Pure-play online grocery retailer Ocado has announced the deployment of its machine learning-enhanced contact centre, which employs an advanced artificial intelligence software model to categorise customer emails. This novel approach ensures customers are still getting that familiar human touch while also benefiting from the quick response provided by technology automation. From the contact centre point of view, the customer service representatives don't have to spend hours categorising thousands of emails manually; instead, the artifical intelligence (AI) model parses the email and provides a useful summary and a priority tag. The customer service representative can then focus on solving the customers' problems in a timely manner. "We strive to deliver the best shopping experience for all our 500,000 active customers. However, working in an omni channel contact centre can be challenging, with the team receiving thousands of contacts each day via telephone, email, webchat, social media and SMS. The new software developed by the Ocado Technology data science team will help the contact centre filter inbound customer contacts faster, enabling a quicker response to our customers which in turn will increase customer satisfaction levels," said Debbie Wilson, Ocado's contact centre operations manager.

In this week's Whiteboard Walkthrough Ted Dunning, Chief Application Architect at MapR, explains in detail how to use streaming IoT sensor data from handsets and devices as well as cell tower data to detect strange anomalies. He takes us from best practices for data architecture, including the advantages of multi-master writes with MapR Streams, through analysis of the telecom data using clustering methods to discover normal and anomalous behaviors. I'd like to talk a little bit about data processing in the context of telecom. In particular, what I'll be talking about is how to extend some of the ideas that we've talked about in other videos about anomaly detection to the particular case of telecom data. This is very different than some of the other data that we've been talking about.

The Billionaire, who also runs a not-for-profit artificial intelligence research company, warned that the futuristic technology could be deadly if it falls into the wrong hands. He has previously said that the research company, OpenAI, wants to "contract large corporations who may gain too much power by owning super-intelligence systems devoted to profits, as well as governments which may use AI to gain power and even oppress their citizens" but has extended that warning further. Speaking to Sam Altman, co-chairman of OpenAI, he claimed that countries would attempt to steal control away from its owner. However, Mr Musk reassured the public that AI technology would not develop a mind of its own and attack like scenes fictionalised in science fiction hit Terminator.

When I came into the workforce in the early 90's, any career connected to the computer was hot. The Internet was at its infancy. Any two or more (often just two) computers connected was called a network, which was a huge deal. Believe it or not email was the killer app. The World Wide Web was not invented yet, and when it came into the scene, finding a photo on a web page was a big deal.

Self-driving vehicles will be widely adopted by 2020, and it won't just be cars -- driverless delivery trucks, autonomous delivery drones, and personal robots will also be commonplace. Low-cost 3D sensors like Microsoft's Kinect will speed the development of perceptual technology, while advances in speech comprehension will enhance robots' interactions with humans. Computer-based learning won't replace the classroom, but online tools will help students learn at their own pace using techniques that work for them. Online teaching will increasingly widen educational access, making learning lifelong, enabling people to retrain, and increasing access to top-quality education in developing countries.

Artificially intelligent self-driving cars aren't a technological evolution that everyone is entirely comfortable with just yet, but computer scientist Sebastian Thrun has enough optimism for all of us. Speaking at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, Thrun said that not only does he think artificial intelligence is going to reshape the way we live, it's going to do so for the better. Thrun, a Stanford university professor who led Google's self-driving car project until 2014, said that as a result of technological advances over the past 200 to 300 years "we have turned ourselves into superhumans." According to Thrun, throughout history we've used technology to overcome our physical limitations and created ways to communicate across long distances, travel quickly across continents, and gather food more quickly than our ancestors ever could. Now we're moving onto the next stage and thanks to advances in AI the focus is going to shift from "replacing our muscles" to "making our brains stronger."

In 1977 when Star Wars introduced the world to C-3PO and R2D2, artificial intelligence (AI) seemed as fantastical as that galaxy far, far away. But at Ignite this year when Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, took to the keynote stage it was very clear that AI is right at our feet. Instead, their vision for AI enhances the many tools we use already use at work and in our everyday lives! At day two of the conference, I had the pleasure of talking with Alan Lepofsky, Principal Analyst of Collaboration Software at Constellation Research, who was even more excited than I was about the whole thing, Check out our interview to hear more about Microsoft's new direction and what a future powered by AI tools might be like for people and businesses everywhere. Dux: Hey everybody, this is Dux.

Speaking at the launch of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) in Cambridge, science icon Stephen Hawking warned listeners about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and humanity. "Success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization," Hawking acknowledged, noting the unprecedented and rapid development of AI technology in recent years, from self-driving cars to a computer playing (and defeating humans) in a game of Go. "But it could also be the last," he warned. Hawking himself acknowledges the value of AI and what it could contribute to humanity's future, saying he believes artificial intelligence and this century's technological revolution will parallel the previous century's industrial one. "The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge. We cannot predict what we might achieve, when our own minds are amplified by AI," said Hawking.

Users are looking for more than the humble SMS text message to communicate with friends and family. Our communication requirements now demand group messaging capabilities with the ability to seamlessly share an image or video on the move. Apple's iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook's Messenger are leading the way, but the recent release of Google Allo suggests that messaging has become the new tech battleground. Our love affair with mobile apps is changing because we have so many, often over 50, yet on average we only actually use five of them on a regular basis. Searching for an app that is hidden in a folder of apps on page 3 of our phones is no longer deemed productive in an age of instant gratification.

The internet bookmark aspires to be the digital equivalent of the sticky note you paste on an important page in a college textbook. Pinterest does this with boards; other bookmarking services, like Pinboard, do so with tags. Stash gives your bookmarks its own AI librarian, which uses machine learning to automatically categorize all of your bookmarks in different categories: for example, articles, or recipes, or products, and so on. Contrary to what some hyperbolic headlines have claimed, it doesn't streamline formatting to give articles a better reading experience, so if you do a lot of internet reading, you'll still probably rely on services like Pocket or Instapaper.