Imagine a future office in which the robot not only makes you tea but actually gets better at it over time. That is the very real future that awaits most workers. "You can imagine a world in five years' time when teams are made up of company employees, crowd specialists, and cognitive robots -- all creating and collaborating together", says Shamus Rae, the head of innovation and investments for KPMG in the UK. The future of robotic process automation also promises to bring more "human" intelligence to robots. "The robot would gain experience from its many interactions -- potentially thousands or more each day -- and gradually improve its responses", Rae explains in the KPMG report "The crowd in the cloud".

Dmitry Malioutov can't say much about what he built. As a research scientist at IBM, Malioutov spends part of his time building machine learning systems that solve difficult problems faced by IBM's corporate clients. One such program was meant for a large insurance corporation. It was a challenging assignment, requiring a sophisticated algorithm. When it came time to describe the results to his client, though, there was a wrinkle. "We couldn't explain the model to them because they didn't have the training in machine learning." In fact, it may not have helped even if they were machine learning experts.

Cognitive computing means giving computers the ability to work out complex problems for themselves. Just like humans, cognitive computers benefit greatly from experience, learning better ways to solve problems with each encounter. When a traditional system of rules finds a task impossible, cognitive computing sees only an opportunity to expand its knowledge. The necessity for cognitive computing in the Internet of Things (IoT) arises from the importance of data in modern business. In the smart IoT venues of the future, everyone from startups to enterprises to homeowners will use data to make decisions using facts rather than instincts.

Intel has many disparate business units doing their own thing. The challenging task of tethering them is a top priority for Intel's second-in-command, Venkata Renduchintala. Renduchintala, known as Murthy, was appointed last November to run Intel's PC, client, and internet of things businesses. He's made his presence felt: Within six months of his appointment, Intel cut struggling products like mobile embedded CPUs and sharpened its focus on growth areas of IoT, servers, and connectivity. One common thread in all the areas of growth is connectivity, with modems and wireless products now as important to Intel as its CPUs.

I am gonna give a talk on introduction to deep learning. I wish to try to answer some elementary / basic questions that a novice in the field might have. I also would like to point out some caveats in DL. So, what questions and topics should I focus on? I shall put your references in my talk too.

There's no human instinct more basic than speech, and yet, for many people, talking can be taxing. One in 14 working-age Americans suffer from voice disorders that are often associated with abnormal vocal behaviors -- some of which can cause damage to vocal cord tissue and lead to the formation of nodules or polyps that interfere with normal speech production. Unfortunately, many behaviorally-based voice disorders are not well understood. In particular, patients with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) often experience deteriorating voice quality and vocal fatigue ("tired voice") in the absence of any clear vocal cord damage or other medical problems, which makes the condition both hard to diagnose and hard to treat. But a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) believes that better understanding of conditions like MTD is possible through machine learning.

Many of the inventors who fueled the digital revolution have become household names. Innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all contributed mightily to the technologies that have transformed our daily lives and society. If you're not an engineer, however, you have probably never heard of the brilliant inventor Rudolf Kálmán, a Budapest-born engineer and mathematician who died on July 2 in Gainesville, Florida, at age 86. His fundamental contribution, an algorithm called the Kalman filter, made possible many essential technological achievements of the last 50 years. These include aerospace systems such as the computers that landed Apollo astronauts on the moon, robotic vehicles that explore our world from the deep sea to the outer planets, and nearly any endeavor that needs to estimate the state of the world from noisy data. Someone once described the entire GPS system--an Earth-girdling constellation of satellites, ground stations, and computers as "one enormous Kalman filter."

I am just a humble technologist and receive average of three emails per day ( I know this is a very small number of emails when you compare to people who have oodles of followers). These are the emails asking me suggestions about "how to become a data scientist". I did a napkin calculation and it added up to 1000 emails per year. I am so happy to get these emails and answer them one by one. By nature and nurture I love teaching, helping and mentoring.

There's been a lot of talk in the office about "bots", while definitely a buzz word at the moment is the hype justified? What are bots and what do they do? Bots are primarily services you can interact with, in a pseudo-human way, via a chat interface; be it text based, speech or visual communication. Essentially they let you do everyday tasks without having to deal with the tedium of human interaction. Although being thrust into the limelight by companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Slack the chatbot has a much longer history than you might expect.

From Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, individuals around the globe are calling for caution and warning about the potentially dangerous pitfalls of artificially intelligent systems. It seems that each day brings forth a new autonomous robot or a new use for an intelligent system. Add to that all the movies and books in which AI is the evil "bad guy," and it's easy to feel like undercurrents of fear are slowly permeating our society. But how much of our fear is a joke, and how much of our fear is justified? We have previously covered the sensationalism and hype that often surrounds conversations about AI, but here, the Future of Life brings experts together to take a deeper dive into these issues.