What were you doing when you were 14 years old? Sean Le Van, from Aneheim in California, will put you to shame. The teenager has created a contextually aware, artifically intelligent bot that you can converse with on the web. The bot – which Le Van calls Acuman, an acronym for Artificial Chatting Utility Matching Algorithmic Nodes – acts as a personal assistant that responds to every-day language and learns information about a user's life and personality. Le Van used his own scripting language and natural language processing algorithms to create Acuman, which uses the data gathered from conversations to analyse and create categorised visual representations in the form of infographics.

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the leading international academic conference in machine learning, attracting 2000 participants. This year it was held in NYC and I attended on behalf of Init.ai. Three of the tutorial sessions I attended were quite impactful. Anyone working on conversational apps, chatbots, and deep learning would be interested in these topics. I've written before about Residual Neural Network research, but listening to Kaiming was informative.

The first attempts by startups using artificial intelligence to design websites haven't amounted to much. A much-anticipated company called The Grid has failed to deliver on expectations. There is still no AI art hanging in MOMA yet. Instead of building more clever bots, startups like Wix are mining troves of user data to train algorithms that offer sound design advice for business websites. Website building platforms are experimenting with AI as part of the future of design.

The World Economic Forum has put together a list of the top 10 emerging technologies that will change our lives. The list includes nanosensors that will circulate through the human body, a battery that will be able to power an entire town and socially aware artificial intelligence that will track our finances and health. These are not far-flung visions, according to the forum. They are technologies that are on the cusp of having a meaningful impact. "Horizon scanning for emerging technologies is crucial to staying abreast of developments that can radically transform our world, enabling timely expert analysis in preparation for these disruptors," said Bernard Meyerson, chairman of the World Economic Forum council that compiled the list of the top 10 emerging technologies in 2016.

The Budapest BI Forum is the leading vendor-independent business intelligence and analytics conference in Hungary. One of the main feature of the event is the multi-subject approach: we have Pydata, Rstats, Data visualization, machine learning and BI talk in the 2 day s of the conference. This way speaking at the Budapest BI Forum in any of the tracks also provides a special chance to learn about other interesting fields of BI and analytics. This year we will have the following track, with a separate CFP for each. All speakers are welcome to submit more than one talks to the same or to different tracks.

A key challenge when working on what we could term "large-scale" PPC accounts is efficiency. There will always be more that you could do if given an unlimited amount of time to build out and optimize an AdWords campaign; therefore, the trick is managing priorities and being efficient with your time. In this post, I will talk about how concepts from machine learning could potentially be applied to help with the efficiency part. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, a computer is like "a bicycle for the mind." The generally understood meaning of this statement is that, in the same way a bike can increase the efficiency of human-powered locomotion, computers can increase human mental productivity and output.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and freelance writer. He writes regularly on business, technology and politics. Thanks to technologies that generate, store and analyze huge sets of data, companies are able to perform tasks that previously were impossible. But the added benefit does come with its own setbacks, specifically from a security standpoint. With reams of data being generated and transferred over networks, cybersecurity experts will have a hard time monitoring everything that gets exchanged -- potential threats can easily go unnoticed.

It's your nighttime routine: You drop your phone onto the nightstand charging pad, and it asks about your day. You tell it, talking to the virtual personal assistant just like you'd talk to a friend. Your phone's artificial intelligence knows you almost as well as you know yourself (maybe even better). So when it suggests ways to get through tomorrow's calendar, you trust its advice. AI is practically everywhere, and getting smarter all the time.

Industrial robots used to be dumb, somewhat inflexible, and mostly blind - but also fast, precise and very efficient. As the cost of components, sensors and vision systems has been dropping, vision-enabled robots are becoming more prevalent and capable, and the industry is dramatically changing. Those changes can be seen in recent trends in China, investments in and acquisitions of robotic companies, by an analysis of recent startup companies, new and widening application areas for robot use, and technological developments. For the past 50 years industrial robots have picked the low-hanging fruit of manufacturing by handling the dull, dirty and dangerous tasks. But today, as consumers want more personalized products, and want them faster, and as costs have dropped and executives have pushed for greater productivity through automation, mobile and vision-enabled robots are emerging and being deployed in many new application areas, particularly for SMEs and in logistics, but also in government, agriculture, surveying, construction and healthcare.

Intent on driving automation throughout the business, DLA Piper has partnered with Canadian tech firm Kira Systems to launch an artificial intelligence tool for document review during M&A transactions. The move comes just three months after Kira Systems secured a similar deal with Big Four accountant Deloitte and follows a 200-person UK redundancy round by DLA Piper as part of an attempt to shift towards automation. 'We believe that this innovative technology will do for corporate transactional work what e-discovery has done for litigation,' said Jonathan Klein, chair of DLA Piper's US M&A practice. 'It will not only make due diligence faster and more efficient, but will mitigate risk throughout the process, all of which are important benefits for our clients and the firm.' Kira Systems has developed machine-learning software, which will be available for DLA Piper lawyers across the global firm, to search and analyse text in contracts.