Lukas Biewald, a former lead data scientist at Yahoo, founded CrowdFlower to build training data for machine learning. Training data is used by data scientists to teach their algorithms to learn. The company website says it is focused on making data useful by helping teams collect, clean, and label data at scale. Crowdflower raised a new 10 million round of funding in June 2016 that included Microsoft as an investor. The funding will be used to fuel adoption of CrowdFlower AI, launched last year, which enables machine learning algorithms to go beyond prediction to provide judgment on how likely the prediction is to be correct -- known as a confidence level.

From the invention of the wheel and steam engine to fax machines and desktop computers, technology has always shaped the way we work – but in the last few decades, the pace of innovation has sped up exponentially, forcing employees and those who lead them to constantly blaze new ground and determine new paradigms for the way things are done. The biggest recent change in work and workplace culture is the introduction of robots. This change has caused a lot of panic and unsettlement among researchers, pundits and everyday workers. There are many conflicting stats and studies that spell out doomsday scenarios for human workers, both in-house and outsourced, in the age of robotics: Forrester estimates that 22.7 million jobs will be displaced by 2025; the World Economic Forum estimates that it's closer to 5 million jobs by 2020. But these doomsday scenarios, observe Professor Leslie Willcocks and Professor Mary Lacity in their book Service Automation: Robotics & the Future of Work, rest on a few crucial flaws – namely, attaching scary numbers to vague dates, highlighting job loss without highlighting job creation and forgetting that historically we've adapted to larger changes in the job market without disaster.

Summary: The most important developments in Deep Learning and AI in the last year may not be technical at all, but rather a major change in business model. In the space of about six months all the majors have made their Deep Learning IP open source, hoping to gain on the competition from the power of the broader developer base and wide adoption. To say that the last year has been big for Deep Learning is an understatement. There have been some spectacular technical innovations like Microsoft winning the ImageNet competition with a neural net comprised of 152 layers (where 6 or 7 layers is more the norm). But the big action especially in the last six months has been in the business model for Deep Learning.

Trevor Sumner is a successful NYC-based technologist, CTO and co-founder of LocalVox, avid scuba diver, fisherman, amateur cook and adventure traveler. As the CTO of a marketing technology company, my main challenge is to keep up with rapid changes in technology and consumer behavior in order to create differentiated growth. In the last 10 years, mobile and social media have disrupted advertising, software and consumer electronics. Just like the rise of the PC and internet a decade before, these are foundational disruptions. Multiple groundbreaking technologies are looking to change how we interact with products, companies and each other, and they are being driven by a perfect storm of dependent innovation.

More importantly, we track how the functionality of Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Mobility, Big Data, Robotics and the Internet of Things will require new approaches to cybersecurity. If you enjoy the daily Threat Brief we know you will enjoy CTOvision.

Messaging platforms are coming of the age, and Chatbots are all the new trend now. They are touted as the next version of apps, like a huge change in the communication industry. Since Facebook has expanded access to its Messenger service, giving businesses the ability to reach customers better through different APIs, "Chatbots" has become the buzzword these days. Many questions are arising about Chatbots: What actually the Chatbots are? Are Chatbots a big opportunity for businesses?

There is a surge of interest and research into Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is seen as the new technological revolution in the work place with machines tipped to replace most human jobs. There is significant improvement in the field of AI currently, than in the history of mankind, AI has been branded a failure or a hype in the past, but that notion does not seem to be the case anymore with the emergence of more sophisticated computer algorithms that have helped machines to pass the Turin Test – A test which determines whether or not a machine computer is capable of thinking like a human. Critics have branded the Turin test an emotionally unsatisfying test for intelligence but agreed that a machine passing the Turin test is an important milestone for AI. It is important to highlight that to get more conclusive results from tests of AI, the Turin test has had twists and variations from the original test by Alan Turin.

We've been hearing a drumbeat recently of claims that a universal basic income--in effect, a monthly welfare check sent to everyone--is going to be necessary to save all the poor unfortunate souls put out of work by self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, robots, and other new forms of automation. We are told that the basic income will be "the only way to keep the country's economy afloat" in an age of automation, or that it will be necessary to absorb millions of truckers thrown out of middle-class jobs by the advent of autonomous vehicles. Of course, this being the field of high technology, there are always those who will say that it's not a bug but a feature. So we get Peter Diamandis reassuring us that "technological socialism" can "demonetize living." I have already thrown some skepticism at the idea that there is going to be a traumatic transition that will throw middle class people out on the streets without warning--rather than a long and gradual transition over decades, to which people can adapt.

Apple CEO Tim Cook waves to the crowd as takes the stage at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California, onJune 13, 2016. SAN FRANCISCO – Tim Cook described his role at the helm of the world's most valuable technology company as "lonely." Reflecting on his five years in the role, Apple's CEO said the constant scrutiny of his every decision – by media, analysts, investors and consumers – has forced him to develop a thicker skin. His comments were part of a 10,000-word interview with The Washington Post Monday. "It's sort of a lonely job," he said.