Are you into Machine Learning OR are you "just" a Statistician? Have you been asked this question yet? If you are in a career or looking to get into one that has anything to do with deriving insights out of data, you probably know what I am talking about. The year 2016 has seen over three dozen machine learning startups being acquired by tech giants; another several dozen machine learning startups raked up a aggregate funding to the tune of $4 Billion worldwide. Is it a blip or a bubble?

Suppose you work at a company. You want to use machine learning to improve marketing or operations or the product. Everyone agrees that this is a good idea because machine learning is the future. There are data scientists and engineers. The data scientists say that they know machine learning and will build you a model.

Here's one proof that artificial intelligence is moving closer to replacing more human jobs. Search giant Google this week introduced AI Duet. It's an experiment that uses machine learning to respond to your music. In a video (which I embedded below), Mann explains that the project is using neural networks and machine learning to create a map for responding to musical notes. Apparently, mapping for musical notes would have been created by a computer developer with a degree or musical background.

SAP is intent on delivering S/4HANA ERP in the cloud and will infuse it with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The company debuted the "next-generation intelligent" SAP S/4HANA Cloud at its Capital Markets Day event held at the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 9. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is designed for enterprises of more than 1,500 employees and meets the increasing need for ERP delivered in the cloud, Sven Denecken, SAP's senior vice president of product marketing for S/4HANA, said after the event. SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables customers to meet their digital transformation needs and provides a platform to act on insights in real time, he said. "The benefits of having real-time data accessible from an in-memory platform has been there for a while, but we see the market shifting more and accepting cloud more in certain industries and in certain regions," Denecken said. "The consumption model of the cloud and the benefits of the cloud are now combining with this modern suite."

Already established as a major player in artificial intelligence, Microsoft Corp.. is aiming to make the technology a foundation of the healthcare industry with the launch Thursday of a new partnership program called Healthcare NExT. The program brings together Microsoft's latest innovations in AI with its Azure cloud computing capabilities in an effort to advance medical research and improve patient care, said Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft Research NExT. He added that the new program will "deeply integrate greenfield research and health technology product development," while also helping the company establish a new model for strategic health industry partnerships. "Our goal is to enable a new wave of innovation and impact using Microsoft's deep AI expertise and global-scale cloud," Lee wrote in a blog post announcing the program. As part of the initiative, Microsoft is teaming up with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center on the first Healthcare NExT strategic research partnership.

Google is adding functionality to allow Google Assistant to compete more directly with Amazon's Alexa, but what it really needs is to offer love and support to developers of smart home products. The company's failure to do this was visible on every stand where a smart home product was to be found at CES. They all worked with Amazon Alexa, but only a very tiny fraction worked with Google Assistant. Google's shopping functionality has involved linking the online ordering systems of retailers like Costco, PetSmart and Target with Google Home so it can offer a similar shopping experience to Amazon through the device. Measuring up to Amazon in this category is going to be tough because Amazon has one system through which millions of products are available globally, whereas Google will have to sign up lots of retailers in every locality where it aims to have this service available.

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Gamalon Inc, emerged from stealth mode this week, announced two machine learning products, based on an in-house technology known as Bayesian Program Synthesis (BPS). The company claims BPS can perform machine learning tasks 100 times faster than conventional deep learning techniques, while providing more accurate results. "We call our way of doing this Bayesian program learning," said Gamalon founder and CEO, Ben Vigoda at a recent TED talk. He believes using Bayesian probabilistic modeling is a much more efficient way, that is, a much less computationally intensive way, to infuse intelligence into machines. Unlike deep learning, which often needs millions of data examples to train a neural network, a Bayesian model can be built with much fewer examples.

A toddler meanders unsteadily through the living room, pausing by a sleek black cylinder in the corner. "Alexa," he says in a high-pitched voice. The cylinder acknowledges the request, despite the muffled pronunciation, and the music starts. Alexa, a cloud-based speech recognition software from Amazon and the brain of its black cylindrical loudspeaker Echo, has been a big hit around the world – except for the younger ones, who take it for granted. Children will grow up alongside it, just as Alexa will evolve, as the AI powering it learns to answer more and more questions, and – perhaps – one day even converses freely with people.

"If somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made [AI android] Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn't be that surprised." Imagine a smart robot performing delicate surgery under the control of a surgeon. Or an artificial intelligence (AI) machine mapping genomic sequences to identify the link to Alzheimer's disease. Or psychiatrists applying AI in natural language processing systems on the voices of patients to assess their risk of suicide. You don't have to imagine anymore, because all of this is happening right now.