Turning data into insight is one of the top business challenges today, and it becomes especially tricky when the data in question is unstructured. Artificial intelligence has a mixed track record there, but a young startup aims to get better results by bringing humans back into the picture. Spare5 on Wednesday released a new platform that applies a combination of human insight and machine learning to help companies make sense of unstructured data, including images, video, social media content, and text messages. The result, it says, are "game-changing insights delivered cost-effectively and at scale." The company's technology is now being used by companies including Expedia and Getty Images to enrich, clean and label unstructured data.

I, like a number of HR industry analysts, have been uncomfortable about some of the uses of algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies that have been exploding on the HR scene in recent years. The single greatest concern is that individuals who have no training in statistics, correlation/causation distinctions, legal risk associated with machine generated recommendations, etc. might use these new technologies and expose their company to great risk and/or adversely impact the livelihoods of many innocent potential workers. In a nutshell, many of the new, cool, supercharged recruiting solutions can quickly and mechanically identify other potential job seekers with similar characteristics to current employee groups that have shown some measure of success or retention with the company. While on its surface that sounds admirable and cost-effective, the problem with these tools is that they rely on a test database which only includes existing employees. If a company has failed to hire many women or minorities in the past, then very few of them will appear in the solution's data population and thus will generate a statistically insignificant subset of individuals to establish a meaningful pattern.

"Advanced cyberlearning environments that involve Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence innovations are becoming powerful tools that can facilitate the explorations and conversations needed to solve society's "wicked challenges," said Winslow Burleson, PhD, MSE, an engineer by training and currently associate professor, New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing. The researchers posit that the use of technology, specifically a bundled and ever-evolving fluid set of integrated cyber tools, will connect disparate groups and individuals, converging them in both a real and an imagined cyber-social-physical environment, called the Holodeck, that Burleson's NYU-X Lab is currently advancing in prototype form, in close collaboration with colleagues at NYU Courant, Tandon, Steinhardt, and Tisch, "The "Holodeck" will support a broad range of transdisciplinary collaborations, integrated education, research, and innovation by providing a networked software/hardware infrastructure that can synthesize visual, audio, physical, social, and societal components," said Burleson. NYU-X Lab's Holodeck prototype harnesses the collective power of shared computation, integrated distributed data, immersive visualization, and social interaction to make possible large-scale synthesis of learning, research, and innovation, that will dramatically accelerate the Rittel and Webber iterative mode of problem solving. The goal is to create a networked infrastructure and communication environment where "wicked challenges" can be iteratively explored and re-solved, utilizing visual, acoustic, and physical sensory feedback, human dynamics with and social collaboration.

In the late 1960s, urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber began formulating the concept of "wicked problems" or "wicked challenges" --problems so vexing in the realm of social and organizational planning that they could not be successfully ameliorated with traditional linear, analytical, systems-engineering types of approaches. These "wicked challenges" are poorly defined, abstruse, and connected to strong moral, political and professional issues. Some examples might include: "How should we deal with crime and violence in our schools? "How should we wage the'War on Terror'? or "What is good national immigration policy?" "Wicked problems," by their very nature, are strongly stakeholder dependent; there is often little consensus even about what the problem is, let alone how to deal with it.

Real-world artificial-intelligence applications are popping up in unexpected places--and much sooner than you might think. While winning a game of Go might be impressive, machine intelligence is also evolving to the point where it can be used by more people to do more things. That's how four engineers with almost zero knowledge of Japanese were able to create software, in just a few months, that can decipher handwriting in the language. The programmers at Reactive Inc. came up with an application that recognizes scrawled-out Japanese with 98.66 percent accuracy. The 18-month-old startup in Tokyo is part of a growing global community of coders and investors who are harnessing the power of neural networks to put AI to far more practical purposes than answering trivia or winning board games.

Not long ago, Google's machine learning and backend building tool, TensorFlow, finally went open source. Today, Google announced that TensorFlow has been updated to version 0.8, with the update including a major requested feature. As of today's update, TensorFlow can now run as a distributed system across mutliple machines. This greatly increases its capabilities and makes for much faster processing, training, deployment and inference in practical use. This allows for a wider stable of possible use cases, as well as making the use of TensorFlow easier and more accessible by adding in the possibility of distributing the processing load across multiple smaller-scale machines, rather than needing a supercomputer to run the platform.

The question of robotic ethics is making everyone tense. We worry about the machine's lack of empathy, how calculating machines are going to know how to do the right thing, and even how we are going to judge and punish beings of steel and silicon. I am less concerned about robots doing wrong, and far more concerned about the moment they look at us and are appalled at how often we fail to do right. I am convinced that they will not only be smarter than we are, but have truer moral compasses, as well. Let's be clear about what is and is not at issue here.

Facebook launched a concierge service called M through its Messenger app in 2015. M can purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements for the user. There is an element of the Mechanical Turk about it at the moment as it is powered by a combination of AI and real-life people. Siri has been around for a few years but has been upgraded in that time. It's now capable of showing the user specific photos he or she has taken, ordering things via ecommerce apps and giving directions.

In 2008, Max Yankelevich was in India, visiting the cubicle farms where big banks and insurance companies outsource business processes -- the invoices, memos, and other papers pushed to keep organizations humming. The employees were smart, says Yankelevich, who was running a cloud computing startup at the time. There was good money in doing this sort of back office work -- but it was mind numbing. Companies were trying to figure out the back office work with "the brute force of human power," says Yankelevich, who studied artificial intelligence while getting his MIT computer science degree in the 1990s. "I started thinking ... there's gotta be a way where artificial intelligence can be used generically enough to learn some of these things that these people are doing," he says.

AI Business recently interviewed one of the UK's leading experts in AI for Business, George Zarkadakis. George has a PhD in AI, is the Digital Lead at Willis Towers Watson, and the author of "In Our Own Image: will Artificial Intelligence save us or destroy us?". George is also a keynote speaker at The AI Summit London, presenting on the many different ways that AI will be shaping the business of tomorrow. George answered a number of interesting questions giving us a taster of the insightful presentation to come at The AI Summit on the 5th of May. How do you believe AI will impact business overall and in what ways?