There was no single moment that everything changed for Steve Wozniak. Instead, it was years of creativity and work that led to his development of the Apple I and the Apple II computers. "I look back now and wonder how did I think of doing things that no one thought of back then?" Wozniak said, speaking at an Alltech conference. Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. and chief scientist at Primary Data, received the Alltech Humanitarian Award at a conference in Lexington, Ky. Watching Wozniak talk is like seeing a brilliant orator at work, as he talks about numerous subjects at a lightning fast speed and gives insightful commentary on each topic before the listener can sometimes even process what has been said on the previous subject. Despite his whirlwind mind, or perhaps because of it, Wozniak is a fascinating speaker and at the conference, he touched upon everything from AI to VR and many things in between.

Advances in machine learning have been driven by innovations and ideas from many fields. Inspired by the way that humans learn, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is concerned with algorithms which improve with trial-and-error feedback to optimize future performance. Board games and video games often have well-defined reward functions which allow for straightforward optimization with RL algorithms. Algorithmic advances have allowed for RL to be in real-world problems, such as high degree-of-freedom robotic manipulation and large-scale recommendation tasks, with more complex goals. Twitter Cortex invests in novel state-of-the-art machine learning methods to improve the quality of our products.

Jason Averbook, an analyst and consultant, said the conference offers "huge learning opportunities" for people who are facing fast changes in technology. "The reason to attend is to keep learning and keep your eye sharp on what the market is doing, and get some ideas about what you might be doing down the road," he said. Katherine Jones, director of talent research and partner at Mercer LLC, based in New York, said areas such as machine thinking and artificial intelligence are important HR technology trends that will be on display. "Vendors have figured out how to do the bread and butter of managing people. Where can they go next?"

A series of chatterbots will attempt to fool judges - including me - into thinking they are also human. No computer has ever triumphed at the Loebner Prize - a version of the Turing Test, first proposed by the computer scientist Alan Turing, who worked at Bletchley codebreaking during World War Two. Steve Worswick is the person behind Mistuku, a bot anyone can chat with online and which was judged the best system in the 2013 contest. "It's slowly becoming more and more involved in our everyday lives," he told Sky News. "At the stage we're at at the moment, I don't think we need to be fearing about people's jobs. "The use is in call centres, frequently asked questions on websites.

The next paper from our reading group is by Song Han, Huizi Mao, and William J. Dally. It won the best paper award at ICLR 2016. It details three methods of compressing a neural network in order to reduce the size of the network on disk, improve performance, and decrease run time. Pre-trained convolutional neural networks are too large for mobile devices: AlexNet is 240 MB and VGG-16 is over 552 MB. This seems small when compared to a music library or large video, but the difference is that the networks reside in memory when running.

Dave Egts is chief technologist, North America public sector at Red Hat. Artificial intelligence showed a lot of promise decades ago when many thought expert systems and fuzzy logic would be used everywhere. Unfortunately, that didn't quite come to fruition, largely because the concepts were ahead of their time. Today, AI is a reality. We use it at home (the aforementioned Alexa, or Apple's Siri) and at work (so-called smart machines that do everything from monitoring social media traffic to providing second opinions for cancer treatments).

The good news for enterprises is that all the data they have been saving for years can now be turned into a competitive advantage and lead to the accomplishment of strategic goals. Revenue and senior management teams are concentrating on how they can capitalize on machine learnings' core strengths to transform the strategic vision of their businesses into a reality. These teams are focusing on business outcomes first and are looking for machine learning to accelerate and simplify, determining which factors most influence buying behavior and lead to goals being accomplished. My colleague, Elliot Yama, recently wrote about why it is necessary to leverage machine learning to drive business outcomes. Predicting propensity to buy across channels, making personalized recommendations to customers, forecasting long-term customer loyalty, and anticipating potential revenue and credit risks of buyers are some specific applications of machine learning right now.

Researchers at MIT have used a machine learning algorithm to create predictive video based off of still images. The algorithm can, according to its creators, create "fairly reasonable" videos based within the scene of the original image. Researchers at MIT have previously fed algorithms episodes of The Office and asked them to predict what would happen next. While the computers could not completely grasp Michael Scott's irony, they were able to guess correctly a fair amount of the time. In this experiment, researchers fed their neural net still images and asked it to actually create the footage it thought would follow instead of just guessing at what it would be.

Countless number of apps in Google Play Store and in the Apple store have inundated users with games, productivity apps and health apps all promising to improve life quality. Industry observers have been calling the rise of apps and the smartphone as the fourth revolution, but analysts are seeing a newer wave of technology that may surpass the impact of apps. Bots are early types of artificial intelligence which Google has used in its "Google Now" and Amazon which employed it in "Alexa," the voice assistant in its wireless speaker device Echo. Despite being in its early stages, several consumer applications are already available using bots like buying movie tickets online or making hotel reservations. Some businesses are already using bots to do former human tasks like handling customer service and scheduling meetings.

James K. Glassman is a visiting fellow at AEI, where he works on internet and communications policy in AEI's Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy. He rejoined AEI in September 2013 after having served as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, during which time he led America's public diplomacy outreach and inaugurated the use of new internet technology in these efforts, an approach he christened "public diplomacy 2.0." Before his government service, Mr. Glassman was a senior fellow at AEI, where he specialized in economics and technology and founded The American, AEI's magazine. In addition to his government service, he was a former president of The Atlantic, publisher of The New Republic, executive vice president of US News & World Report, and editor-in-chief and co-owner of Roll Call. Steve Lohr has covered technology, business, and economics for The New York Times for more than 20 years.