Machine learning and expert systems will not destroy jobs wholesale, predicts George Zarkadakis, digital lead at advisory firm Willis Towers Watson, but will remove the need for many tasks that employees have traditionally cut their teeth on at the beginning of their careers. Zarkadakis cited a study by consultants McKinsey, which found that just under one third of activities that make up 60 percent of existing jobs will be automated. Unfortunately for new entrants to job markets, the bulk of these activities will be concentrated in starter roles, said Zarkadakis. "We've done some research ourselves and looked at the impact on entry-level jobs. Jobs that graduates get once they leave university. We found that many of the entry-level jobs are very susceptible to complete obliteration," he told The AI Summit in London.

Now that high school seniors have made the fateful choice of a college to attend in the fall, their parents are free to pull out tufts of hair as they figure out how to pay for it. Scholarships are life-saving options, but they can be hard to ferret out, says San Francisco-based startup Schoold, which offers a free college-planning mobile app. The company, which uses artificial intelligence techniques to personalize help for individual students, today announced a new "Scholarship" function on its app. It will automatically surface details on study grants and awards that could work for each particular user. The app takes into account the student's intended college, major, interests, and other elements of the profile they create on the app.

One of the hottest topics the last few years or so have been around AI in all it's forms, everything from being simple female-named chatting tools, to domesday predictions AI that will kill us all, or just make us fat and obsolete in the workplace. So far what we've seen and be able to play with has mostly been in the form of chat bots, helping us navigate through over complicated websites or get some very limited customer service help. November 6, 2001 "Treehouse of Horror XII" was aired, with Pierce Brosnan starring as Ultrahouse 3000. An smart building AI that becomes attracted to Marge and decides to get rid of Homer, attempting to kill him by dumping him into the dining room table's garbage disposal. Alas containing many of the common fears of what an AI eventually will do to us.

Virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a number of new technologies are providing new opportunities for media agencies as well as e-commerce companies to grow new business and shift business models. JD.com unveiled its latest smart refrigerator model at the CES Asia yesterday, aiming at providing an industry chain solution for smart devices manufacturers. JD.com chief technology officer Zhang Chen told a keynote speech that it has also setablished a strategic partnership with Microsoft to drive artificial intelligence research and to enhance human-computer interaction experience. It would seek partnership that could complement each party's resources in terms of retail channel and technology. Last year, sales volume of smart devices at JD.com nearly tripled and the types of devices available also added 1.6 times from a year ago.

Malaysia's strategic investment fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd is making a strategic investment of 100 million into New Jersey-based Fractal Analytics, a leading global provider of analytics, to accelerate its growth. In a press release, Khazanah executive director Chinta Bhagat commented: "The availability of large amounts of real-time information and the ability to analyse it at scale, will transform how the world makes decisions. Fractal is one of the companies leading this change and with our partnership, it can dramatically accelerate its programmatic investments and acquisitions." TA Associates, a Boston-based global private equity firm and AIMIA, the world's largest loyalty firm and Gulu Mirchandani of Onida are some of Fractal's current investors. Fractal Analytics co-founder and chief executive officer Srikanth Velamakanni said, the investment will allow the company to step up development of its artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning-based software stack.

To a class of over 300 students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, there didn't seem to be anything unusual about the new teaching assistant, Jill Watson. They never met Ms. Watson, but she always responded to emails quickly and casually. Like any good TA, Ms. Watson's involvement was low-key but helpful. "She was the person –well, the teaching assistant– who would remind us of due dates and post questions in the middle of the week to spark conversations," student Jennifer Gavin told the Journal. Some students envisioned their TA as a young PhD hopeful.

With our latest release of Seldon we have taken a huge leap forward and completely re-architected how Seldon is packaged, deployed and maintained. Seldon is now provided as a fully dockerized set of containers running inside Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an orchestration framework that helps running complex systems built from docker containers in production environments. It handles service discovery and provisioning along with rolling updates to those services in live production installations.

Sprockets are turning……big day for Big Data in machine learning land at Hewlett Packard Enterprise! Today Haven OnDemand, our industry leading machine learning as a service, crossed the 15,000 user threshold! This innovative offering that has created quite a stir, released with full commercial enterprise support on March 10th, it is attracting interest from forward-thinking developers small and large across the globe. Available today to any developer as a freemium version – yup it costs nada! Even comes with a "Try It!" button so you can see in seconds precisely how it works and how it can be integrated into virtually any application.

Earlier this year, robots withdrew in defeat from the hospital. Johnson & Johnson had been trying--operative word, trying--to sell a robot that can put patients to sleep for simple procedures like colonoscopies. Who did not like this? Human anesthesiologists, of course, whose jobs would be on the line. Professional groups lobbied hard against the device, questioning its safety. Even after the Food and Drug Administration approved the device, hospitals were wary.

There is an ongoing war between hackers and information security systems. It usually plays out far from the public eye and happens constantly on servers all over the world. Millions of events take place on computers that could potentially signal malicious activity, and it is the job of carefully-designed software to decipher between the good and the bad. Unluckily for them, missing a single malicious event could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to a company. A recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that the good guys in that fight may have found a significant advantage.