Like so many organizations today, Infosys, the Indian consulting giant, is a company in transition. For years it has made a good living helping customers manage legacy tools, but CEO Vishal Sikka, who took over 21 months ago saw a shifting landscape and he began implementing new systems immediately. One of those changes involved developing a new artificial intelligence system they have called Mana, which is designed to help customers automate repetitive system maintenance tasks and build knowledge about the underlying systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Sikka announced the system this morning at the Infosys Confluence conference in San Francisco. Mana involves three main tools: Infosys Information Platform for analytics, Infosys Automation Platform for automating and continuously building knowledge about system maintenance and workflow tasks and Infosys Knowledge Platform, a formal platform for capturing and storing knowledge.

Today, people are more connected than ever before – and this complexity of technology connections is creating a wealth of data. Thanks to the magic of machine learning, this data is fueling intelligence that is empowering humans to do more and in turn creating new opportunities for marketers. Artificial intelligence is in fact not artificial at all, it is a web of intelligence surfacing the most pertinent elements at the right time for the right purpose – and enabling humans to make the choices that are right for them. Ubiquitous relationships between humans and technology mean that machines are already informing decisions all around us. From suggesting the next item to buy in your favourite clothes store, to providing you with discount offers on items that your supermarket knows you're going to buy, these are all based on a cumulative understanding of what you like.

In this Mastery webinar, Ernan Roman of ERDM will reveal transformational Voice of Customer research findings regarding the personalized communications that buyers expect, and how this can drive double-digit improvements in response rates and customer engagement. Over 50% of attendees are repeated customers or referrals. The 52nd, 53rd and 54th will be held in Hong Kong, Dubai and Madrid. Book early to enjoy USD300 discount. One Size Does Not Fit All.

The Ying Ao sink foundry in southern China's Guangdong province does not look like a factory of the future. The sign over the entrance is faded; inside, the floor is greasy with patches of mud, and a thick metal dust -- the by-product of the stainless-steel polishing process -- clogs the air. Guangdong is the growth engine of China's manufacturing industry, generating 615bn in exports last year -- more than a quarter of the country's total. In this part of the province, the standard wage for workers is about Rmb4,000 ( 600) per month. Ying Ao, which manufactures sinks destined for the kitchens of Europe and the US, has to pay double that, according to deputy manager Chen Conghan, because conditions in the factory are so unpleasant. So, four years ago, the company started buying machines to replace the ever more costly humans. Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers.

Last month a computer program called AlphaGo took on one of the greatest players of the complex board game, Go, and beat him four games to one. Lee Sedol, the South Korean Go master, lost 1 million, offered as prize money by Google, the challenger's proprietor. But, more momentously, his humbling has taken the battle of wits between machines and humans to yet another level. To be sure, this isn't the first time software has got the better of an exceptionally clever human. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue had checkmated Garry Kasparov, the erstwhile world chess champion.

For years, Person of Interest has been right on the cutting edge between commenting on current events and speculating about the future. With its final season, the show is depicting a futuristic nightmare--and yet, it's also more topical than ever before. We talked to producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman, and they told us the real villain of Person of Interest is Facebook. First off, I've seen the season premiere of Person of Interest, which airs next Tuesday, May 3. True to form, it's a brilliant hour of television that will keep you throwing things at your TV screen as the Machine Gang struggles to come back from their devastating loss at the end of season four. The super-intelligent Machine, which was built to predict terrorist threats but wound up trying to save ordinary people from smaller crimes, has been destroyed, and the race to reconstruct it from some memory chips is as intense as any thriller I've seen in ages. I honestly don't know what I can say about Person of Interest that we haven't said a dozen times before--this is one of the best science fiction shows of the past decade.

Last December, Tesla CEO Elon Musk teamed up with Y Combinator president Sam Altman and former Google Brain Team scientist Ilya Sutskever to launch OpenAI, a 1 billion non-profit organization dedicated to furthering our understanding of artificial intelligence with a promise to share its research openly with the world. Today, it's taken its first step in that direction by launching a free toolkit for developers to build and train their own AI bots with games and algorithmic challenges. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! The OpenAI Gym, currently in beta, includes environments to simulate situations for your AI to learn from, as well as a site to compare and reproduce results. The tools are designed for use with Reinforcement Learning (RL), one of the technologies used to develop Google's AlphaGo AI that defeated Go world champion Lee Se-Dol recently. RL works on the principle that a bot will receive a reward every time it completes an action successfully – similar to how you might train a dog.

OpenAI, a 1 billion ( 687 million) artificial intelligence company backed by Elon Musk, has built a "gym" where developers can train their AI systems to get smarter. Using OpenAI's open source toolkit, available for download now, developers can access "environments" where they can test their AI bots. The OpenAI Gym, currently in beta, provides a number of environments, including more than 50 Atari games, such as "Space Invaders," "Pong," "Asteroids" and "Pac-Man". Developers can also test their AIs on board games like Go, which was recently mastered by an agent built by London startup Google DeepMind. "Over time, we plan to greatly expand this collection of environments," wrote OpenAI's Greg Brockman and John Schulman in a blog post.

Mark Zuckerberg expects artificial intelligence will progress to make computers better than humans at basic sensory perception within the next 10 years, and that Facebook will end up knowing a lot more about you than it does now. The prediction is the latest from a top tech CEO to indicate the fast improvement being made in machine learning systems that just a few years ago would have struggled to recognize a dog from a cat. The Facebook CEO was speaking about core things that humans do, such as seeing, hearing and understanding language and was careful to clarify that computers will still have limited abilities elsewhere. "That doesn't mean that the computers will be thinking or be generally better, but that is useful for a number of things," he told financial analysts on a conference call on Wednesday. In recent months, senior executives at Google have also talked up AI.

This post is authored by Krishna Anumalasetty, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft. We are excited to announce that Azure Machine Learning security practices have been verified by independent third party auditors and achieved HIPAA, ISO 27001, ISO 27018 and EU Model Clauses compliance. Enterprise customers often require that cloud services comply with specific security certifications. Compliance certifications provide assurance to customers that the security of these services have been verified by independent auditors. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) establishes requirements for the use, disclosure and safeguarding of electronic Patient Health Information (ePHI).