It a known fact that customers expect personalised and relevant information. This is because of their awareness of new developments in tech. They start to get higher expectations. This can be a real challenge for companies. They want good service on all platforms, indirectly or directly.

Thuy Truong thought her aching back was just a pulled muscle from working out. But then came a high fever that wouldn't go away during a visit to Vietnam. When a friend insisted Truong, 30, go to an emergency room, doctors told her the last thing she expected to hear: She had lung cancer. Back in Los Angeles, Truong learned the cancer was at stage 4 and she had about eight months to live. "My whole world was flipped upside down," says Truong, who had been splitting her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Asia for a new project after selling her startup.

The study involved 149 ads across 35 brands and 22,334 people in six countries. Realeyes measured how people felt while they watched the ads by using artificial intelligence to analyse their facial expressions through their webcams (with their consent). The study was designed in collaboration with the Mars Marketing Laboratory at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Realeyes' emotion data was cross-referenced with Mars, Incorporated's known sales lift data for each ad to investigate the relationship between emotions and sales performance. This created the largest emotional dataset linked to real business outcomes currently in existence.

Look around you; most people are heads-down, looking at their phone, whilst at the same time ordering anything from coffee to a train ticket. They are semi-aware of their surroundings and hooked within a messaging communication application window of some type on their device. Messaging windows are everywhere, and the rate of use and number of options available are both intensifying. Whether we like to admit it or not, messaging interaction platforms are contributing to our daily mobile screen time. They are the only applications we allow into our lives intrusively through notifications, and the only type of application we truly want to spend our precious time in.

A study by Realeyes and Mars, Incorporated has revealed emotion measurement technology can distinguish between ads which deliver high or zero/low sales lift with 75% accuracy. The study involved 149 ads across 35 brands and 22,334 people in six countries. Realeyes measured how people felt while they watched the ads by using artificial intelligence to analyse their facial expressions through their webcams (with their consent). The study was designed in collaboration with the Mars Marketing Laboratory at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Realeyes' emotion data was cross-referenced with Mars, Incorporated's known sales lift data for each ad to investigate the relationship between emotions and sales performance.

It might be easy to diagnose a cold based on a patient's hoarse voice, but researchers believe subtle vocal changes undetectable to the human ear can identify or predict certain difficult-to-diagnose diseases. That's where machine learning could step in, helping physicians detect a range of illnesses that can't be diagnosed with more traditional tests, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, according to MIT Technology Review. Charles Marmar a psychiatrist at New York University's Langone Medical Center is collecting voice samples from combat veterans to determine how specific characteristics like tone and pitch could help psychiatrists diagnose PTSD, traumatic brain injury or depression. Initial studies have found vocal cues can differentiate PTSD patients from healthy ones with 77% accuracy, but an influx of new data will strengthen those results. "Medical and psychiatric diagnosis will be more accurate when we have access to large amounts of biological and psychological data, including speech features," Marmar told MIT Technology Review.

Humanity can never be accused of lacking in self-esteem … or is it just rampant hubris? It seems like whatever we invent or influence, it ends up like us. We've anthropomorphized our deities, making them look and act like us, even though we're supposed to be above our petty squabbles, capable of pretty much anything, and we're supposed to improve ourselves by being like them. But the really big gamble -- and danger, I would argue -- is when we anthropomorphize technology. I'm talking about what happens when we apply our humanity, for better or worse, to the tech we invent and evolve: robots, and the software that runs them, and artificial intelligence (AI).

One of today's driving forces behind cognitive technologies such as artificial intelligence is 13-year-old Tanmay Bakshi (pictured), developer and IBM Champion for cloud. However, being the youngest developer to work on IBM Corp.'s Watson AI platform is clearly not enough for this talented teenager. He is now working on an AI-based project called The Cognitive Story, which senses people's intentions and articulates them to individuals or machines. "I'm working on many new projects with artificial intelligence, of course IBM Watson [and] ones provided by Darwin Ecosystem LLC," Bakshi said. "We are working on this really interesting project called "The Cognitive Story," [which] is basically this collaboration between IBM, Darwin Ecosystem, Not Rocket Science Inc. and me. We are working toward using the power of cognitive in order to change people's life in a positive way."

Craftworkz specializes in building applications that embed artificial intelligence. These applications can learn, discover, see, hear and interpret like humans. For several clients, Craftworkz has built custom chatbots using their own AI framework built in Python. To build this solution, Craftworkz has designed a microservices architecture that is deployed on IBM Bluemix. This highly available architecture consists of several Node.js and Python runtimes, Redis by Compose and several IBM containers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has occasionally gotten a bad rap in recent years. Futurologists like Elon Musk foresee a future where humans, due to becoming obsolete, will need to merge with machines in order to survive, while stories such as a Japanese company laying off over 30 employees to be replaced by robots have led to much hand-wringing about future job losses. Undoubtedly, the rise of the robots will deeply affect a wide variety of industries. However, in my opinion, AI will have huge benefits for the majority of sectors, especially for my own profession, digital advertising. While previous research from Oxford University has predicted that 33% of marketing associate professionals are at risk of being replaced, these are the lower-level jobs of the profession, and the scope of these jobs will definitely evolve as AI takes over some of these roles' responsibilities.