It's been a busy few weeks for us here at Sentient. We were lucky enough to spend our afternoon chatting about the future of AI in retail at ShopTalk, then spent our evening talking about the AI with some of the brightest minds in the industry at WIRED. We'll have videos of both for everyone in the coming weeks, but wanted to share our co-founder Babak Hodjat's appearance at Collision earlier this month to give you a taste of the way we see AI at Sentient: At any rate, we've been racking up the frequent flier miles lately. And the next month and change is no different. Here are some of our upcoming speaking gigs.

To address this problem, Cogitai is committed to developing systems that learn continually from their experience. "Our continual-learning technology will allow computer systems to build knowledge and skills simply through interacting with the world around them," said Dr. Mark Ring, CEO of Cogitai. "Simple knowledge and skills gained through early experience will allow development of more complex knowledge and skills in a powerful cycle of never-ending self-improvement. Though this ambition has always been one of the major goals of AI, it has never been considered feasible in the near term by those knowledgeable in the field, but our team believes it sees a path toward this dream." "Our company will build upon decades of research in the fields of Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning, harnessing recent progress, but going well beyond current technology to create systems that learn for themselves how the world works in ways reminiscent of how human children do," said Dr. Satinder Singh, Chief Scientist of Cogitai.

More and more, financial firms are turning to machines to do the job humans have done for decades. Last spring, wealth management firm Charles Schwab launched a new service called Schwab Intelligent Portfolios. The service is unique in that it's not a person who decides where to invest your money, it's an algorithm - lines of code programmed into a computer. "It's lower cost for the investor," says Tobin McDaniel, who leads the Schwab Intelligent Portfolios team. "As opposed to working with a traditional advisor where you might pay up to 1%, here you get portfolio management at essentially no management fee."

If the global professional services company has its way, digital workers may be just around the corner. Accenture has partnered with IT and business process automation company IPsoft to create artificially intelligent technology to perform a variety of tasks at enterprises worldwide. This new AI arm of Accenture is based on IPsoft's cognitive agent, Amelia, which IPsoft bills as "your first digital employee." Amelia, which uses natural language to communicate with customers "just like a human," can perform a host of service desk duties. This can include helping customers open new bank accounts, processing insurance claims and checking in patients at hospitals.

I really found interesting this bit from a recent Andreessen Horowitz a16z podcast that looked at Google I/O, Google's annual developer conference. Kyle: So Steven, yesterday Google announced quite a few different products and services, several cynical commenters on twitter came out with the idea that, "You know, hey, we've seen a lot of these things before, oh a computer you control with your voice in the home, a bot that you interact with to, you know, interact with different services. We've seen this before why is google showing all of this off now? None of this feels new." But you pushed back against that.

Three weeks ago, New Scientist revealed that Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind has access to the identifiable personal medical information of millions of UK patients through a data-sharing agreement with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. Now, a New Scientist investigation has found that Google DeepMind deployed a medical app called Streams for monitoring kidney conditions without first contacting the relevant regulatory authority. Our investigation also asks whether an ethical approval process that covers this kind of data transfer should have been obtained, and raises questions about the basis under which Royal Free is sharing data with Google DeepMind. DeepMind's partnership with the Royal Free provides it with fully identifiable information – including names, addresses and details of medical conditions – for the 1.6 million patients treated at Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free each year. It also includes complete data on all patients treated by the trust in the past five years.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Long before the public learned that the Large Hadron Collider had unearthed the Higgs boson, physicists like Matt Hollingsworth knew it was coming. They had seen hints in the data: First, a small, statistically dubious bump where the subatomic particle--the one that explains why everything in the universe has mass--should be. Then, the bump began to grow. Every day, some employees would religiously check an internal website that charted the growth of the signal, the probability that it was real. Before breaking out the champagne, they needed to reach three-sigma--or 99.7 percent certainty.

Apple is planning to launch a rival to Amazon's popular Echo connected speaker that will be powered by its voice-activated digital assistant Siri -- a feature the company is also planning to finally open up to developers, sources told the Information. The report, quoting sources with knowledge of Apple's plans, said the Echo rival was in development long before Amazon launched its product in 2014. However, it is still not clear when Apple plans to launch the device. There is also no indication in the report what the device would look like or how much it would cost. Last week, Google launched its own version of Amazon's Echo called Home, which will go on sale in the coming months.