To learn more, request information about our AI Global ambassadors program. More information about the speakers and the final agenda will be announced shortly. Coffee and lunch will be provided during the conference. The full speakers line up will be announced shortly. The selected companies will have the unique opportunity to promote their product/service during the conference, have free access to the event, and meet with industry leaders.

Last week Google's AlphaGo defeated legendary Go player Lee Sedol in four out of five games marking another milestone in the field of Artificial Intelligence. This is reminiscent of a 6 game match in 1997 where IBM's Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov. While machine beat man in both these games, there have been remarkable improvements between the computational capabilities of Deep Blue and AlphaGo. Deep Blue relied on brute computational force to evaluate positions; however AlphaGo relied on a a concept called "deep learning" that resembles human decision making. Beating humans at complex games is interesting news, these deep learning techniques also have the potential to enhance how retailers engage with their customers and improve their operational effectiveness.

Chat bots tap into two very current preoccupations. On one hand, the hope that they can actually work is a reflection of the ongoing explosion of AI, and on the other, they offer a way to reach users without having to get them to install an app. One way to look at any given AI problem, in the crudest terms, is to ask whether solving this needs'general AI' or whether your domain is narrow enough and your solution broad and flexible enough that you can deal with a wide enough percentage of potential scenarios without having HAL 9000. That is, we're clearly pretty close to making a car that can handle highway driving with no human input, since the range of possible events is pretty small, but driving in central Rome or Moscow is an entirely different matter that needs an entirely different level of decision-making: what does that hand gesture mean? Hence, the challenge in plugging an AI into a'conversational' chat bot interface is that you don't have HAL 9000 but are in some sense pretending to the user that you do.

Celaton today announced the release of inSTREAM version 6, its intelligent automation platform that applies sophisticated algorithms, including artificial intelligence and cognitive learning, to streamline and automate the processing of semi-structured and unstructured content. Unstructured and semi-structured unpredictable content flows into organisations every day by email, post, paper, fax, social media, web feeds and other electronic data streams and creates challenges for customers due to the cost and need for experienced staff to process it. Unique to inSTREAM is its ability to learn the pattern of content through the natural consequence of processing and monitoring human intervention. Confidence is improved through accelerated learning. Efficiency is improved through accelerated learning.

Emerging technologies and their possible implications for ethics, security, and even human existence have increasingly gained ground in the past two decades. Some innovations have resulted in obvious security and existential threats: a world with nuclear arms, for example. The potential of other technological shifts, however, has been more mixed. Biotechnologies, genetic engineering, and stems cells have given rise to controversial debates in which advocacy groups on both sides have convincingly put forward pros and cons. The Internet has revolutionized everything from markets to family communication in ways both beneficial and harmful.

It's been an emotional week in the realm of game AI as the world watched the historic five-game showdown between legendary Go world champion Lee Sedol and Google DeepMind's famed deep learning AI AlphaGo. All five games were held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, and as events played out, millions around the world became increasingly captivated. Anticipation for the match began growing in January, when Google's UK-based AI group DeepMind, led by CEO Demis Hassabis, announced their computer algorithm AlphaGo defeated three-time European Go champion Fan Hui 5 games to 0--a victory some experts didn't expect a computer to achieve for a decade. At the end of a Google blog post announcing the win was the promise of a best-of-five face-off between AlphaGo and 18-time international Go champion Lee Sedol, a match equivalent to IBM's Deep Blue defeat of Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997. Notably, Go is inherently more complex than chess and AlphaGo, at least in part, trained itself to play the game.

The secret to running a profitable business is improving efficiency on all ends. Companies are always looking for ways to get more tasks done for less money without compromising quality. Saving money in areas like customer service frees up resources that can be allocated to different departments that will incite company growth more directly. Alfred Bot is a fully customizable virtual assistant for businesses and we don't mean virtual assistant in the traditional sense; Alfred Bot takes virtual assistant to the next level. Alfred Bot is a cloud based program that can help your business provide 24 hour customer service, preform tasks and commands, or even train employees.

Microsoft has announced a new way for developers to create bots that can do a variety of tasks, from playing Tic Tac Toe to having full conversations with you. The Rich Bot framework will have cognitive services and will learn through machine learning. An open source Bot Builder SDK will make it easy to build bots that work over SMS, Office, Skype, Twitter, Slack and a variety of other services as well. The new runtime works off of Microsoft's own Azure platform, and it supports both Node.JS and C#. There will be a Bot Directory to showcase a sample of the open source bots.

It's very new as a mainstream management tool (as opposed to something only data scientists would use) and is indeed a fairly complex technology. The thought that computers could take in a huge amount of data and not only make sense of it, but learn along the way, is unfathomable to many. Similar to the confusion and learning curve that accompanied Internet technology, a solid understanding of machine learning and its true applications takes time and a willingness to dive deeper. The following are four myths that often accompany conversations around machine learning--and evidence of the contrary.

Two quantitative analysts using artificial intelligence in an online data science competition showed they could diagnose heart disease about as accurately as doctors. Qi Liu and Tencia Lee, hedge fund analysts and self-described "quants," built the winning algorithm in the competition, which could find indicators of heart disease. The online data contest challenged participants to develop machine algorithms that could measure cardiac volumes from MRIs provided by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Mr. Liu and Ms. Lee didn't know each other before they won the competition, beating out more than 1,390 algorithms. They met each other in a forum on the Kaggle site, where the competition was hosted over a three-month period.