"Make an appointment for 4pm today with Gary," I say to my assistant as I hang up from a promising phone call with a potential client. There was a time when you had to be high up in an organisation to have an assistant. My assistant is an artificially intelligent piece of software that lives in my smart phone. It makes me wonder if technologies like these could help a business grow. A report called The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to automation was published in 2013 by researchers from Oxford University.

For those of you that can remember the 80s TV series Knight Rider, it was about a guy and his self-driving car, which had an Artificial Intelligence called KITT and some cool secret agent-like gadgets (for you millennials….think Google Car with Amazon Alexa built by James Bond's Q). The hero of the show, Michael Knight could connect and talk with the car via his smartwatch and give KITT some instructions on how to stop the bad guys – though from time to time the car would disagree with him and do what it felt was statistically better. Today the technologies of science fiction from Knight Rider are fast becoming mainstream, and the insurance industry is faced with a glut of new issues and challenges caused by the ever evolving world of connected devices, artificial intelligence, and autonomous technology. Consider a scenario where KITT makes a decision and causes a car accident that results in an insurance claim.

Third, the Recommendation engine of the Social Network, continued to suggest me thing from that domain, a domain in which I am not that interested, but I was skipping them, in the hope to get better suggestions on the domain I actually cared much more. That engagement, at the moment, means for AI to talk more about things that we talk most, to read more about things we read more, to watch more things that we used to watch in the past, and the AI thinks that it is doing a great job. Out world, physical or virtual (Internet) is dominated by Artificial Intelligence. It is about the time we start to look into if, to understand how our Algorithms and AI is Radicalizing humans on the altar on Engagement and Profits.

An artificial intelligence programmed to fly fighter jets has defeated several air combat experts in a simulation, according to a paper published in the Journal of Defense Management. The AI, called ALPHA, was built by Psibernetix, Inc. with assistance from the Air Force Research Laboratory. ALPHA's purpose was to be better than highly trained fighter pilots, and so far it appears up to the task. The AI has gone up against its predecessor, the AFRL's previous AI program, and a series of human opponents. It emerged victorious each time. One of those opponents, Gene Lee, is a retired Air Force colonel with extensive flight experience both as a pilot and an instructor.

Arun Uday is a former VC and currently the founder of Tring Chat, a mobile group chat app that allows users to search and join chat groups of interest to them. Chatbots seem to be climbing the proverbial peak of the tech hype curve with every passing day. Popular messaging apps have been attempting to outdo each other in terms of making their platforms open for bot development. Businesses are also rushing to embrace them, as evidenced by the interest they are eliciting from even staid institutions such as centuries-old banks. The frenetic action notwithstanding, the moot point, as always, is whether bots actually solve any real end-user need.

DESCRIPTION The Amazon Payments Team manages all Amazon branded payment offerings, globally. These offerings are growing rapidly and we are continuously adding new market-leading features and launching new products. Our payments products (Amazon Co-Branded Credit Cards, Private Labeled Credit Cards, Non-Amazon Branded Credit Cards, Shop with Points and Foreign Exchange) provide the most innovative payment experience on and off Amazon. We manage a financial services ad serving platform (billions of impressions per year) through Amazons purchase path where we offer Amazon branded and non-branded payment products and services. Our team of high caliber software developers, statisticians, analysts and product managers use rigorous quantitative approaches to ensure that we target the right product to the right customer at the right moment, managing tradeoffs between click through rate, approval rates and lifetime value.

Maybe there's something beyond computation in the sense that we don't understand and we can't describe what's going on inside living systems using computation only. When we build computational models of living systems--such as a self-evolving system or an artificial immunology system--they're not as robust or rich as real living systems. Maybe we're missing something, but what could that something be? Rodney Brooks, a computer scientists and Director of the MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is looking for something beyond computation in the sense that we don't understand and we can't describe what's going on inside living systems using computation only. When we build computational models of living systems, such as a self-evolving system or an artificial immunology system -- they're not as robust or rich as real living systems.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots Ellen Huet Bloomberg "The company [X.ai] Multiple former AI trainers said that as recently as a few months ago, trainers looked over parts of almost all incoming e-mails--to evaluate what Amy guessed the user was saying--before Amy generated an auto response...Some people might find it unnerving to message a bot only to realize it's a human." ROBOTICS: Robots Could Hack Turing Test by Keeping Silent Tia Ghose Scientific American "Warwick was organizing Turing tests for the 60th anniversary of Turing's death when he and his colleague Huma Shah, also a computer scientist at Coventry University, noticed something curious: Occasionally, some of the AI chatbots broke and remained silent, confusing the interrogators. 'When they did so, the judge, on every occasion, was not able to say it was a machine,' Warwick told Live Science." HEALTH: A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline Gina Kolata The New York Times "Something strange is going on in medicine. Major diseases, like colon cancer, dementia and heart disease, are waning in wealthy countries, and improved diagnosis and treatment cannot fully explain it...But Dr. Cummings, intrigued by the waning of disease, has a provocative idea for further investigation...Perhaps, he said, all these degenerative diseases share something in common, something inside aging cells themselves."

The world's first AI healthcare companion for the home can store, dispense and even order medication The rise of fitness trackers and exercise programs with a cult following have made it clear that our society is desperate to get and remain healthy. Those looking for a high-tech way to keep track of their well-being might be interested in a new home health robot called Pillo. A combination of face recognition, machine learning, automation and video conferencing make Pillo a personal health assistant that can even dispense your daily vitamins and medication. According to the company responsible for the device, the system uses facial recognition and can identify the face and voice of every user in a household, and dispense the right pills at the appropriate time. The medication is stored in a tamper-proof casing that can fit up to 250 medium-sized pills.

The problem of content discovery and recommendation is very common in many machine learning applications: social networks, news aggregators and search engines are constantly updating and tweaking their algorithms to give individual users a unique experience. Personalization engines suggest relevant content with the objective of maximizing a specific metric. For example: a news website might want to increase the number of clicks in a session; on the other hand, for an e-commerce app it is very important to identify visitors that are more likely to buy a product in order to target them with special offers. In this post I will explore some techniques that can be used to generate recommendations and predictions using the amazingly fast Vowpal Wabbit library. Make sure that you have installed scikit-learn and Vowpal Wabbit's Prerequisite Software.