The Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum published a book in January called "The 4th Industrial Revolution." In his book, Klaus Schwab proposes that we are at the beginning of a fundamental shift in human/technological interaction. Advances in robotics will redefine the workforce. Advances in information technology will deliver meaningful artificial intelligence. And advances in biotechnology will redefine what it means to be human.

Scott Huffman, leader of Google Assistant engineering, is working on a high-profile example of practical AI. Artificial intelligence could be a huge an economic boon, but not if its benefits help only the highest-skilled workers, whose jobs computers can't replace, President Barack Obama believes. With AI research rapidly becoming AI products from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and other companies, the technology is no longer an academic curiosity. Obama expects great things of AI as it spreads to new industries, he said in an interview with Wired magazine published Wednesday. But his optimism was guarded.

I made a strategic decision Sunday -- to sit out the second round of presidential debates. Instead, I enjoyed a fascinating expose on artificial intelligence (AI) on "60 Minutes." We all have pre-conceived notions about AI. Stephen Hawking has said when machines are smarter than us, it will bring about the end of the world. Specifically, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Most of us are familiar with the fictitious Terminator film and television franchise, unfolding the saga of John Conner versus Skynet, which follows Hawking's thinking.

Recently, Microsoft took the unusual step of placing its Cortana and Bing product teams inside the same organization as Microsoft Research. The new Microsoft AI and Research Group will be led by computer vision pioneer and executive vice president Harry Shum, whose 20-year Microsoft career involves leading Bing's search efforts from 2007 through 2013 and helping launch Microsoft Research China. We asked Shum how this new organization will benefit Microsoft's digital assistant in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. The language of the blog post announcing the formation of Microsoft's new AI division, together with how Satya Nadella has characterized it, suggests that Microsoft thinks it's in a space race of sorts when it comes to artificial intelligence. I just feel that the timing's right to go big on AI.

In an interview with Wired Magazine, Obama spoke of redesigning the social compact and starting a conversation around fair wages. He cited teachers as being underpaid, and called for a reexamination of what we value, and what we'll pay for. Obama addressed basic income, a proposal for all citizens to receive a government stipend in order to meet their costs of living. The idea has gained recent support among some futurists and economists, given concerns over how technology will eliminate jobs and impact salaries in coming years. "Whether a universal income is the right model -- is it gonna be accepted by a broad base of people? Related: Is Uber's push for self-driving cars a job killer? A 2013 Oxford study concluded that 47% of U.S. jobs are at risk of being handled by machines over perhaps a decade or two. Some experts fear we're headed toward mass unemployment. Truck drivers, cab drivers and deliveryman are the most prominent example of those at risk. The tech and car industries are currently pouring billions into self-driving vehicle technology. Businesses have long embraced automation because it lowers their costs and improves profits. But advances in technology are expected to broadly expand the jobs that automated machines can handle. Of course, most Americans once worked on farms. Our country has survived transitions before. Yet experts caution this revolution in how we work could unfold much quicker, making it more difficult and unpleasant. "Oh, we survived the Industrial Revolution, sure we did.

The BMW Motorrad VISION NEXT 100 concept motorcycle is unveiled in Santa Monica, Calif., on the last of four international stops of BMW's tour into its next 100 years. The motorcycle is self balancing. But looking deeper, saying that it wants to imagine the company a century from now, BMW's leaders are focused on robotic cars, electric power, new and recycled materials replacing steel and radically new manufacturing techniques, including those that would enhance its manufacturing footprint in the U.S., where the factory in Spartanburg, S.C., is on its way to becoming the company's largest. The German automaker brought its Vision Next 100 presentation to an airport hangar here this week after several stops around the world to talk about what it sees in the future and to and show off four prototype vehicles, including a new self-balancing motorcycle in which riders never need to put their feet down. No matter how people choose to transport themselves, BMW says it wants to be a leader at the high end of the market.

DeepMind's latest AI has a "working memory" so that it can learn how to solve tasks for itself – such as how best to get from A to B on the London tube network. "The thing can learn to compute what it has to, rather than being programmed," says Murray Shanahan at Imperial College, London, who wasn't involved with the work. Called a Differentiable Neural Computer (DNC), the system succeeds because it combines neural networks, which are good at learning but not so good at storing data, with an external memory. It can retrieve items from its memory in the order they were recorded – a key innovation that ensures they don't get overwritten too quickly and helps the system tackle complicated data it hasn't seen before. The DNC works out how to interpret a data set on its own, following some basic training on random graphs.

British lawmakers want more transparency and less bias in decision-making -- not their own, of course, but in decisions made by AI systems. As more and more software systems and connected devices employ artificial intelligence technologies to make decisions for their owners, the lawmakers want to know what's behind their thinking. The U.K. Parliament's Science and Technology Committee has been studying the need for more regulation in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. Recent advances in AI technology raise a host of social, ethical and legal questions, the committee's members said in a report published Wednesday. We need, they said, to think about whether transparency in decisions made by AI systems is important; whether it's possible to minimise bias being accidentally built into them; and how we might verify that such technology is operating as intended and will not lead to unwanted or unpredictable behaviors.

Before assessing R and Python, I will start with Wolfram Mathematica. You can handle lists and matrices easily, you have all the best mathematical functions, backup of Wolfram Alpha and extremely sophisticated graphics visualizations, that allow you, for instance, to make and visualize an animated gradient descent, animate different weights for a given neural network, choose a specific Machine Learning algorithm and automatically classify your dataset in classes, plot stunning 3D visualizations, make animations and manipulate variables values dynamically at the same time you see the output of your calculation. It has 4.65 Gb size and comes with all libraries integrated. It's a great program when you know the formulae for Machine Learning algorithms, so you can build them from scratch, in a completely customized way. You can also do face recognition, geolocation of objects with 3D plots of map surface, handle cellular automata like any other and develop social networks models with artificial intelligence completely customized.

TensorFlow is an open-source library from Google developed for creating deep learning models. Please fill out the following form so that the printable cheat sheet can be sent to you via e-mail.