Over the summer, I spent some time in Silicon Valley, the home of technology and innovation. I took part in a program at Singularity University, a group whose mission is to help all of us understand how to utilize cutting-edge technologies to positively impact the world around us. I spend every day talking and thinking about technology and ways to make it do more for UBS Wealth Management's clients and staff. For two decades I've worked with different technology and I've seen some amazing changes – I remember not only when we didn't have emails on our phones in our pockets, but when we didn't even have emails at all! So given my experience and what I do day-in, day-out, I love that the speed at which technology is developing still astounds me.

Microsoft's Ignite conference is bringing 23,000 IT professionals to Atlanta, Georgia this week and the company is using this opportunity to talk about how it plans to bring more intelligence to its tools and platforms. As companies gather more and more data, Microsoft argues, it's becoming imperative that the tools these companies use also become smarter. This means bringing better analytics to the workplace to help individual employees become more productive, but also bringing machine learning-powered tools to services like its CRM service Dynamics 365. One thing the company's representatives stressed repeatedly during a small press event ahead of the conference was that Microsoft doesn't believe AI technologies will replace humans but instead empower them. We'll see how that works out in the long run.

The retail industry is inundated with buzzwords that describe the best way to engage with consumers -- such as omnichannel marketing, customer journey, and a 360-degree view -- to provide a more personalized and optimized experience. All of these buzzwords point to a common problem most retail marketers are aching to solve: How can they use customer data to create timely insight into what customers are doing in-store and/or online and convert that into strategies and actions that increase sales? It's an age old question with new age solutions, and the retail industry is now leveraging artificial intelligence (A.I.) to usher in a unique way of thinking about this problem. In fact, a new chart shows there are 45 A.I. companies focused on retail across a range of verticals, including recommendations, merchandising, search, conversational commerce, and especially multichannel marketing. Using omnichannel retailing, the ability to connect with a customer both online and offline, is ideal because omnichannel customers have a 30 percent higher lifetime value than single channel customers.

If I had to pick one area I find most exciting, most potentially disruptive and thus the best opportunity for return on investment, it would be A.I. Or is it the other way around? The anatomy of infrastructure is not unlike that of the human body, and we all know it's possible to live long, healthy lives. But we also know that systems out of balance in the body lead to sickness and disease (or, in the case of Industrial Revolution, economic disease and monetary sickness). It hasn't happened yet, as history has shown that human behavior, fear, and greed are more sure in life than death and taxes. Remember, we're trying to construct an infrastructure with systems working in harmony: the Anatomy of the (Healthy) Future Clearly, the best representation of the nervous system in our cyber-anatomy infrastructure is Artificial Intelligence, the future of which is Deep Learning (Augmented Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Neural Networks have actually been around some time).

Earlier this year, Google's DeepMind artificial brain conquered a world-class champion at the game of Go -- a feat that even amazed Elon Musk -- and might well take on "StarCraft," too. But Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is less impressed, at least judging from comments he made at Monday's Microsoft Ignite event in Atlanta. Instead of playing games, Nadella says, Microsoft is focused on putting artificial intelligence into every app, everywhere. "We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games. We are pursuing AI so that we can empower every person and every institution that people build with tools of AI so that they can go on to solve the most pressing problems of our society and our economy," Nadella says.

A Reinforcement Learning scheme is presented, enabling Autonomous Agent control (including an Arduino robot via bluetooth). I would very much appreciate feedback on both the utility and biological/psychological plausibility of these features. I would then like to revise the paper and add acknowledgements accordingly. BEFORE YOU READ The paper was written for the purpose of discussing the validity (or not) of the 3 features it provides in terms of utility and plausibility (if you feel the plausibility concerns are a distraction they can be safely ignored). The experiments are small in scale yet big enough for demonstration, while the scheme itself is readily scalable and could be incorporated with other features (eg CNN's, LSTM).

Machine learning is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Every time we talk to our smartphones, search for images or ask for restaurant recommendations, we are interacting with machine learning algorithms. They take as input large amounts of raw data, like the entire text of an encyclopedia, or the entire archives of a newspaper, and analyze the information to extract patterns that might not be visible to human analysts. But when these large data sets include social bias, the machines learn that too. If the source documents reflect gender bias – if they more often have the word'doctor' near the word'he' than near'she,' and the word'nurse' more commonly near'she' than'he' – then the algorithm learns those biases too, the researcher explains According to James Zou, Assistant Professor for Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, machine systems are learning human biases when examples of such are included in the training set.

Microsoft's servers are now powered by optimized custom chips that joined together to translate the entirety of Wikipedia in literally less than a blink of an eye. In a demonstration at Microsoft's Ignite conference on Orlando, Microsoft tapped what it called its "global hyperscale" cloud to translate 3 billion words across 5 million articles in less than a tenth of a second. Microsoft helped custom-design the programmable logic components, or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), that it has added to each of its computing nodes. The company recognizes that smarter, more computationally intensive technologies will require more computing power on the back end, whether those technologies revolve around Microsoft's own Cortana digital assistant--which can now intelligently reschedule your workout to meet your fitness goals--or something that can recognize a distracted drivers, as the automobile manufacturer Volvo is researching. Microsoft's Cortana now includes health-specific information.

DeepBench is an open source benchmarking tool that measures the performance of basic operations involved in training deep neural networks. These operations are executed on different hardware platforms using neural network libraries. Deepbench is available as a repository on github. The primary purpose of DeepBench is to benchmark operations that are important to deep learning on different hardware platforms. Although the fundamental computations behind deep learning are well understood, the way they are used in practice can be surprisingly diverse.

If you've been following along with this series of blog posts, then you already know what a huge fan I am of Keras. Keras is a super powerful, easy to use Python library for building neural networks and deep learning networks. In the remainder of this blog post, I'll demonstrate how to build a simple neural network using Python and Keras, and then apply it to the task of image classification. To start this post, we'll quickly review the most common neural network architecture -- feedforward networks. We'll then write some Python code to define our feedforward neural network and specifically apply it to the Kaggle Dogs vs. Cats classification challenge.