China's state-run media has accused internet giant Baidu of putting profits before people following the death of a 21-year-old student who used its search engine to seek out ineffective treatment for cancer. Wei Zexi, from Shaanxi province, died on 12 April after undergoing expensive experimental treatment that he had learned about through the search engine of Baidu, China's answer to Google. On Monday, amid growing public anger, the Communist party's official mouthpiece, the People's Daily, attacked Baidu for allegedly promoting potentially dubious medical treatments in its search results in exchange for money. "There have been hospitals making profits at the cost of killing patients who were directed by false advertisements paid at a higher rank in search results," the newspaper claimed, adding: "With great power comes great responsibility... profit considerations shall not be placed over social responsibility." According to reports in the Chinese media, Wei died of synovial sarcoma, a rare form of soft tissue cancer that can affect a person's legs, arms or torso.

In the digital world, business revolves around the customer. Organizations are transforming from the traditional business model to a customer-centric and personalized offering model. Customer experience has become the priority for businesses -- the key to differentiating themselves from their competitors. By improving the journey across the stages of customer engagement, they can create more personalized offerings and ultimately drive higher conversions. According to Gartner, in the next three years, 60 percent of digital commerce analytics investments will be spent on customer journey analytics.

"You'll have learning machines that sense we're under attack," Work stated on Monday. "We already have it in the Aegis combat system. Work assured the conference that the US government would never allow Artificial Intelligence to have the power to fire nuclear missiles in any offensive capacity. "Machines [are] taking over from humans key decisions of when to launch both offensive and defensive missiles… In the next decade it's going to become clear when and where we will delegate authority to machines. We will delegate [some] authority to machines," Work explained.

If you were picturing a not-so-distant future populated by ever-helpful artificial intelligence eager to kowtow to your every whim in a split second--well, think again. "I need another day," said the AI developed within algorithm editor Grasshopper to create a dress for the New York socialite Lisa Maria Falcone to wear to tonight's Met Gala. Designer Zaldy Goco, Robert de Saint Phalle of Conduit Projects (an interdisciplinary design and consulting studio), and computational designers Nicholas Jacobson and Jared Friedman all looked on in dismay. But much like the other minds behind the red carpet confections on display tonight, AI does not like to be pushed. To use logic, computation, generative algorithms, and mathematical optimization--or, simply, its artificially intelligent brain--to solve for the meticulous coding and arrangement of thousands of mirrors in 24 sizes and four colorways atop a flat grid of patterned pieces.

Arjun Pratap is founder and Chief Executive Officer at EdGE Networks. Fueled by the vision to build innovative, future-focused HR technology solutions – which re-engineer Human Resource Management to positively impact business outcomes – Arjun leads EdGE Networks to be a disruptor in the skill development space. Prior to EdGE Networks, Arjun worked with organizations such as SpeedERA Networks and Akamai Technologies, where he was responsible for building their India and international businesses. He also headed the sales function at Dexler Information Solutions to provide strategic direction in building the company. Arjun holds a post graduate degree in Information Systems and International Business, from The University of Sydney, Australia.

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. It will play a big part in the IoT. From our friends at R2D3 is a very interesting visual introduction to machine learning.

Historically, support centers, sales teams and marketing groups existed in three different silos. Machine learning makes it possible for organizations to make strides in sales, support and marketing efforts--at the same time. The ability to have real-time influence between the sales, marketing and support processes is an obvious precursor to additional profit. Because machine learning works from up-to-the-minute, granular information regarding customer actions and interactions, sales teams will always have real-time information on which customers are most satisfied.

In a real-time interactive environment like customer support--where any mistakes have real business costs--any technology affecting customer interactions must be transparent and controllable. Machine learning is not infallible; the decisions artificial intelligence makes will not be 100-percent correct, 100-percent of the time. Therefore, it's important for support leaders to have insights into these decisions, as well as the opportunity to regulate them on a case-by-case basis. Only then can they control the risk--and the cost--of a potential failure.

Machine learning is something that many business are starting to tack onto their existing processes. Yet, to add machine learning capabilities after the fact is often a fool's errand. Joshua argues that machine learning cannot be an afterthought, but rather must be custom developed to suit the specific problem or question that each company is trying to answer. His company, Wise.io, tackles this challenge of helping business build ground up machine learning applications that generate accurate predictions for use in an array of business processes. Joshua Bloom is the cofounder and CTO of Wise.io. He is also an astrophysicist, and a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new artificially intelligent system that crowdsources plots for interactive stories, which are popular in video games and let players choose different branching story options. With potentially limitless crowdsourced plot points, the system could allow for more creative stories and an easier method for interactive narrative generation. Current AI models for games have a limited number of scenarios, no matter what a player chooses. They depend on a dataset already programmed into a model by experts. Using the Georgia Tech approach, one might imagine a Star Wars game using online fan fiction to let the AI system generate countless paths for a player to take.