Is your smart phone really smart? Do you ever fear it will get too smart? Will it wake up one morning and decide to start running your life – deleting contacts it doesn't like, booking holidays online that it wants to go on with you or shifting your calendar appointments to suit its tastes? Perhaps, more realistically, you may be inclined to feel that your printer has a mind and mood swings of its own, seemingly out to get you when you are facing the most desperate deadline. But actually, the more we progress in the field of robotics, the more we are forced to recognise and appreciate that the mind is a unique wonder of the living world.

There are myriad services that make designing a website very easy, like Squarespace, Adobe Portfolio, and Google's Material Design Lite. But Wix, the website builder with 85 million users, wants to go one step further than its competitors--with an artificially intelligent design service based on carefully honed machine learning models. "How do you make something complex, like building a site, trivial for a user?" asks Nitzan Achsaf, the head of Wix Advanced Design Intelligence, or ADI. "When we talked to our users, we learned that the two main problems they faced are how to write great content and how to actually design a website so it looks beautiful." The ADI technology works like a virtual graphic designer.

We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert A. Simon predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world's chess champion. That didn't happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky's 1970 prediction that "in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being," we still consider that a feat of science fiction. The pioneers of artificial intelligence were surely off on the timing, but they weren't wrong; AI is coming.

But with the rollout of iOS 10, Apple will begin using differential privacy to collect and analyze user data from its keyboard, Spotlight, and Notes. Roth is a computer science professor who has quite literally written the book on differential privacy (it's titled Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy) and Federighi said Roth described Apple's work on differential privacy as "groundbreaking." Differential privacy builds on the introduction of deep linking in iOS 9 to improve Spotlight search. Although iOS 10 will only use differential privacy to improve the keyboard, deep linking, and Notes, Smith points out that Apple may use the strategy in maps, voice recognition, and other features if it proves successful.

Apple is stepping up its artificial intelligence efforts in a bid to keep pace with rivals who have been driving full-throttle down a machine learning-powered AI superhighway, thanks to their liberal attitude to mining user data. Not so Apple, which pitches itself as the lone defender of user privacy in a sea of data-hungry companies. While other data vampires slurp up location information, keyboard behavior and search queries, Apple has turned up its nose at users' information. The company consistently rolls out hardware solutions that make it more difficult for Apple (and hackers, governments and identity thieves) to access your data and has traditionally limited data analysis so it all occurs on the device instead of on Apple's servers. But there are a few sticking points in iOS where Apple needs to know what its users are doing in order to finesse its features, and that presents a problem for a company that puts privacy first.

Anirudh Koul's grandfather was slowly losing his ability to see. By 2014, he was having a hard time recognizing Koul's face in their weekly Skype calls bridging the vast distance between the Silicon Valley, where Koul is a data scientist at Microsoft, and the elderly man's home in New Delhi. So Koul started reading up on the challenges of vision loss and thinking about how the recent advances in deep learning, a potential-packed area of machine learning, could help give people a new way to recognize what's around them without actually seeing it. That was the modest beginning of Seeing AI. Two years later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced the budding technology to thundering applause at this year's Build conference.

Recent developments in energy management systems and the IoT (Internet of Things), have enabled easy, and low cost visibility of real time energy consumption data of not only main power lines but also individual devices. For anyone skilled in the art of energy management, it is obvious that such data contains incredible value that can help facility managers significantly increase the operational and energy efficiency of their sites. However, due to the shortage and cost of analytical resources, it is always a great challenge to practically and easily deliver such valuable insights out of so much data. As more and more devices are being monitored, the task becomes nearly impossible to manage manually. An article which I recently published as part of the latest research work we're doing in Panoramic Power, introduces an innovative data-science approach that helps automatically generate actionable energy and operational efficiency insights out of real time device level energy consumption data, using machine learning techniques.

Today, we are all connected--often, even MORE connected than we'd like to be. We have our phones, our tablets, our laptops, even our cars--each creating a daily explosion of data. Not to mention data that's generated from transactions, sensor activity, customer behavior, and so on. So, it's not that surprising to understand that malicious attacks are becoming more severe and complex. When a breach occurs, months can go by without detection.

Wanna know more about machine learning and predictive analytics? We're thrilled to welcome Rob Craft - Group Product Manager at Google Cloud Platform during lunch break! Coming from San-Francisco, Rob Craft is the lead Product Manager for the Cloud Intelligence team in Google Cloud Platform. He is responsible for Cloud Machine Learning, Cloud Search, Internet of Things, and Cloud Pub/Sub. Rob will discuss how you can leverage the power of ML whether you have a machine learning team of your own or if you just want to use ML as a service.

Microsoft and Google have announced plans to expand their machine learning capabilities, through acquisition and new research offices respectively, reports Telecoms.com.