IBM's artificial intelligence Ross has just landed its first job! Law firm Baker & Hostetler has announced that they are employing Ross to handle their bankruptcy practice, which currently consists of nearly 50 (human) lawyers.

Algorithms help us to choose which films to watch, which music to stream and which literature to read. But what if algorithms went beyond their jobs as mediators of human culture and started to create culture themselves? ANALYSIS: Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, hired IBM's Watson programming team to incorporate artificial intelligence into the investment process. Later this year, I will be doing something similar, so stay tuned to learn more about this exciting endeavour. Sports excite people as a triumph of human effort.

For anyone who wants to learn "Data Science," I want to emphasize that it's such a fluid term. I would recommend starting out by analyzing a dataset in an area that is close to your heart, whether it's real estate pricing data for your neighborhood, or educational curriculum & outcome data. For me, it just happened to be genomic and patient health data, because that was a problem space I felt comfortable playing around in. If you explore the myriad technologies out there to help you find patterns and predict things from that data you're passionate about, before you know it you'll wake up one day and realize that you're actually a data scientist! It's all a matter of learning how to use different tools and when to apply them, and this just comes with practice.

This is my first blog here; my name is Fen. I was with MathWorks for almost 15 years. MathWorks is the creator of MATLAB andI built some of the modules in MATLAB. In the past 5 years, I led a team of consulting engineer to build data analytics solution for customers in APAC. In recent years, commercial banks and asset management companies in China started to build more quantitative models to measure credit risk. With our help, some of them chose to use MATLAB statistics and machine learning modules to build credit risk models; I would like to share a common approach I used on credit risk projects.

It was a public engagement exercise that turned into a national row after a public poll to name a new British research vessel saw the name Boaty McBoatface get the most support. But Google has had a cheeky dig at the humourless officials in the British government who objected to the name by calling its latest artificial intelligence software Parsey McParseface. The technology firm, which has just become the world's largest company, has released software that uses sophisticated machine learning to analyse the linguistic structure of language. It forms part of an open-source neural network aimed at training computers to understand how human languages are put together so they can be processed. It announced the English version of this system is called Parsey McParseface in a blog that outlined how it hopes the software will transform artificial intelligence.

Eggheads at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) claim they have trained a machine-learning system to detect 85 per cent of network attacks. To reach that level, the software, dubbed AI2 [PDF], parsed billions of lines of log files, looking for behaviors that indicate either a malware infection or a human hacker trying to get into a network. If it spotted any suspicious connections or activity, it alerted a human analyst, who identified whether the software got it right or wrong. After 3.6 billion log lines were scanned and three months of training passed, the AI2 system was able to hit 85 per cent accuracy in detecting malicious activity, we're told. "This brings together the strengths of analyst intuition and machine learning," said Nitesh Chawla, the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame.

Bill Gates speaks during the Forbes' 2015 Philanthropy Summit Awards Dinner on June 3, 2015 in New York City. Many are still wary about the effects of future artificial intelligence in humanity. But Microsoft cofounder and the world's richest man Bill Gates says AI won't be a threat, instead it will be "extremely helpful" in managing human lives. The actively evolving field of artificial intelligence has revolutionized the healthcare, business and education sectors around the world. AI also continues to prove its ubiquity by making great advances in technology and robotics but many warn about the existential risks of artificial intelligence.

Last week scientists at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC, announced a pretty important breakthrough – they've developed a robot that can operate by itself on soft tissue. The robot is called the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot. Not just because it's another step towards even more precise and safe surgery, which is good for everyone, but because the robot can do this with a level of independence not previously seen. In 1985, doctors used the Puma 560 to assist them in delicate operations, and that's how robotic surgery has developed – as a way of assisting human doctors. It's not hard to see why: a robot may be able to make more precise movements than a person, and it won't get tired or feel the strain of a long operation in the way a surgeon might.

AI is the next Golden Age and will dramatically improve how businesses interact with their customers. AI will power new disruptive companies that will displace those that stay on the sidelines. Getting our workforce educated on what AI is and how remarkably easy companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google have made it to plug in to existing apps. Many ideas were built on AI and Machine Learning ranging from safety, social, customer service and shopping. Natural language and image recognition were used by many teams.

One day in January, Eric Wilson dashed off a message to the teaching assistants for an online course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "I really feel like I missed the mark in giving the correct amount of feedback," he wrote, pleading to revise an assignment. Thirteen minutes later, the TA responded. "Unfortunately, there is not a way to edit submitted feedback," wrote Jill Watson, one of nine assistants for the 300-plus students. Last week, Mr. Wilson found out he had been seeking guidance from a computer.