First there was big data – extremely large data sets that made it possible to use data analytics to reveal patterns and trends, allowing businesses to improve customer relations and production efficiency. Then came fast data analytics – the application of big data analytics in real-time to help solve issues with customer relations, security, and other challenges before they became problems. Now, with machine learning, the concepts of big data and fast data analytics can be used in combination with artificial intelligence (AI) to avoid these problems and challenges in the first place. So what is machine learning, and how can it help your business? Machine learning is a subset of AI that lets computers "learn" without explicitly being programmed.

Cancer is a tricky disease to treat. With more than one hundred known types, each responding differently to treatment depending on the person they're growing inside (and dozens of other factors), oncologists certainly have their work cut out for them. Machine learning could soon make their jobs a bit easier. Our new event for New York is focused on quality, not quantity. IBM's supercomputer Watson has been applying machine learning to personalized cancer treatment for some time.

So do Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft -- and each is working to make its voice assistant your personal Einstein of choice. Amazon recently enhanced its efforts by nabbing an AI expert from eBay, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Hassan Sawaf is now Amazon's director of artificial intelligence, focusing on "the user experience for users of Amazon's search capability across all products and businesses," according to Sawaf's LinkedIn page. The Journal was one of the first to spot Sawaf's updated responsibilities on LinkedIn. "eBay has wide and deep capabilities in AI across the technology organization, and recently completed two acquisitions ... that contribute tech and talent to our AI and machine learning/machine translation capabilities," an eBay spokeswoman said in an email.

Firefighters have a truly noble job as their responsibilities often require putting one's own life on the line. A NASA researcher is using the Assistant for Understanding Data through Reasoning, Extraction, and sYnthesis (AUDREY), an artificial intelligence tool, to make a day's work a bit easier and safer for these heroes. The IoT-powered system will work with wearables that will track a firefighter's location via GPS and record heat and air quality in the specific points as they go around the site of the emergency. All this data is then tied-up with satellite imagery of the scene to build a game plan. AUDREY can lead a team of firefighters: artificial intelligence will determine which areas would likely collapse in an emergency and help any number of firefighters work together as efficiently as possible.

The big news on March 12 of this year was of the Go-playing AI-system AlphaGo securing victory against 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol by winning the third straight game of a five-game match in Seoul, Korea. After Deep Blue's victory against chess world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, the game of Go was the next grand challenge for game-playing artificial intelligence. Go has defied the brute-force methods in game-tree search that worked so successfully in chess. In 2012, Communications published a Research Highlight article by Sylvain Gelly et al. on computer Go, which reported that "Programs based on Monte-Carlo tree search now play at human-master levels and are beginning to challenge top professional players." AlphaGo combines tree-search techniques with search-space reduction techniques that use deep learning. Its victory is a stunning achievement and another milestone in the inexorable march of AI research.

Call it artificial intelligence with a human touch. This week, two California universities separately announced new centers devoted to studying the ways in which AI can help humanity. USC's Viterbi School of Engineering and its School of Social Work said Wednesday that they had joined forces to launch the Center on Artificial Intelligence for Social Solutions. A day earlier, the University of California, Berkeley unveiled its newly minted Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Even as science and technology pundits (including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk) warn of the overthrow of humanity by advanced artificial intelligence - a prospect that appears nowhere on the horizon, experts say - scientists are increasingly looking ahead to the ways in which AI might actually aid human lives.

Amazon lures away eBay's artificial intelligence chief Microsoft is making refrigerators way'cooler' with a shot of Artificial Intelligence Amazon poaches eBay A.I. chief, continues ramping up machine learning operations Many of today's martech companies that espouse machine learning capabilities simply offer a ...

There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding around what computers can and can't do. Unfortunately, while artificial intelligence might not be as sensational as a summer blockbuster, it's just as exciting in the market research industry. A quick education on the difference between data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning (and how they play together) can give you a basic understanding of why they're the real stars of market research, and, if used together, can present a formidable tactic that one can use to conquer any data question or conundrum. Data mining is actually one of the newer methods that market research companies are employing, but it serves as a foundation for both artificial intelligence and machine learning. Data mining, as a practice, is more than just culling supersets of information from various sources. Data mining can cull and then aggregate information to alert you to patterns and correlations that you hadn't even thought of.

The entire tech industry is racing to build artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, computers that can learn and react to stuff they've never seen before, sort of like a human brain. Naturally, tech giant Google is smack dab in the middle of this trend. Just like the move to mobile gave rise to companies like Uber and Snapchat, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt believes that machine learning will underpin the next crop of game-changing successful companies. Google has built a team of machine learning researchers that call themselves the Google Brain Team. As this team creates new machine learning technology, they make it available to others as a service on Google's cloud.

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.