Artificial intelligence (AI) is used for more than just collecting data and predicting outcomes. It can be used to create better consumer experiences in a multitude of ways. The more consumer-centric your services are, the higher the conversion rate your brand is going to notice. Increased engagement, more social presence and an urgency for addressing consumer queries using AI create happy consumers. Use the data provided by social media interactions, website conversion rates and interaction performance to gain more sales conversions.

In central London this spring, eight of the world's greatest minds performed on a dimly lit stage in a wood-panelled theatre. An audience of hundreds watched in hushed reverence. This was the closing stretch of the 14-round Candidates' Tournament, to decide who would take on the current chess world champion, Viswanathan Anand, later this year. Each round took a day: one game could last seven or eight hours. Sometimes both players would be hunched over their board together, elbows on table, splayed fingers propping up heads as though to support their craniums against tremendous internal pressure. At times, one player would lean forward while his rival slumped back in an executive leather chair like a bored office worker, staring into space. Then the opponent would make his move, stop his clock, and stand up, wandering around to cast an expert glance over the positions in the other games before stalking upstage to pour himself more coffee.

In 1996, Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by IBM, was the first machine to win a chess match against the world champion Garry Kasparov. Since then, artificial intelligence has gone down a rapid development trajectory, now even questioning the divide between technology and creativity. Pushing past the notion of the machine as the extension of the artist, Harold Cohen, former artist and professor at the University of California San Diego, designed Aaron, an art-creating program that can paint still life and portraits of human figures without photos or other human input as reference. Artomatix, founded by Eric Risser in 2013, uses algorithms to leverage the'world's first artificial imagination'. The team at Deep Dream Google has spent recent years'teaching computers how to see, understand, and appreciate our world'.

Join Roger Schank for an informal evening of discussion about his work, the debunking of Cognitive Computing and what learning by doing really means in the 21st Century, from an educational standpoint. Roger is a pre-eminent professor of Cognitive Science with a focus on education and improving the experiences of students in class. Dr. Schank was Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Yale University and Director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Paris VII, Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University, and research fellow at the Institute for Semantics and Cognition in Switzerland. Roger will give a 40 min talk to the top leaders of Data Science in Barcelona Tech Companies as well as host a Q&A session.

It is widely forecasted that a shortage of skills in data science and analytics will mean a great deal of money is wasted through missed opportunities in coming years. Traditional academic establishments have begun to move to fill the gap.

THE WINOGRAD Schema Challenge is a competition intended to reward technologists who can build a system that understands the kind of ambiguous sentences humans come out with all the time, but which are simple for other humans, even stupid ones, to understand. Get it right 90 per cent of the time and 25,000 is up for grabs. And with things like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Google Assistant, the Winograd Schema Challenge must surely be as good as obsolete by now. The best two entrants at the event this week achieved correct scores only 48 per cent of the time, little better than randomly guessing the meaning of the sentences they were supposed to crack. This is despite a decade of advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which has barely shifted since the late 1950s, according to some.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they would be opening up the hugely popular virtual game environment Minecraft for scientific research. They launched Minecraft AIX to utilize the platform for research into areas such as AI. The platform was developed at Microsoft's Cambridge lab and allows researchers to use the Minecraft environment to test out their theories and, hopefully, therefore make progress in the field of AI. One of the first examples of this in practice was unveiled in a recently published paper whereby scientists put AI algorithms through their paces in Minecraft constructed mazes. Mazes have long been used in behavioral psychology as researchers tested the ability of rats and mice to remember things and learn new pathways, with a particular emphasis on reinforcement learning.

In an Artificial Intelligence future, those with high-end computing skills will not only survive, but thrive… This is according to Digital Skills Academy CEO and Founder, Paul Dunne. "No industry – from farming to fintech – is immune to the changes being wrought by the new digital economy," says Dunne. And Artificial Intelligence (AI), once the stuff of sci-fi, is already making an impact in the digital world, he notes. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a'robo-boss' and 45 percent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines. By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in five percent of all economic transactions and smart agents will facilitate 40 percent of mobile interactions.

Nvidia Corp.'s graphics cards have long been a household name around the world, or at least in houses with gamers in them. And now, the company has finally taken a step into gaming proper, launching its first-ever game Thursday. Titled "VR Funhouse," the game is a virtual reality collection of seven arcade-style mini games and has been designed with two purposes in mind. In a blog post, Nvidia said: "It was created with a dual-purpose. First, we wanted it to be fun. To be enjoyed by people of all ages, whether or not they've tried VR, whether or not they're an early adopter. Second, it was created to show how immersive VR can be when physics simulation is fully integrated into an experience."

Scientists are hoping to use Big Data and machine learning to prevent further outbreaks of Ebola, by identifying the likelihood of various bat species carrying the virus. Ebola is what's known as a filovirus, which are long filament-shaped viruses whose genome is encoded on a single strand of RNA. Ebola is the most famous example, but there are others which are just as deadly, such as the Marburg virus that takes its name from an outbreak in the city of Marburg, Germany, in 1967. Ebola, like Marburg, is spread when people come into direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected persons. The most infamous outbreak of Ebola occurred just two years ago, in West Africa in 2014, where 11,310 people died from the disease, the World Health Organization says.