Do models or offline datasets ever really tell us what to do? Most application of supervised learning is predicated on this deception. Imagine you're a doctor tasked with choosing a cancer therapy. You could think hard about the problem and come up with some rules. But these rules would be overly simplistic, not personalized to the patient or customer.

Cyber criminals are quite adept at stealing data, money and privacy. No network is off limits as they exploit any point of weakness they find in businesses, homes, institutions, automobiles, utility networks and other portals. And their tactics evolve faster than security professionals can manage them. The question is, can we leverage technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing to win the war against cyber criminals? Cybersecurity experts shared their thoughts on this topic.

By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the US, starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That's just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week. These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.

SRI International, the Silicon Valley research lab where Apple's virtual assistant Siri was born, is working on a new generation of virtual assistants that respond to users' emotions. As artificial-intelligence systems such as those from Amazon, Google, and Facebook increasingly pervade our lives, there is an ever greater need for the machines to understand not only the words we speak, but what we mean as well--and emotional cues can be valuable here (see "AI's Language Problem"). "[Humans] change our behavior in reaction to how whoever we are talking to is feeling or what we think they're thinking," says William Mark, who leads SRI International's Information and Computing Sciences Division. "We want systems to be able to do the same thing." SRI is focused first on commercial partners for the technology, called SenSay Analytics.

Show a human any photograph and they'll able to predict what happens next with pretty decent accuracy. The woman riding her bike will keep on moving. The dog will catch the frisbee. The man is going to have a pratfall. It's such a basic skill that we don't consider the vast amount of information that is used to make these predictions -- concerning gravity, inertia, the nature of pratfalls, etc. -- and teaching computers to do the same is proving to be a key challenge in machine vision Researchers from MIT attempting to solve this problem have come up with some very impressive results, using specially trained neural networks to turn images into videos and getting the computer to essentially predict what happens next.

A Little Bird map of the world of artificial intelligence, as you can see above, analyzes the connections between people and organizations following one another on Twitter, and finds a variety of different subcommunity clusters. Over the next 30 days we'll be looking at clusters of influencers and experts across a wide range of other topics - and we'll see who in those topics is paying the most attention to AI's possible impacts in their field. The ability to analyze intersections of influence, interest, and expertise across topics is one of the things that makes Little Bird's influencer discovery uniquely powerful.

Nvidia (NVDA) on Tuesday unveiled a palm-sized AI computer to be used by China internet giant Baidu's (BIDU) self-driving cars. Among a series of AI and other announcements it made at a chip industry conference in China, Nvidia said the new Drive PX 2 artificial-intelligence platform for "AutoCruise" functions will let vehicles use "deep neural networks to process data from multiple cameras and sensors." It said the product will let Baidu and other customers "accelerate production of automated and autonomous vehicles." Nvidia stock fell 1.5% in the stock market today, to 59.87, after rising 2% at the open. Baidu stock fell 1.2% Tuesday, to 181.90.

Kicking off the first in a series of global GPU Technology Conferences, NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang today at GTC China unveiled technology that will accelerate the deep learning revolution that is sweeping across industries. Huang spoke in front of a crowd of more than 2,500 scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and press, gathered in Beijing for a day devoted to deep learning and AI. On stage he announced the Tesla P4 and P40 GPU accelerators for inferencing production workloads for AI services and, a small, energy-efficient AI supercomputer for highway driving -- the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 for AutoCruise. The new Tesla GPUs deliver massive leaps in efficiency and speed -- 45x compared to CPU-only systems -- for inferencing production workloads for AI services like voice-activated applications and movie and product recommendation engines. And they do it at a fraction of the cost of CPU systems. Powered by our new Parker SoC, the new palm-sized, 10-watt DRIVE PX 2 for AutoCruise lets automakers accelerate production of automated and autonomous vehicles, with features such as live HD mapping, highway autopilot and autonomous parking.

Video analytics platform Valossa just launched Val.ai, a platform to help video creators, advertisers and other video boffins figure out what's going on in video. In addition to computer-vision tricks ("Man on a beach", "car interior", "kitten is surprised"), the platform can do sentiment analyses (person is happy / person is sad / person is confused) and even heart rate analysis based on a high-definition video stream alone. "There are many uses for our technology," explains Ville Hulkko, the company's chief commercial officer. Imagine you are looking for a particular piece of footage of a dog and a ball on the beach, for example. If you don't remember when it was taken, you'll spend a long time looking for the correct video clip.

Boomtrain is sponsoring FUSE: The Convergence of Technology & Media, which will be held in Philadelphia on September 12-14. The media industry has been buzzing about artificial intelligence for years. Yet practical uses for the technology are only just being realized by companies like The New York Times, the BBC, and Condé Nast. Although applications for AI in the media business are still in their infancy, it will not take long for the technology to affect every aspect of the business, says Nick Edwards, CEO & co-founder of Boomtrain -- creator of a marketing platform built on AI tech. Edwards argues that AI is the most important technology impacting the industry today and it will continue to shape it in the years to come.