On my current project as well as several others, there is a noted increase in interest and curiosity about adding and integrating chatbots to digital platforms for Banks and Financial Institutions. This has spawned a wide variety of offerings in the marketplace – especially from the big players like Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Facebook. The initial question that most organization might tackle is whether or not to adopt one or multiple platform offerings in the marketplace or to grab some open source components and try to create your own chatbot engine. It is becoming very clear that a chatbot ecosystem is going to be made up of a series of components that will help organize and manage chatbot interactions. Other components may be integrated for special features or biometric authentication of a user as this space matures.

It is a coincidence, but one laden with meaning, that Nvidia is setting new highs selling graphics processors at the same time that SGI, one of the early innovators in the fields of graphics and supercomputing, is being acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Nvidia worked up from GPUs for gaming PCs to supercomputers, and has spread its technology to deep learning, visualization, and virtual desktops, all with much higher margins than GPUs for PCs or any other client device could deliver. SGI, in its various incarnations, stayed at the upper echelons of computing where there is, to a certain extent, less maneuvering room and more intense competition. In fact, systems using Nvidia's GPU motors have given the shared memory and clusters – many of the latter using Nvidia's Tesla accelerators to improve their computational efficiency – made by SGI a run for the money. SGI is no doubt wishing it had made GPUs for all kinds of devices and had transformed its OpenCL environment into something akin to CUDA.

Wee-Hyong Tok has decades of database systems experience, spanning academia and industry, including deep experience driving and shipping products and services that span distributed engineering teams from Asia and the United States. Before joining Microsoft, Tok worked on in-database analytics, demonstrating how association rule mining can be integrated into a relational database management system, Predator-Miner, which enables users to express data mining operations using SQL queries and provides opportunities for better query optimization and processing. Tok is instrumental in driving data mining boot camps in Asia and was honored as a Microsoft SQL Server Most Valuable Professional for several consecutive years because of his active contribution to the database community in Asia. He has co-authored several books, including the first book on Azure machine learning, Predictive Analytics with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, and has also published more than 20 peer-reviewed academic papers and journals. Tok holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the National University of Singapore.

Just recently, DeepMind's AlphaGo won a series of Go matches against a top-level human opponent. This victory has caused a mix of excitement and consternation. Are we seeing another case of a bigger and faster machine pushing the edge of performance, or are we perhaps approaching a fundamental crisis of "cognitive competition?" To answer this questions, we look at the succession of game-playing computers, and then explore the rise of "model-free methods" and what it foretells for our future. We have become used to the idea that purpose-built machines can surpass humans in almost any physical task.

The supercomputer swiftly cross-referenced a patient's genetic data to make a diagnosis that would have taken a human doctor weeks. In a world where big data is fast transforming healthcare across the globe, PCs could not only assist GPs, but eventually, replace them. Now, it appears that IBM's supercomputer Watson has greatly speeded up the diagnosis of a rare form of leukemia in a patient, and in doing so, may have saved her life. In January 2015, the patient was admitted to a hospital affiliated to the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science in Japan. Doctors initially diagnosed her with acute myeloid leukemia, a type of blood cancer.

This article has been reposted from Robohub.org Flying robots perform 100th show on Broadway, using new localization technology and algorithms designed and created by Verity Studios of Zurich in collaboration with Cirque du Soleil for their new show PARAMOUR. Since April, a troupe of eight flying machines has been performing in a Cirque du Soleil Broadway show called PARAMOUR. This group of quadcopters has completed its first 100 shows in front of a live theater audience, without a single incident. Given the string of recent safety incidents with drones (there's more), this begs the question: How was this accomplished? The Paramour quadcopters were designed and created by Verity Studios of Zurich and were transformed into flying lampshades in collaboration with Cirque du Soleil.

This video also provides an effective explanation of "The AI Effect", a term coined by John McCarthy to describe why people do not recognise the artificial intelligence that is with us today. Also see Part 2 - The Future of AI https://youtu.be/kQMQZjpUPh4

Estimates suggest that by the year 2020 we will have 20 billion devices connected to the Internet. Industries are shifting, lines are blurring, and markets are changing all as a result of a technology and digital-centric approach to commerce and business. In this podcast, Cliff Justice, Partner in KPMG's Innovation and Enterprise Solutions group, sits down with Stan Lepeak to discuss: The convergence of robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics are driving unparalleled business model transformation. To learn more visit KPMG's Digital Labor website: www.kpmg.com/us/digitallabor. To discover more, read Embracing the Cognitive Era.

"I think it's really cool, that people have gotten computer systems to learn to play games -- either against people or the same kinds of games that people play. The programs can do very well and their playing is actually very human-like. "The more recent example that's getting a lot of press is the Atari video game-playing program. They actually created a learning system that you can plug into a 1980s-era video game and it figures out how to play. On average, across a wide variety of games, it plays about as well as a really strong human video game player.

I understand the urge to create conflict in order to tell a story. However, I grow tired of reading predictions that machines will someday replace lawyers. As I have said often, machines and computers and AI, Oh My, will act as augmenters for real lawyers, and real lawyers will continue to offer legal advice, and to represent clients. This argument could have been made with any technological invention. Did the invention of the telephone replace lawyers or legal assistants?