In statistical modeling, there are various algorithms to build a classifier, and each algorithm makes a different set of assumptions about the data. For Big Data, it pays off to analyze the data upfront and then design the modeling pipeline accordingly.

Machine learning has a critical dependency on human learning. I'm not referring to data scientists, a class of learned humans who play an undeniably pivotal role in this new era. What I'm referring to are the legions of individuals who prepare training data to guide algorithms in their search for patterns of interest. Once the target patterns have been tagged and flagged by humans in the know, machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can work their magic. Does it make sense to demean this job category that's essential to the cognitive era?

Alphabet Inc-A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) unveiled new cloud computing services that allow any developer or business to use the Machine Learning (ML) technologies that power the company's most powerful services, Wired reports. The recent, spectacular victory of Alphabet's AlphaGo program over top Go player Lee Sedol has been hailed as a major Artificial Intelligence (AI) breakthrough and indicates how AI is rapidly becoming a mature technology with a potential for world-changing applications. In fact, AI is becoming adept at more and more high-level cognitive tasks that used to be considered as too complex for automation. "The victory is notable because the technologies at the heart of AlphaGo are the future," noted Wired. "They're already changing Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Twitter, and they're poised to reinvent everything from robotics to scientific research."

Earlier this month, we watched the defeat of world-renowned Go-mastermind Lee Sedol, who lost a Go tournament to Google's AlphaGo Artificial Intelligence. What's so incredible and unexpected about this event is that such a defeat--where an artificial intelligence takes down a human master in such a complex game--wasn't expected for another decade, at least. But the world watched in awe as Lee was defeated 4 times by Google's artificial intelligence (AI). The competition consisted of five matches that spanned over one week in mid-March. If Lee was to win the competition, he would have been awarded 1 million.

Satya Nadella's tenure as Microsoft's CEO has been marked by the knowledge that the company has to find a future beyond Windows. "Our industry does not respect tradition," Nadella said when he was appointed. Since then, Nadella reorganized the company to focus on areas where the company is still growing. Today he announced the emerging platform where he hopes to realize many of Microsoft's ambitions: conversation as a platform, otherwise known as bots. As we reported in January, the tech industry has begun to embrace bots with a fervor unseen since the early days of the App Store. Messaging apps have emerged as the most popular apps on smartphones, and advancements in natural language processing have made it possible to build artificial intelligences that more easily respond to our requests and perform actions in the real world.

The Department of Defense announced in early February, in an address to the Economic Club of Washington by Defense Scretary Ashton Carter, that its Strategic Capabilities Office was innovating "new roles and game-changing capabilities to confound potential enemies." The Washington Post's Dan Lamothe wrote an exclusive piece on the SCO, a hitherto unknown agency within the DoD, on March 8. In that piece, Lamothe explained that the future of war is now- and the future is the SCO's artificial intelligence.

The recent victory of Google's AlphaGo over top-tier Go champion Lee Sedol put artificial intelligence back in the public mind, and Google is at the top on the list of companies most likely to produce our future robot overlords. Yet Microsoft has swooped in and, as decisively as AlphaGo beat Sedol, stolen its rival's thunder with a comprehensive initiative that wants to put AI everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. Microsoft envisions a world full of bots – so full, that you may end up interacting with them more often that you do real human beings. That future isn't here quite yet, but Redmond's engineers are laying the groundwork, and the company's plan sounds like the outline for a new episode of Black Mirror.

And investors liked what they heard. Microsoft shares were up 0.4% to above 55 in afternoon trading on the stock market today, approaching their all-time high of 56.85, reached on Dec. 29. "Microsoft's Build conference was more exciting than we expected, with major announcements around machine learning, bots and AI," Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brendan Barnicle said in a report Wednesday. "These products show Microsoft's development focus is moving beyond the cloud to Conversations as a Platform." Barnicle reiterated his overweight rating on Microsoft stock with a price target of 65.

We'll have bots to thank for that, and Microsoft wants developers to embrace them, the same way hordes of developers embraced iOS apps back in 2008. "We want every developer to build experts for Cortana," Nadella said onstage Wednesday. "We want all developers to build bots." Because of the cross-platform nature of both Cortana and the many communication apps Nadella cited yesterday, Microsoft's bot army will work on whatever device you want to use. The company debuted a host of tools yesterday to make that happen, including the Microsoft Bot Framework, which will let developers build bots and deploy them across the various communication platforms we use.

IBM says it wants to make intelligent computers that can make decisions like humans. This week, it shipped the NS16e, its largest brain-inspired computer yet, and has big goals ahead. The company plans to create bigger versions of the NS16e -- which was purchased by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- to come closer to matching the scale of a human brain. "Perhaps one day we may see a single rack of neurosynaptic system with as many neurons and synapses as in a human brain," said Jun Sawada, a researcher at IBM, in a blog entry. The brain can be viewed as an extremely power-efficient biological computer.