In recent years, it's been exciting watching advances in AI like IBM's Watson smashing humans at Jeopardy and Google's AlphaGo AI beating champions at the game of Go a decade earlier than expected. But the sophisticated algorithms under the hood are really the stars of the show. These powerful computing systems are fundamentally changing industries and automating a growing number of day-to-day tasks. At the same time, AI still isn't perfect, and we've seen hints of its potential dark side. Our algorithms are only as good as the data we feed them.

SAN FRANCISCO – Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions like the one that grounded about 2,000 Delta flights last week because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s, airline industry and technology experts have said. Airlines have spent heavily to introduce new features such as automated check-in kiosks, real-time luggage tracking and slick mobile apps. But they have avoided the steep cost of rebuilding their reservations systems from the ground up, former airline executives said. Scott Nason, former chief information officer at American Airlines Group Inc., said long-term investments in computer technology were a tough sell when he worked there. "Most airlines were on the verge of going out of business for many years, so investment of any kind had to have short payback periods," said Nason, who left American in 2009 and is now an independent consultant.

The field of study that focuses on the interactions between human language and computers is called Natural Language Processing, or NLP for short. It sits at the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics (Wikipedia). "Nat ur al Lan guage Pro cessing is a field that cov ers com puter un der stand ing and ma nip u la tion of hu man lan guage, and it's ripe with pos sib il it ies for news gath er ing," Anthony Pesce said in Natural Language Processing in the kitchen. "You usu ally hear about it in the con text of ana lyz ing large pools of legis la tion or other doc u ment sets, at tempt ing to dis cov er pat terns or root out cor rup tion." NLP is a way for computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language in a smart and useful way.

This interview took place at the RE•WORK Deep Learning Summit in Boston, on 12-13 May 2016. Yoshua Bengio (PhD in CS, McGill University, 1991), post-docs at M.I.T. (Michael Jordan) and AT&T Bell Labs (Yann LeCun), CS professor at Université de Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms, NSERC Chair, CIFAR Fellow, member of NIPS foundation board and former program/general chair, co-created ICLR conference, authored two books and over 300 publications, the most cited being in the areas of deep learning, recurrent networks, probabilistic learning, natural language and manifold learning. He is among the most cited Canadian computer scientists and is or has been associate editor of the top journals in machine learning and neural networks. Get more information on the Deep Learning Book here: http://www.deeplearningbook.org

Yoshua Bengio leads one of the world's preëminent research groups developing a powerful AI technique known as deep learning. The startling capabilities that deep learning has given computers in recent years, from human-level voice recognition and image classification to basic conversational skills, have prompted warnings about the progress AI is making toward matching, or perhaps surpassing, human intelligence. Prominent figures such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have even cautioned that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity. Musk and others are investing millions of dollars in researching the potential dangers of AI, as well as possible solutions. But the direst statements sound overblown to many of the people who are actually developing the technology.

Asking about the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine learning reminds me a little of the transition to suitcases with wheels. Do you remember lugging around those old suitcases? If not, good for you - this original advertisement from US Luggage will take you back! Thank Bernard Sadow for persistence with his idea to add wheels, because when he pitched his idea people thought he was crazy. Surely no one would want to pull their own suitcase?

Many business leaders recognise that developments in robotics and AI are coming and that they will bring significant changes for business and society. These developments are not happening slowly and are all around us. Take my friend for example. When I called him recently, he was in his Tesla, driving up the A3, having a bowl of cereal. This shows how quickly technology is moving.

Jana Eggers will be speaking on "How to Scope an AI Project" at the upcoming O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data and data science. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the O'Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics. Most recently she has been helping companies across many industries adopt AI technologies as a way to enable a range of intelligent data applications.

Firefighters have only their wits and five senses to rely on inside a burning building. But research developed in part by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, may change that, introducing artificial intelligence (AI) that could collect data on temperatures, gases and other danger signals and guide a team of first responders safely through the flames. AUDREY, the Assistant for Understanding Data through Reasoning, Extraction, and sYnthesis, has received the Undersecretary's Award for Collaboration from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in recognition of its joint development by JPL and DHS. It's part of the Next Generation First Responder (NGFR) program, a DHS initiative to innovate new ways to keep firefighters, police, paramedics and other first responders safe in the field through increased awareness of their surroundings and communication abilities. But the big picture is even more exciting: AUDREY can track an entire team of firefighters, sending relevant signals to individuals while helping to make recommendations for how they could work together.

What do you see when you think about artificial intelligence? With a new competition, XPRIZE and IBM Watson challenge us to think slightly more pragmatically (or at least less apocalyptically dystopian) about the implications of artificial intelligence research on the future of humanity. To date, more than 1,000 people have registered to form teams with plans to tackle such issues as health, climate, transportation, space travel, robots, city planning, surgery, education and even civil rights. Because the competition is an open challenge, teams are expected to come up with criteria on which they will ultimately be judged in 2020. Some teams may be backed by corporations or angels, while others may go it alone as a team.