but for now, he's got one eyebrow raised: "I challenge Domo to explain how any service can credibly be called a'business cloud' that manages everything you need without access to the financial information." Scott Cummings, one of our commenters who says he is heavily involved in enterprise sales, adds: "I have yet to meet a paying Domo customer, and those who have tried it have stated it is at best "frosting on the cake" The plot is already thick, my friends….

Machine learning company Maluuba, with headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario and a research office in Montreal, has applied an algorithm to the text of J.K. Rowling's bestselling novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, along with several hundred other children's stories, to read text in such a way that it can then answer questions afterward. Maluuba has also just announced the opening of an R&D lab in Montreal, staffed by Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal's Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) in partnership with reinforcement learning expert Richard Sutton from the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning, to make advances in the fields of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and artificial intelligence (AI). Taking a deep learning approach, Maluuba trained its algorithm to approach the Harry Potter text from several levels of textual abstraction, word, sentence, paragraph, etc. And while a certain contingent of tech utopians may very well look at Maluuba's case study as the smoking gun they need for shutting down Humanities departments in universities everywhere, the company itself makes clear that using an algorithm to comprehend literature is a stepping stone to more practical uses. "For a computer to understand humans speaking in natural language and respond appropriately, it needs to capture and represent a large amount of knowledge that is not just words, but also common sense and context about the topic being discussed by the human," said Maluuba cofounder & CEO Sam Pasupalak. "Maluuba is working with leading experts and the world's premiere academic center for deep learning to design systems that can represent knowledge and answer questions in natural language.

One of the huge drawbacks of modern technology is that it fills the air around us with radio signals. From your kitchen radio to your LTE-enabled smartphone, all of these devices use radio waves to communicate. Unfortunately, there is only a certain amount of radio frequencies that can be used. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is looking for a way around this problem, and wants teams to develop an artificially intelligent system that will control what devices use what radio waves and when. Basically, instead of forcing devices to make use of narrow frequency bands when the spectrum gets congested, DARPA wants devices to negotiate sharing frequencies when they need them.

Join us live at Entrepreneur's Accelerate Your Business event series in Chicago or Denver. But the time may come soon since an AI recently impressed judges of a Japanese literary prize. The novella, The Day a Computer Writes a Novel, was co-written and edited by a team of humans. The story itself follows a computer program as it recognizes its talent for writing and leaves behind its preprogrammed duties. Initially, the book was included in the group of 11 AI-authored submissions allowed to enter the contest for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, according to Smithsonianmag.com.

Flickr/Peyri HerreraAn artificial intelligence director (not this robot, but you get the idea.) Ad agency McCann Japan has appointed an artificial intelligence creative director, AI-CD?, who will be attending McCann Worldgroup's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1, along with 11 new college graduates. AI-CD? was actually created by the agency under its'Creative Genome Project', the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency's'McCann Millennials taskforce'. The artificial intelligence can give creative direction on commercials because the data that forms the basis of the algorithm includes deconstructed, tagged and analysed TV shows, as well as data on the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commersion Confederation's CM Festival. President & CEO of McCann Japan, Yasuyuki Katagi said: "Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we're very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ß for the future of ad creation. The whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our A.I. employee."

Machine learning is being used by companies such as Netflix, Facebook, and Spotify for automated data analysis. The results are then used to create recommendations based on past consumption habits. This approach is based on algorithms that learn and adapt to the usage data and patterns that emerge, not the hard-coded rules used in traditional analytics. Netflix in particular has successfully leveraged analytics for years, and their strategy serves as an example of how machine learning can help you gain a competitive advantage. Big Data analytics, being based on manual processes to search for patterns in data, has a major flaw--humans.

McCann has appointed an articificial intelligence creative director AI-CD?, who will be attending McCann Worldgroup's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1, along with 11 new college graduates. AI-CD? was actually created by the agency under its'Creative Genome Project', the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency's'McCann Millenials taskforce'. The artificial intelligence can give creative direction on commercials because the data that forms the basis of the algorithm includes deconstructed, tagged and analysed TV shows, as well as data on the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commersion Confederation's CM Festival. President & CEO of McCann Japan, Yasuyuki Katagi said: "Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we're very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ß for the future of ad creation. The whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our A.I. employee."

McCann Erickson Japan is taking artificial intelligence to the next level, creating and appointing the world's first robot creative director. The robot, called AI-CD?, will be assigned as a creative director to client accounts and will provide creative direction for commercials. It will also evaluate and gain learnings from results after commercials have aired to ensure it improves for future projects. AI-CD? was developed through a new taskforce in the agency, McCann Millennials, a group of staff members born between 1980 and 2000 who apparently care not for the future of their own careers, or the possible rising of the machines à la The Matrix. The robot is able to give creative direction for commercials, drawing from a database of tagged and analysed TV commercials from the past 10 years of winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation's annual CM Festival (ACC CM Festival).