If robots are taking our jobs, they may also support our retirement. Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimates that 47 per cent of US jobs and 33 per cent of UK jobs have the potential to be automated. But the technology that could fill those jobs – robotics and artificial intelligence – is both a threat to some workers and a potential area of growth for investors, notably pension funds, seeking to capitalise on the new wave of industrialisation. "It's the next generation," says Philippe Cerf, Europe, Middle East and Africa co-head of the technology, media and telecommunications group at investment bank Credit Suisse. "Machine-learning is applied to some extent across all tech these days."

Last year blockchain became one of the hottest topics in the world even much outside IT community. We saw a booming growth in the number of startups; large banks and even governments started investing in researching the technology. So definitely, there is much buzz about the topic, but seemingly it has nothing to do with machine learning and artificial intelligence. While articles and news on artificial intelligence as compared to blockchain and other cryptoworld topics are in no less degree blossoming these days, everybody keep silent on possible synergic implications in these truly breakthrough fields of computer science. At BICA Labs we do see a strong synergy between blockchain and AI -- a synergy that goes much beyond just an applied science.

In the movies, we've seen AI depicted as both good and evil (but mostly not good), in supercomputers (HAL 9000, Colossus and Skynet to name a few) and in robots (the Machines, Sonny and ED-209). Thanks in part to the availability of large amounts of information/big data, today's AI is at work in a variety of applications that are less science fiction and more oriented to solving business problems and charting new territory. In Rolling Stone, tech entrepreneur Jason Calcanis calls AI the new buzzword: "You just use the phrase'Artificial Intelligence' in your business plan and everyone pays attention." In fact, the AI sector attracted 310 million in funding in 2015, up from 45 million in 2010, according to research from CB Insights.

There are about 10,000 known human diseases, yet human doctors are only able to recall a fraction of them at any given moment. As many as 40,500 patients die annually in an ICU in the U.S. as a result of misdiagnosis, according to a 2012 Johns Hopkins study. British entrepreneur Ali Parsa believes that artificial intelligence can help doctors avoid these mistakes. Parsa is the founder and CEO of Babylon, a U.K.-based subscription health service that plans to launch an AI-based app designed to improve doctors' hit rate. Users will report the symptoms of their illness to the app, which will check them against a database of diseases using speech recognition.

I saw a news article recently about how high frequency trading firms are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their trading performance and profit. Two large companies were mentioned with each having a slightly different approach. This May, Nomura Securities are releasing a new stock trading system, built around analysing and assessing vast price and trading data resources. The system aims to simulate the insights of experienced (human) traders and make predictions based on historical market conditions and the correlation to current asset prices. Nothing particularly new about that, but the difference is they will be using AI tools to enable the system to enhance its price prediction ability as it gains more experience.

Artificial intelligence has won Jeopardy, mastered Go and has now predicted the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV show. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'We are very pleased with the Ai's performance in achieving 100 percent accuracy in predicting the I'm a Singer competition's results,' Dr. Min Wanli, Alibaba Cloud's chief scientist for artificial intelligence, said in a statement following the show, according to the Wall Street Journal. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'The results demonstrated that Ai is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions,' he added.

Editor's note: this post is part of an ongoing series exploring developments in artificial intelligence. First, collect huge amounts of training data -- probably more than anyone thought sensible or even possible a decade ago. Second, massage and preprocess that data so the key relationships it contains are easily accessible (the jargon here is "feature engineering"). Finally, feed the result into ludicrously high-performance, parallelized implementations of pretty standard machine-learning methods like logistic regression, deep neural networks, and k-means clustering (don't worry if those names don't mean anything to you -- the point is that they're widely available in high-quality open source packages). Google pioneered this formula, applying it to ad placement, machine translation, spam filtering, YouTube recommendations, and even the self-driving car -- creating billions of dollars of value in the process.

The total amount of data produced by IoT devices and systems is humongous and arriving with a very high velocity. However more than 90% of this data gets lost unless it is analyzed. One way of performing this analysis is by setting threshold which would trigger an action to be taken once it is breached. This can be seen by the danger zone readings as shown in the time-series data shown below. However, this approach is at best a reactive approach and at worst simply futile (as the event has already occured).

ONLY a handful of South Africans are using artificial intelligence to help solve business and social problems, and to make money. The past year's devastating drought might have been mitigated if information about previous droughts had been used to predict it and to prepare, says Bhekisipho Twala, director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Johannesburg. Data scientists could also help Eskom predict the where and when of electricity use, easing its task of keeping the lights on when power supply is constrained. "The whole point of data mining or machine learning is finding hidden information that can make business (or other) decisions easier," says Obakeng Moepya, one of the three founders of Johannesburg-based Isazi Consulting, which uses advanced mathematics and statistics to solve difficult problems. Machine learning -- also known as artificial intelligence -- is a field of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Data mining is the analysis step in machine learning, with the goal of extracting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data.

Probabilistic graphical models has been quite a roller coaster over the past few years. Social network analysis is growing less rapidly as well. While the results herein may not come as much surprise, it's fascinating to see the extent to which AI, machine learning, and especially deep learning has proliferated and grown among advanced course offerings. It is incredibly exciting to witness the opportunities for predictive insights & machine intelligence that are affecting every industry and business application, and reassuring that knowledge and understanding of these core areas is only going to increase -- and perhaps become core tools & techniques for an upcoming wave of engineers.