Over three separate days of testing, Rebchook's favorite recommendation came from the algorithm each day, as did two of his three overall favorites. "I couldn't really differentiate between what the bots picked and the human picked," Rebchook said. "I guess if computers can beat us at chess and Go, they can best us at picking houses, too."

Not too many years from now, your day will look very different. You will have self-driving cars to rid you of your nightmare commute and AI assistants to take care of everyday drudgery: from grocery shopping to setting up appointments. Smart drugs and nanobots loaded in your blood will keep your body and mind performing at their peak. Wearable sensors and smart clothing will ensure that your doctor knows if anything goes wrong. It'll be a life that even the Jetsons will be jealous of, and it'll be yours if you just let Silicon Valley do its thing--right?

The internet has evolved a great deal since it was first launched back in the 80s. Back then, there was no such thing as a high-speed internet connection, hence the need for simplistic, text-based website with no variations in font, typography, layout or visual content. A website back then consisted of nothing but pages and pages of standard text placed in front of a white background, with no pictures and no font variations except those in size. One could argue that reading a book was probably a more enriched experience back then. Fast forward a decade, and we got our standard wired connections.

The media is to blame for the hysteria around Artificial Intelligence (AI), according to senior strategic designer at BCG Digital Ventures, Chris Naylor. Human intelligences exhibited by machines is changing the way consumers interact with businesses and can be taken advantage of right now- without the world coming to a fiery end. Naylor explained to the audience at yesterday's Daze of Disruption the three main types of AI and how businesses, like Spotify and ANZ, are using artificial intelligence to successfully power customer interaction and drive greater value. "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to boom into a 70 billion dollar industry, it's easy to see why it's touted as the next big thing. But the hype is a shrouded with mystery, AI is often seen as this futuristic technology out of reach for most companies and limited to powering autonomous cars and useless chatbots. But the reality is that AI is here and you can take advantage of it today," Naylor said.

IBM Research announced a multi-year collaboration with the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT to advance the scientific field of machine vision, a core aspect of artificial intelligence. The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension's (BM3C) goal will be to develop cognitive computing systems that emulate the human ability to understand and integrate inputs from multiple sources of audio and visual information into a detailed computer representation of the world that can be used in a variety of computer applications in industries such as healthcare, education, and entertainment. The BM3C will address technical challenges around both pattern recognition and prediction methods in the field of machine vision that are currently impossible for machines alone to accomplish. For instance, humans watching a short video of a real-world event can easily recognize and produce a verbal description of what happened in the clip as well as assess and predict the likelihood of a variety of subsequent events, but for a machine, this ability is currently impossible. Beginning in September 2016 in Cambridge, the BMC3 collaboration will bring together leading brain, cognitive, and computer scientists to conduct research in the field of unsupervised machine understanding of audio-visual streams of data, using insights from next-generation models of the brain to inform advances in machine vision.

Oracle and Salesforce both announced "AI" initiatives this week, but there are differences in the scope and scale of what's promised, the pace of their rollouts, and even how they're talking about artificial intelligence. For starters, neither vendor is talking about the sort of sentient, general-purpose AI seen in science fiction depictions ranging from "Iron Man" and "Star Trek" to "The Terminator" and "2001 a Space Odyssey." Rather, both vendors are talking about assisting humans with "smart" apps that apply closed-loop machine learning and data science to combinations of customer data and third-party data. In some apps you'll also see human-to-machine and machine-to-human interaction capabilities including natural language processing, voice recognition, and machine vision. Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps are powered by the Web-scale Oracle Data Cloud andthe company's massive cloud compute capacity.

Machine Learning is being used to solve many problems, which problems can you use it for? In the last 5 years there has been growing success using machine learning. Rapidly increasing processor speed and access to large scale data sets are allowing for many new problems to utilize machine learning successfully. Today machine learning is being applied by innovative companies in almost every field. Using machine learning to solve problems is becoming central to many companies core points of differentiation.

Come and talk about machine learning! We speak about everything from your favorite algorithmes like Random forest and deep learning to domain applications like genomics, image processing, robotics and so on. We also talk implementation because tools and infrastructure are also important. You are welcome to present your startup project or your work related to machine learning.

San Francisco, Calif.: Sentient Technologies, the provider of distributed artificial intelligence (AI), today announced Sentient Ascend, the first conversion rate optimization (CRO) solution that uses AI to evolve winning designs for online marketers. Improving testing speeds by as much as 100 times or more over current A/B and multivariate testing solutions, Ascend gives marketers the freedom to try many more copy, image, design and interaction changes to accelerate the path to increased revenues and conversions. Existing A/B testing tools can only evaluate the impact of one marketing idea at a time and require substantial traffic to achieve a result, and existing multivariate testing solutions require even more traffic to test a limited number of changes. With Ascend, marketers can test dozens of ideas simultaneously, and the AI determines not only which individual changes are helpful, but also which combination of changes achieves the best results. Some early Ascend customers are testing millions of potential design combinations at once.

Imagine a driverless vehicle capable of using a variety of emojis, honks and signs to communicate its intentions to nearby drivers and pedestrians. Drive.ai, a new entrant in the autonomous vehicle race, has begun testing a fleet of such vehicles near its home base in Mountain View, Calif. The company, staffed by researchers from Stanford University's artificial intelligence laboratory, is getting an assist from Steve Girsky, a former General Motors executive who has been named to the Drive.ai Girsky stepped down from GM's board in June after holding several posts at the automaker, including vice chairman of GM and chairman of its Adam Opel subsidiary. "We all know that the automotive industry is in the midst of a foundational shift," Girsky said in a statement.