In a nutshell, Sannikov's theories describe how an employer would adjust a contractor's compensation in real time, in response to changing performance and external conditions. Where most previous researchers only allowed contracts to be updated at regular intervals, Sannikov described what happens when they can be changed infinitely fast. In reality, of course, Sannikov's work is just pure math conducted in an econ department. No one adjusts contracts by the microsecond.

This introduction to Natural Language Processing, or NLP for short, describes a central problems of artificial intelligence. NLP is focused on the interactions between human language and computers, and it sits at the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics. NLP is used to analyze text, allowing machines to understand how human's speak. This human-computer interaction enables real-world applications like automatic text summarization, sentiment analysis, topic extraction, named entity recognition, parts-of-speech tagging, relationship extraction, stemming, and more. NLP is commonly used for text mining, machine translation, and automated question answering.

Regardless of the analysis of smartphone market share, Office and cloud revenues, quarterly profits, gaming consoles sales, Surface hardware, or search engine relevance, Microsoft remains a large company employing diversified and talented individuals. Often, the individuals under Microsoft's employ do double duty as the brilliant minds creating projects and industries for the company while also pioneering advancements, groundbreaking achievements, and technologies in fields outside of their immediate obligations. Recently, Yuval Peres and Robert Schapire joined the long list of Microsoft employees and researchers who have been recognized by their peers for their achievements in their respective fields. Peres and Schapire's are receiving perhaps the highest honor in science and research by being elected to the Nation Academy of Sciences. Peres and Schapire's recognition will see them become part of new 84 members and 21 foreign associate groups that will be joining the National Academy this year.

In the fourth issue of this monthly digest series you can find out how Qualcomm is bringing deep learning and AI to smart devices, why Daimler sent self-driving trucks all across Europe, how to imitate Rembrandt's best work with the help of deep learning, and much more. From the Smithsonian comes news--and a must-see fascinating video--about a painting created using data from more than 168,000 fragments of Rembrandt's work, trained to paint in Rembrandt's signature style. Over the course of 18 months, a group of engineers, Rembrandt experts and data scientists analyzed 346 of Rembrandt's works, then trained a deep learning engine to "paint" in the master's signature style. In order to stay true to Rembrandt's art, the team decided to flex the engine's muscles on a portrait. They analyzed the demographics of the people Rembrandt painted over his lifetime and determined that it should paint a Caucasian male between 30 and 40 years of age, complete with black clothes, a white collar and hat, and facial hair.

Today our focus has been on KPIs, ERP, WMS, TMS, YMS, EDI, The Cloud, S and OP, 3 D Printing, IoT, IoE, Drones: Same Hour/Day/Time Delivery to Customers, Cyber Security, Theft, Government Regulations, E-Commerce, Omni-Channel, Modeling/Simulation, Risk Management, Tracking, Traceability, Re-shoring, Robotics, et al, but…what about Artificial Intelligence or AI technologies? AI is a controversy of deep, lasting dimensions. Will machines learn to think like humans…and then outthink us? The application of AI technologies has created the ability to understand, store and use product information in an entirely new way. AI technologies allow you to understand the underlying grammatical structure, the product DNA, used to build each product, together with all natural variations that potentially exist.

When the tech giant Microsoft unveiled its AI or artificial intelligence-powered bot on Twitter for a playful chat with the people in March, little did the tech giant realise that the twitterati would begin slamming the innocent bot with racist and offensive comments. Launched as an experiment in "conversational understanding" and to engage people through "casual and playful conversation", Tay was soon taken off Twitter by Microsoft engineers. This was a soft experiment. But what if you can interact with a "chatbot" and send the AI-powered machine your financial requirements like you would text to your banker or chartered accountant in the near future? Facebook wants this to happen and at its F8 global developer conference in April, the social networking giant unveiled AI bots right into its popular messaging app Messenger -- to allow 900 million monthly active users on Messenger to interact with businesses and get updates from them.

Lenovo, reigner in producing personal computer, is now putting its hands on investing 500 million dollar in hardware technology startups after its announcement of new fund. Lenovo has a record of making skilful investment with its first investment of 100 million invested in 30 companies which focused on security, games and smart home devices. Naming the few from the list: Israeli facial recognition startup Face which is listed as Chinese firm iDreamsky; biometric whiz Nok Nok Labs from US and SmartX, biometric facial and fingerprint recognizing attendance system from India. Following the Chinese government propaganda of Made in China 2025 initiative, which is putting prime significance to robotics and Artificial Intelligence, Lenovo will be utilizing this fund to support companies which potentiate its businesses and, in particular, those in the big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, robots and other Internet services. Lenovo is not the first to endeavour in this field in china.

Major disruption by technology is a recurring trend. In the 1990s, we experienced the rise of information technologies such as databases and personal computers. Then, came the rise of mobile computing. Following that, cloud computing transformed business operations. These technologies didn't just improve certain tasks - they completely changed the way we work.

This "robotic mermaid" could be more than just a clever way to retrieve sunken treasure (and disappoint amorous sailors). It hints at how humans and robots may someday work together in all sorts of difficult environments. The submersible humanoid robot, called OceanOne, was developed at Stanford University. It recently retrieved priceless artifacts from King Louis XIV's La Lune, a 350-year-old galleon wrecked off Toulon in southern France in 1664. OceanOne has two arms, a head, and a tail-like appendage fitted with motorized propellers.

Young patients at Alder Hey will soon be able to use their smartphones to ask questions about everything from hospital menus to details of their medical care. The West Derby hospital has teamed up with computer giant IBM to use artificial intelligence to help put children and their families at ease. The technology – known as Watson – will allow kids to ask questions ahead of their admission to hospital, relaxing them as much as possible beforehand. Over the next few months, hundreds of Alder Hey patients and their parents will be asked a range of questions about everything from parking to what they would like to eat, their favourite games and films and what they want their bedroom to look like.