Astro Teller knows how to draw attention. He was wearing his rollerblades on Thursday when he glided into a roomful of reporters to announce that Project Loon--Alphabet's wacky-sounding plan to deliver the internet to the world's farthest-flung places via giant balloons--is even closer to reality than the company previously thought. It was a made-for-the-press moment, but Teller buried the lede. It's cool that these balloons may soon start broadcasting internet signals from the stratosphere. But the bigger deal here is that machine learning is moving beyond its digital origins into the real world.

A group of researchers at California?s Stanford University say they've created a computer-based artificial intelligence algorithm that can identify skin cancer as accurately as a doctor. Tech billionaire Elon Musk shared his insights about the future at an event in Dubai. ELON Musk believes artificial intelligence could be catastrophic for humanity. He thinks we are set to become a cyborg race, which will have to grapple with 15 per cent of the global work force being without a job, reports The Sun. The creative genius added a'universal income' would have to be introduced for the global population because robots will do everything.

Current research projects show that artificial intelligence (AI) can help us solving global problems for the greater good of mankind. Despite the headlines presenting crashes involving self-driving cars, the applications of AI technology in this area could dramatically reduce injuries and deaths on the roads. Self-driving cars could also change our lifestyles. Thanks to this emerging technology, we will have more time to entertain ourselves of work during commutes. The decreased cognitive load and the increased comfort provided by shared transportation and self-driving may also affect where people choose to live.

As someone who is interested in machine learning you know probably how hard it is to explain to a non digital native what it is what you exactly do. As a consultant with an interest in machine learning, I have found two sources that explain in very clear terms what machine learning is, how it basically works and in which way it can improve day-to-day business applications. Werner Vogels is the CTO from Amazon and in his TED-like speech called'Does AI make Apps Evil?' he clearly explains how machine learning is nothing more than simple technology that can be applied to build smarter applications. For example recommendation engines, fraud detection or marketing campaigns can absolutely benefit from it. Thomas Ball is an advanced analytics professional and writer at KDnuggets and he wrote an insightful article on predictive modelling titled'Data Science of Variable Selection: A Review'.

The rise of chatbot technologies has not been the stunning success many people anticipated. The technology is now ubiquitous, but chatbots are more famous for their failures than successes. For instance, Microsoft's Tay faced a wave of media scorn after the internet trained it to become a misogynistic racist in the span of a day. Less snarky criticisms have been leveled at Google's Allo. Experts have called the tech giant out for failing to equip Allo with end-to-end encryption, thereby exposing chat conversations to third parties.

It's easy to think of TJBot as a person. After all, TJ responds to voice commands, displays emotions, and can carry on a chat. But TJBot is actually a programmable cardboard robot powered by IBM Watson. This little robot gives you an entry point into the world of artificial intelligence and "embodied cognition." Now you can embed AI and cognitive capabilities into everyday objects and enhance your device interactions.

Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly one of the hottest topics these days. We often find ourselves interacting with AI without even knowing it. Various tech giants such as Facebook, IBM, Google, and Microsoft are all engaging in different AI-initiatives. They are competing on building digital personal assistants such as Facebook's M, Apple's Siri and Cortana from Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg even plans to build his own model of Iron Man's Jarvis to run his home.

With the rapid advancement of information discovery techniques, machine learning and data mining continue to play a significant role in cybersecurity. Although several conferences, workshops, and journals focus on the fragmented research topics in this area, there has been no single interdisciplinary resource on past and current works and possible paths for future research in this area. This book fills this need. From basic concepts in machine learning and data mining to advanced problems in the machine learning domain, Data Mining and Machine Learning in Cybersecurity provides a unified reference for specific machine learning solutions to cybersecurity problems. It supplies a foundation in cybersecurity fundamentals and surveys contemporary challenges--detailing cutting-edge machine learning and data mining techniques.

At this year's CES, one of the largest global consumer electronics and consumer technology tradeshows, it was announced that augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence will be the primary disruptive consumer technologies for the next 20 years. In addition to this a recent report published by research company, Mintel, looked at how virtual and augmented reality technologies are entering our homes and stated that this will have an impact on how we shop, the brands we choose, and so on. You only have to think about the potential of drones delivering your goods versus the good old parcel delivery driver, to appreciate the impact this technology is likely to have on our lives and the environment around us. In 2016 Pokémon Go and Snapchat demonstrated how brands can effectively capture consumer attention and monetise augmented reality experiences at scale. Add to this recent news from Digi-capital, which showed that in the first quarter of 2016 investment in augmented reality and virtual reality grew to $1.1 billion (compared to the $700m total in 2015) and you can start to appreciate how these technologies are beginning to move centre stage.

Have you ever wondered how Facebook collects all the data it has to feed you with the content it presumes you'll like and keep you coming back for more? Well, now there's an app that can answer these questions. Available for free, Data Selfie is an open-source Chrome extension that helps you discover how machine learning algorithms track and process your Facebook activity, and gain insights about your personality and habits. TNW Conference won best European Event 2016 for our festival vibe. See what's in store for 2017. To accomplish this, the nifty extension monitors your Facebook interactions for patterns and then crunches the collected data into insightful reports.