If you are a strong-armed NFL quarterback who reads defenses like genre fiction, a movie star whose name alone can open a film in China, or a stock picker who beats Buffet every time, congratulations: you are almost as valuable as a data scientist or machine learning engineer with a PhD from Stanford, MIT, or Carnegie Mellon. At least it seems that way. Every company in Silicon Valley -- increasingly, every company everywhere -- is frantically competing for those human prizes, in a human resources version of a truffle hunt. As businesses now realize that their competitiveness relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence in general, job openings for those trained in the field well exceed all the people in the world who aren't locked up by Facebook, Google, and other superpowers. But what if you could get the benefits of AI without having to hire those hard-to-find and expensive-to-woo talents?

Modern music gets a lot of flack for sounding mass-produced, particularly genres like pop and country. Flow Machines is a project funded by European Research Council, and has created Artificial Intelligence tools that can compose music. The project's FlowComposer tool draws on a database of over 13,000 leadsheets, basic scores of the melodies and harmonies of tracks, ranging from the Beatles to Broadway hits. The tool can compose songs from this data automatically, or be used as a tool by composers, allowing musicians to create tracks that are a blend between automatic compositions and their own original work. While the concept of music partially composed by AIs may be frightening, particularly for music purists like myself, Flow Machines says the project doesn't want to replace human creativity and musicality.

Artificial intelligence has been widely hyped for its potential to transform a broad swath of industries, from cybersecurity to medicine. Now, we might start to get a clearer picture for how it could be used to change the way we shop. Macy's announced Wednesday that it has teamed up with IBM Watson to use artificial intelligence as a customer service tool in 10 of its stores. The retailer dubbed the pilot program "Macy's On Call," and it will allow customers to type in questions on their phones and receive answers. Unlike some chatbots that can only regurgitate preprogrammed responses based on keywords, IBM Watson will learn over time to give better answers that are customized to individual stores.

Several machine learning based investment models are already deployed and functioning. Some of them focus on technical analysis and apply investment models based upon daily fluctuations in the market. Having the ability to observe patterns, provide quick feedback, and adjust course, these algorithms take positions, and exit from positions, while accumulating trading profits and simultaneously learning from each transaction. Then there are other models that are based upon the fundamentals of the stock. The one that I found of great interest is the one developed by SignalFire.

Robots' potential to take over the world is a commonly expressed fear in the world of AI, but at least one Turing Award winner doesn't see it happening that way. Rather than replacing mankind, technology will create a new kind of human that will coexist with its predecessors while taking advantage of new tech-enabled tools. So argued Raj Reddy, former founding director of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and 1994 winner of the Turing Award, at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany last week. "I could not have predicted much of what has happened in AI," Reddy told an audience of journalists at a press conference. "Four or five things happened in AI in the last decade that I didn't think would happen in my lifetime," including achievements in language translation and AI's triumph at the game of Go.

Machine learning is, as simple search for news can prove, a hot topic in the tech industry. Its varied applications make machine learning truly unique: from the existing ones, such as disease prediction or loan assessment, to future applications, like generating videos from photos or identifying pixelated faces, the list is virtually endless. Another important application of machine learning has to do with Internet security. More specifically, an issue that affects the mobile advertising industry: fraud. The rise in fraud is one of the greatest challenges currently that mobile video advertising has to face these days, as bots and other sources can have a negative impact on the advertisement's effectiveness.

This is another installment of Spare5's "Conversations in Machine Learning" blog series. Each week, our content human, Cassie, shares a summary of a recent conversation we had with a machine learning team and potential customer--what they're building, how they're handling training data today, etc. Read more about the series here. Shut up and take my money, is basically how I feel about this week's rad application of machine learning. We've had a few calls recently with the Research Engineer and Head of Research at a company that made us all at Spare5 go, "Oh I love them! Coooool!" when we found out they'd come into our prospective-customers universe.

It's just the way it is: the human being is a lazy creature. If it's possible not to do something, we don't do it. However, paradoxically this is a good thing, because laziness is… the engine of progress! Well, if a job's considered too hard or long-winded or complex for humans to do, certain lazy (but conscientious) humans (Homo Laziens?:) give the job to a machine! In cybersecurity we call it optimization.

AI is the cornerstone of the next generation of technology applications and is already on its way to infiltrating every part of our daily lives. As such, training AI from a diverse set of perspectives on the world is vital if we hope to advance AI in a way that makes the world a better place. The ever-important task of fostering diversity in the burgeoning AI community is a responsibility that falls upon all of us, not just corporate gatekeepers or select data scientists with advanced technical degrees. Matt Zeiler unveils groundbreaking new technologies that will transform the way AI is "taught" and make both teaching and using AI accessible to anyone in the world.

As Artificial Intelligence race is on, major tech companies are already developing Chatbots to serve their customer in a better way. Many customer services oriented businesses believe that Artificial Intelligence tool could help their companies. But are not sure if their business is sophisticated enough to implement Chatbots in their systems. While there are some imperatives for implementing an AI-based virtual assistant in your organisation, the entry barrier is much lower than many believe. Chatbots and Service Industry can go together till long extend to solve customer queries efficiently saving human cost and giving customers a pleasant and personalised experience.