Sometimes it feels like we're on a quest to amass more and more data, filling graphs and spreadsheets like there's no tomorrow. We know that it's increasingly possible to track people, and we're told that arranging and rearranging information might just help in the elusive hunt for killer insights. But, at Contagious, we're hearing far more people ask: 'What if data wasn't just used as a way to gain understanding of demographics or to more accurately target someone, but as a starting point for creativity?' Some of the major winners at this year's Cannes Lions festival, as well as a few other brands, have already put this approach into practice and are developing pieces of work that take data to the next level. We're seeing tangible projects that use ones and zeros as a creative spark to give people a way of grasping a complex idea in an emotional way, so that they can feel and experience as well as understand. From graphs to art One staggering way that data was brought to life recently was on behalf of Australia's Transport Accident Commission.

Google was using less than 40% less energy to cool a handful of its data centers with the push of a button using artificial intelligence called Deep Mind. Google flagged the use of artificial intelligence as a major achievement pointing towards how artificial intelligence can be used to make data centers, power plants, energy grids and manufacturing plants more efficient. As these huge, energy-intensive operations use power more efficiently, fewer greenhouse gases are emitted. "We're really thrilled about the environmental impact," said Mustafa Suleyman, who leads applied AI at Google DeepMind, a group of London researchers behind the project. Suleyman said that DeepMind quickly succeeds in other facilities like power plants which were beyond his expectation.

How can Banks help customers manage money throughout their life? In the early days of banking, bankers knew customers and could guide and advise them in person. Today's digital models have taken away that personal connection. Can we use technology to bring back the human connection? At many levels, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to bring back that connection.

It has been well documented that technology has played a major role in the Olympics this year in Rio. Athletes are using technology to train smarter, wearing specialized equipment to compete stronger and are recovering faster and more effectively all due to advances in technology and new innovations. Barbara Kendall has seen this transformation in a way in which few can relate. She competed in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Olympics in Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney and won gold, silver and bronze medals through her 25-year Sailboarding career. When her athletic career ended, she got into the technology world and is now a member of board of directors for an artificial intelligence (AI) company Arria NLG.

Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has pioneered self-improving general problem solvers since 1987, and deep learning neural networks since 1991. The recurrent neural networks developed by his research groups at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (at the Università della Svizzera italiana and University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Italian Switzerland) and the Technical University of Munich were the first to win official international contests. They have revolutionised handwriting recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, image captioning and are now available to over a billion users through Google, Microsoft, IBM, Baidu and many other companies. DeepMind is heavily influenced by his lab's former students. His team's Deep Learners were the first to win object detection and image segmentation contests and achieved the world's first superhuman visual classification results, winning nine international competitions in machine learning and pattern recognition (more than any other team).

We asked the representatives of Strategic Technologies Department "Microsoft Russia" to tell us how a new device Pix works and what services were used creating it. Professional photographers are familiar with the feeling when you take million shots expecting a perfect one, when it is essential to capture the moment because in a split second the shot will change forever. We all remember the feeling when we want to feel ourselves a pro and get a unique perfect shot using a smartphone, which is always with us, but unfortunately lacks some functions of a professional camera. Microsoft scientific-research team offered a solution of this problem and developed Microsoft Pix, an app for iPhone aimed at adjusting the settings for taking the best shots (ISO, exposition, focus) using the technologies of artificial intelligence. In this article we are going to consider it from a user's and developer's perspectives.

Ford Motor Co. intends to have a fully driverless vehicle -- no steering wheel, no pedals -- on the road within five years. The car will initially be used for commercial ride-hailing or ride-sharing services, with sales to consumers coming later. "This is a transformational moment in our industry and it is a transformational moment for our company," said CEO Mark Fields, as he announced the plan Tuesday at Ford's Silicon Valley campus in Palo Alto, California. Ford's approach to the autonomous car breaks from many other companies, like Mercedes-Benz and Tesla Motors, which plan to gradually add self-driving capability to traditional cars. Just last month, BMW AG, Intel Corp. and the automotive camera maker Mobileye announced a plan to put an autonomous vehicle with a steering wheel on the road by 2021.

Editor's Note: The author of this post is a member of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an increasingly common word in our legal lexicon over the past year. While AI is not new, ROSS Intelligence's announcement of its partnership with a handful of big law firms this past spring kicked off a wave of vibrant conversation about AI in the legal profession. AI is the use of automated, computer-based means by which large amounts of data are processed and analyzed to reach reasoned conclusions. The technology's potential benefits are immense.

As well, e2f's CEO, Michel Lopez, will be speaking along with Lilt's CEO, Spence Green, and GetYourGuide's Anne-Cécile Tomlinson, about our case study for the use of autoadaptive translation technology for large-scale localization projects. Machine Translation (MT) systems are traditionally criticized for poor quality output. Yet combining Machine Translation with auto-adaptive Machine Learning (ML) enables a new paradigm of "machine assistance." Of course, if you really want to learn how these new methods in machine learning, machine translation, and machine assistance are changing the world of translation, feel free to drop us a line!

Developers can't be everywhere, but a new service from Logz.io named Cognitive Insights can -- and it might keep developers from wasting valuable time on Stack Overflow. Currently, development teams have to search for fixes to their problems on the internet when they're stumped. It's a lot of hacking at a keyboard for the right SEO phrasing, and then a ton of time trying to work what they've found online into their workflow. Cognitive Insights does the work for them; it knows what technologies a team is working on -- and what languages they're writing code in -- based on information users feed to it. From there, it proactively searches the internet for topics relating to what a team is working on. It uses machine learning to understand issues that are similar to what may be happening in your own apps or services, and monitors similarities in how problems are solved.