There's no question that technology is drastically changing the way we work, but what will the job market look like by 2050? Will 40% of roles have been lost to automation – as predicted by Oxford university economists Dr Carl Frey and Dr Michael Osborne – or will there still be jobs even if the nature of work is exceptionally different from today? To address these issues, the Guardian hosted a roundtable discussion, in association with professional services firm Deloitte, which brought together academics, authors and IT business experts. The future of work will soon become "the survival of the most adaptable", says Paul Mason, emerging technologies director for Innovate UK. As new technologies fundamentally change the way we work, the jobs that remain will be multifaceted and changeable. "Workers of the future will need to be highly adaptable and juggle three or more different roles at a time," says Anand Chopra-McGowan, head of enterprise new markets for General Assembly.

Entrepreneurs need little convincing that technology is important, rapidly evolving, and likely to have a profound impact on their businesses. But keeping track of developments, and knowing where to focus one's attention, is anything but straightforward. Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers (pdf) say the impact of constant technological breakthroughs represent a "megatrend" – a change so big that "every business should develop an emerging technology strategy". They have highlighted eight key areas that all businesses should pay attention to. The artificial intelligence market is growing rapidly and forecast to be worth 36bn by 2025.

Entrepreneurs need little convincing that technology is important, rapidly evolving, and likely to have a profound impact on their businesses. But keeping track of developments, and knowing where to focus one's attention, is anything but straightforward. Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers (pdf) say the impact of constant technological breakthroughs represent a "megatrend" – a change so big that "every business should develop an emerging technology strategy". They have highlighted eight key areas that all businesses should pay attention to. The artificial intelligence market is growing rapidly and forecast to be worth 36bn by 2025.

Companies are increasingly using software robots to perform routine business processes by mimicking the ways in which people interact with software applications. And the rapidly growing market for robot process automation (RPA) is already showing signs of an important emerging trend: Enterprises are beginning to employ RPA together with cognitive technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning to automate perceptual and judgment-based tasks once reserved for humans. The integration of cognitive technologies and RPA is extending automation to new areas and can help companies become more efficient and agile as they move down the path of becoming fully digital businesses. RPA software automates repetitive, rules-based processes usually performed by people sitting in front of computers. By interacting with applications just as a human would, software robots can open email attachments, complete e-forms, record and re-key data, and perform other tasks that mimic human action.

Compelling data reveal a discouraging truth about growth today. There has been a marked decline in the ability of traditional levers of production--capital investment and labor--to propel economic growth. Yet, the numbers tell only part of the story. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a new factor of production and has the potential to introduce new sources of growth, changing how work is done and reinforcing the role of people to drive growth in business. Accenture research on the impact of AI in 12 developed economies reveals that AI could double annual economic growth rates in 2035 by changing the nature of work and creating a new relationship between man and machine.

LingPipe is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) library that is released under a dual commercial and an open-source AGPL license, and the basis for a NLP consulting company (Alias-I) that one of the authors (Breck Baldwin) founded. In fact, the preface of the book states that some of the recipes in this book come from Breck's private repository. This book is the first one devoted exclusively to LingPipe. While LingPipe provides comprehensive Javadocs and tutorials on its website, but it is fairly dense material (NLP is hard!) - the book is an easier, gentler way to understand it. One other reason LingPipe's API is so dense (even compared to other Java NLP libraries) is because it is written for performance, making heavy use of encapsulation to wrap common tasks and the visitor pattern to consume data in streaming mode. The book does a good job explaining the latter pattern in some depth, and deconstructing the code examples so the former becomes more obvious.

Artificial Intelligence Poised to Double Annual Economic Growth Rate in 12 Developed Economies and Boost Labor Productivity by up to 40 Percent by 2035, According to New Research by Accenture NEW YORK; Sept. 28, 2016 – Research released today from Accenture (NYSE: ACN) reveals that artificial intelligence (AI) could double annual economic growth rates by 2035 by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine. The impact of AI technologies on business is projected to boost labor productivity by up to 40 percent by fundamentally changing the way work is done and reinforcing the role of people to drive growth in business. "AI is poised to transform business in ways we've not seen since the impact of computer technology in the late 20th century," said Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer, Accenture. "The combinatorial effect of AI, cloud, sophisticated analytics and other technologies is already starting to change how work is done by humans and computers, and how organizations interact with consumers in startling ways. Our research demonstrates that as AI matures, it can propel economic growth and potentially serve as a powerful remedy for stagnant productivity and labor shortages of recent decades."

Not everyone is willing to take the risks to solve the big problems. Even fewer are equipped to do so. But, when the data scientist asks questions of data that nobody else thinks to ask, they cure healthcare inefficiencies, build anti-money-laundering models to thwart crime, program the future of artificial intelligence, drive advances in connected vehicles, and diagnose climate change. The data scientist doesn't care how big your data is, and they're not interested in incremental change. They dare to transform society.

Marian Jacob is covering South East Asia. Marian worked in marketing and corporate communications for over a decade, covering both internal and external communications. She began her career in professional services, leading up to communications business partnering in various multi-national organizations with progressive cultures. Marian has worked on both global and regional roles within communications. She also provides counsel to companies on strategic communications and marketing opportunities.

Compelling data reveal a discouraging truth about growth today. There has been a marked decline in the ability of traditional levers of production--capital investment and labor--to propel economic growth. Yet, the numbers tell only part of the story. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a new factor of production and has the potential to introduce new sources of growth, changing how work is done and reinforcing the role of people to drive growth in business. Accenture research on the impact of AI in 12 developed economies reveals that AI could double growth rates in 2035 by changing the nature of work and creating a new relationship between man and machine.