"Machine learning" will pave the way to delivering better experiences including "how quickly we can put apps on the X1 platform," Comcast EVP and chief technology officer Tony Werner explained here in an introductory overview at the Imagine Park opening session on Monday. He envisioned "a ton of very cool apps," comparing the ability of DOCSIS 3.1 to replace "a backhoe or forklift" in implementing new services for cable operators. "I love Full Duplex," Werner enthused about a symmetrical multi-gigabit project underway at CableLabs and being demoed here by Nokia, before he scooted off stage to support other Comcast executives at the opening of their nearby booth on the INTX show floor. As fellow panelist and visionary Andy Lippman, senior scientist and Associate Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, showed his "Ultimate Media" project, Werner quickly noted that, "You don't have all the online sources loving it." Werner cited the prioritization for certain news sources within the MIT algorithm.

When his father was diagnosed with stage IV, non-operable gastric cancer in 2007, Dr. Dimitris Bertsimas knew that combination chemotherapy was the best course of treatment. He visited several of the leading cancer hospitals in the nation--Dana Farber, Massachusetts General, MD Anderson and Memorial Sloan Kettering--to see what specific therapies they would propose for his father. "They each told me very distinct therapies, almost with no drugs in common," says Bertsimas. "I didn't know how to compare them." So Bertsimas, who is a professor of operational research at MIT did a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation.

After its attempts to digest romance novels, one of Google's artificial intelligence projects is now accidentally writing poetry, some of which would make the fictional Vogons proud. Google is working with Stanford University and University of Massachusetts in the US to enhance the natural language skills of an AI technique called recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM), which is used within machine translation and image captioning among other tasks. It essentially builds sentences a single word at a time by analysing the previous words in that sentence. Related: Poetry expresses what it is to be human – it's therapy for the soul Adam O'Riordan Currently, RNNLM is not capable of implementing global themes or features, such as a set topic, within its sentence generation. Each sentence produced by the algorithms doesn't necessarily flow smoothly into the next.

Smarter and more adaptive machines are rapidly becoming as much a part of our lives as the internet, and more of our decisions are being handed over to intelligent algorithms that learn from ever-increasing volumes and varieties of data. As these "robots" become a bigger part of our lives, we don't have any framework for evaluating which decisions we should be comfortable delegating to algorithms and which ones humans should retain. That's surprising, given the high stakes involved. I propose a risk-oriented framework for deciding when and how to allocate decision problems between humans and machine-based decision makers. I've developed this framework based on the experiences that my collaborators and I have had implementing prediction systems over the last 25 years in domains like finance, healthcare, education, and sports.

As the third industrial revolution - led by software - continues to gather steam, world leaders are predicting our entrance into the fourth industrial revolution. Can you guess what is leading it? We all dreamed of the day when robots would effortlessly takeover our mundane chores like doing the dishes, but the truth is that AI can already do more than that. AI is already driving cars, making art, beating humans at Go...and will soon take over your job! Forget science fiction, AI is already here and it is so close to getting so much bigger that governments are starting to prepare for this Tsunami. The White House recently released a report that highlighted staggering numbers for the job market due to AI.

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(NASDAQ:AMZN)--Amazon today announced new Alexa voice features are coming to Fire TV, including the ability to control playback of Amazon Video and Add-On Subscription content, launch apps, access local movie show times, search local businesses and restaurants, and more--all just by using your voice. Discovering and accessing content on Fire TV has never been easier with the new Alexa playback features, plus integrated voice search across 59 content partners including Hulu, Showtime, Starz, HBO Go and more. These new Alexa features will be automatically delivered via free, over-the-air software updates in the coming weeks. "Customers have told us they love having the convenience of Alexa on their Amazon Fire TV," said Tim Twerdahl, General Manager, Amazon Fire TV. "We're excited to add new Alexa features to Fire TV, making it easier than ever to enjoy their favorite TV shows, movies, and apps."

But is the Big Data movement going to make a difference? I'm strongly in favor of cognition, computing, and computing that is smarter rather than dumber. But is the Cognitive Computing movement likely to make a difference?

In 2011, an entrepreneur named Jeff Hammerbacher summed up the dystopian malaise many people in the tech industry felt about the state of Web and mobile innovation. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads," Hammerbacher, an early Facebook employee and co-founder of Cloudera, said in an interview with BusinessWeek. As it turns out, maybe that was not such a bad thing. To serve more precise ads at targeted audience, engineers and programmers needed to build smarter systems that aggregated massive quantities of data. Sophisticated algorithms were created, application programming interfaces were built to truck data around the Internet and massive server complexes were constructed to store and compute all the bits.

Artificial intelligence is already getting close, and we may be even closer with Snips, a mobile AI company from the collective minds of three Ph.D.'s. Today, the company launched its AI platform for iOS, claiming to be the only technology of its kind that is "private by design." While technology's primary goal seems to be making our lives easier, that convenience often seems to come at the price of security. But with Snips, the founders say that the platform's design ensures that a user's personal data never leaves their device, and more importantly, that no one -- including Snips -- can collect any sensitive information. This means that the user and the user alone has full control of his or her data. The platform is meant to mimic the human brain, drawing inspiration from the way in which our memory stores information.

Law firms are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) in a bid to improve efficiency. Developed in conjunction with tech start-up RAVN, BLP's'contract robot' can complete legal work which would take a team of paralegals and associates months to do within seconds. It is currently assisting the firm's real estate team. Called LONald, the robot extracts data from Land Registry documents and enters it into a spreadsheet in the same way staff would do. It cross-checks data points to remove duplicates and then uses the spreadsheet to send queries out.