Rudina Seseri is founder and managing partner at Glasswing Ventures, an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Harvard Business School and an Executive-In-Residence for Harvard University's Innovation-Lab. First the computer, then the web and eventually social networks and smartphones all had the power to revolutionize how people live and how businesses operate. They destroyed companies that weren't able to adapt, while creating new winners in growing markets. While the exact timing and form of such waves of disruption are hard to predict, the pattern they follow is easy to recognize. Take the web/digital disruption, for example: There was a technological breakthrough (e.g.

Navigant Research estimates that utility companies will spend almost 50 billion on asset management and grid monitoring technology by 2023. Today many organizations are facing budgetary challenges in order to increase reliability, uptime and safety within their facilities. The industry is adapting to new technologies including utilization of advanced sensors and sensor fusion, edge devices, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to create the maintenance center of the future. Bernie Cook, former Director of Maintenance and Diagnostics at Duke Energy and now VP of Woyshner Service consulting, will join us to provide practical guidance and examples of how utilities can begin adapting these next generation technologies within their facilities to drive significant reduction in maintenance costs. Following Bernie, Stuart Gillen, Director of Business Development at SparkCognition, will give examples of how machine learning technologies are augmenting current practices that make maintenance engineers more efficient at predicting critical asset failure.

If you'd like to learn how to run R within Azure Machine Learning and SQL Server, you may be interested in these upcoming 4-day Practical Data Science courses, presented by Rafal Lukawiecki from Project Botticelli. In this classroom-based course, you will learn machine learning, data mining, some statistics, data preparation, and how to interpret the results. You will also learn how to formulate business questions in terms of data science hypotheses and experiments, and how to prepare inputs to answer those questions. Rafal will share his decade of hands-on experience while teaching you about Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) which is the foundation of Cortana Analytics Suite, and its highly-visual, on-premise companion, the SQL Server Analysis Services Data Mining engine, supplemented with the free Microsoft R Open and Microsoft R Server software. By the end of this course you will be able to plan and run data science projects.

With his research into artificial intelligence, he sees potential to make a significant difference in the defence and emergency management sectors. His expertise in this area also forms the basis for his teaching in both the Master of Information Technology and the Master of Computer Science at RMIT University. We spoke to him to find out more about his passion for this increasingly relevant area of IT. I'm an Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence within the School of Science and my work is focused on conducting research in a range of topics in artificial intelligence (AI). I also teach programming and specialist AI courses in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs; supervise a number of projects in smart systems product development; and I'm the program coordinator for the Bachelor of Computer Science. In addition to this, I manage and contribute to industry and Government funded research projects and have been part of nearly 1.5 million dollars' worth of research funding in the last five years.

Late last month, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft announced that they will create a non-profit organization called Partnership on Artificial Intelligence. At the White House Frontiers Conference held at Carnegie Mellon University today, thought leaders from these companies explained why AI has finally arrived and what challenges lie ahead. While AI research has been going on for more than 60 years, the technology is now at an inflection point, the panelists agreed. That has happened because of three things: faster, more powerful computers; critical computer science advances, mainly statistical machine learning and deep learning techniques; and the massive information available due to sensors and the Internet of Things. The early decades of AI saw "a succession of disappointments and promises not met," said Yann LeCun, director of AI at Facebook.

Amazon's aim is to have Alexa indistinguishable from a human voice. Dave Limp, Amazon's SVP of device and services business is standing in front of an image of the bridge of the starship Enterprise, explaining the inspiration for Amazon's surprise hit Echo device. "A lot of people wondered what was the inspiration for this vision, it really was this, this cultural icon it started here with the tap on the lapel to talk to the computer. And later in the Star Trek series you could be anywhere on the starship Enterprise and you could talk to the computer and she would respond quickly with an answer," he says. With a 100M investment fund and the opening up of cloud service APIs and an SDK, Alexa and the Echo could become the brains of your home automation and IoT network.

Cotton ball spider webs and peeled grape-eyeballs, begone! Because this year, the hottest new Halloween decoration is set to be the "Trumpkin," or a pumpkin carved in striking resemblance to none other than Donald Trump. Is the life of a fashion editor all front-row seats and Instagram perfection? Well, yes and no, as Marie Claire U.S.'s editor-in-chief Anne Fulenwider told us. Yes, it's glamorous, but it also means "putting your hair back in a ponytail, rolling up your sleeves, editing stories, and meeting with … Flipping posts, videos, images and more into Flipboard Magazines allows bloggers to show off passions that reach far beyond what's covered on their blog's niche. He showed us that just because music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual."

If you want to see some of the stuff that Tay tweeted, head over here(warning; some of her tweets make Donald Drumpf look tame). Tay's introduction by Microsoft was not just an attempt to build an AI that learnt from human interactions, but also one that potentially enriched Microsoft's brand and was designed also to harvest users information such as gender, location/zip codes, favourite foods, and so on (as was the Microsoft Age guessing software of last year). It harvested user interactions alright, but after a group of trolls launched a sustained, coordinated effort to influence Tay, the AI did exactly what Microsoft designed it to do -- it adapted to the language of it's so-called peers. Tay appears to have accomplished an analogous feat, except that instead of processing reams of Go data she mainlined interactions on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe. She had more negative social experiences between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning than a thousand of us do throughout puberty. It was peer pressure on uppers, "yes and" gone mad. No wonder she turned out the way she did. I've Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Twitter, New Yorker article, March 25th, 2016 Tay is a lesson to us in the burgeoning age of AI. Teaching Artificial Intelligences is not only about deep learning capability, but significantly about the data these AIs will consume, and not all data is good data.

It's a lightning-fast learner, speaks eight languages and is considered an expert in multiple fields. It's got an exemplary work ethic, is a speed reader and finds insights no one else can. On a personal note, it's a mean chef and even offers good dating advice. Named after IBM's first CEO, Watson was created back in 2007 as part of an effort by IBM Research to develop a question-answering system that could compete on the American quiz show "Jeopardy." Since trouncing its human opponents on the show in 2011, it has expanded considerably.

The White House released a 58 page narrative on how the government should prepare and approach utilizing Artificial Intelligence for a wide variety of applications; you can find the doc here, Executive Office of the President AI Report. Yet, I'm stuck filling out and mailing (millennials, I'm talking about postal mail with a stamp) a PDF for the City of Chicago to update my address they send my property taxes to, something not quite adding up but I digress. I am firm believer in the power of Artificial Intelligence to revolutionize all industries and how our government operates is no exception. The report does a great job at highlighting how a dedicated and concerted effort needs to be focused on Artificial Intelligence and the economic value that can be created from it – at a local, state and federal level. Overall, it was a solid read that talked a lot about the potential of Artificial Intelligence to change the world as we know it.