Microsoft is adding the commercial version of the Docker Engine into Windows Server 2016, continuing the company's efforts to reach out to include Linux in its plans. The announcement, made this morning at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta, coincides with the official launch of Windows Server 2016, which is due to reach general availability in October. It means that Docker will now run on Windows, but in a way, it's also a step in Microsoft's efforts to keep Azure open. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has not only embraced the cloud but has also accepted the importance of Linux there. Windows could have continued with its own form of containers, but it's now embraced Docker.

Artificial Intelligence has been the holy grail of Computer Science for over a hundred years and we are finally starting to scratch the first layer of this incredibly complex system. Currently, all the major players in the Technology business are investing heavily in the R&D of AI systems, but it would seem we are still very far away from the development of a true AI. To truly get a good grasp on where the industry stood in its quest for intelligent machines, we sat down with John Giannandrea, the former Head of Machine Learning and currently the SVP Search at Google, for a one-on-one. From the conversation, it became clear that we have had the latest developments in automation all wrong, and here is the real picture. John was quick to clarify that there are three distinct levels of Machine Intelligence; Machine Learning, Machine Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence.

With all of the advancements made in artificial intelligence and machine learning today, there seems to be an influx of tools and solutions that are starting to leverage cognitive capabilities. But do these tools and solutions actually reflect the true meaning of AI? According to Jonas Nwuke, platform manager for IBM Watson, AI (or cognitive computing) is "intended to help people make better decisions. The system learns at scale, gets better through experience, and interacts with humans in a more natural way." The problem in today's software development industry is that because AI is such a big umbrella term, it often gets misused or overused, according to Todd Anglin, chief evangelist at Progress.

It was an accidental discovery. Miami based start up, Premonition, was set up to do legal analytics. They assembled the World's largest litigation database and trained an artificial intelligence system to read it. While primarily focused on finding the performance of individual lawyers before specific judges to determine potential relationships, they noticed that a particularly prolific foreclosure attorney produced an 83% win rate for one of his bank clients, while another was only winning 16% of their foreclosures, essentially the same case types. "We couldn't figure it out and had all kinds of foolish theories why," Premonition co-founder and inventor, Toby Unwin confides.

On Thursday Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a 1 million award for the creation of a conversational artificial intelligence that can talk to people "coherently and engagingly" for a third of an hour. To aid the endeavor, up to ten teams will get a 100,000 stipend from Amazon along with Alexa-enabled devices, free cloud computing and support from Amazon's Alexa team. The push comes as Amazon's digital assistant Alexa is coming to multiple platforms beyond its original home on Amazon's Echo speaker, and as artificial intelligence is anticipated to become the cutting edge of tech companies' interfaces with their customers. The Alexa Prize announcement comes the same day several of the world's largest tech companies announced the formation of a consortium aimed at fostering the promise of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it was reorganizing part of the company to better position itself as one of the significant players in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. The company has created a new organization that combines its research group, one of the largest in the technology industry, and a number of products that rely on artificial intelligence, including its Bing search engine and Cortana virtual assistant. The new artificial intelligence and research group at Microsoft will have more than 5,000 employees. Microsoft also said that one of its top executives, Qi Lu, has left the company to recuperate from a serious bicycling accident that occurred several months ago. Once he recovers, Mr. Lu will continue to act as an adviser to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, and Bill Gates, its co-founder, Mr. Nadella said in an email to company employees Thursday. The creation of a new group at Microsoft with a focus on artificial intelligence was already planned, but the departure of Mr. Lu -- a respected computer scientist who spent a decade at Yahoo -- affected the shape of the new organization.

As speedy as today's supercomputers are, they're still nowhere near the complexity and power of the brains sitting inside of our heads. But the rapid rise of computing technology and artificial intelligence poses a very interesting question: will we one day be able to upload our minds to the cloud? Imagine mapping all of the information inside your head to a stack of servers; your mind living forever in a carefully cooled data center. It sounds like the start of a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, or the idea behind the excellent gaming thriller SOMA, but there are already scientists working making this concept a reality. Take the 2045 Initiative, for example, spearheaded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov with the aim of dispensing with our biological bodies by - you've guessed it - 2045.

Customer service interactions are time intensive and are frequently a source of customer irritation – particularly when interacting with a customer service agent that has little experience in your matter. Chatbots are increasingly effective in customer service interactions. Chatbots recognize and understand specific phrases in customer requests (typically written requests, but spoken natural language requests are rapidly advancing) and then respond to customers accordingly. Chatbots self-learn as they receive further information and customer requests, enabling them to improve accuracy and conduct conversations more naturally. I also include Apple's SIRI and Microsoft's Cortana in the category of chatbots – although Apple and Microsoft might disagree preferring to classify SIRI and Cortana as digital assistants.

"This software intelligently reviews millions of records in a short amount of time, enabling us to determine breast cancer risk more efficiently using a patient's mammogram. This has the potential to decrease unnecessary biopsies," says Stephen T. Wong, Ph.D., P.E., chair of the Department of Systems Medicine and Bioengineering at Houston Methodist Research Institute. The team led by Wong and Jenny C. Chang, M.D., director of the Houston Methodist Cancer Center used the AI software to evaluate mammograms and pathology reports of 500 breast cancer patients. The software scanned patient charts, collected diagnostic features and correlated mammogram findings with breast cancer subtype. Clinicians used results, like the expression of tumor proteins, to accurately predict each patient's probability of breast cancer diagnosis.

The competition's goal was to automate the right whale recognition process using a dataset of aerial photographs of individual whales. The terms and conditions for the competition stated that to collect the prize, the winning team had to provide source code and a description of how to recreate the winning solution. A fair request, but as it turned out, the winning solution's authors spent about three weeks recreating all of the steps that led them to the winning machine learning model. When data scientists work on a problem, they need to test many different approaches -- various algorithms, neural network structures, numerous hyperparameter values that can be optimized etc. The process of validating one approach can be called an experiment.