Imagine: Humans waging an epic battle against technology, with human intelligence inevitably subjugated by artificial overlords. Plenty of folks would line up with front-row tickets and popcorn in hand. But it's also the very real manifestation of a universal fear -- jobs relegated to machines, livelihoods handed over to bots. But when we take a closer look at bots and other forms of artificial intelligence, our worst fears are a far cry from the truth. We've built bots to help us succeed.

Robotic process automation (RPA) can be the true antidote to manual, rote work, or it can be our worst nightmare if you listen to all the drama or the hype. RPA centers on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to apply human-like thinking to streamline a typically manually intensive process or activity; and whether we like it or not, it's here to stay. Take, for instance, the process of data extraction from documents such as invoices. Application of advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document recognition can automate a significant amount of the job of data entry typically performed by clerks or specialized data entry staff. Interestingly, human effort is still involved with attaining the ability to hand off a process or task to a machine.

Until a few years ago, machine learning algorithms simply did not work very well on many meaningful tasks like recognizing objects or translation. Thus, when a machine learning algorithm failed to do the right thing, this was the rule, rather than the exception. Today, machine learning algorithms have advanced to the next stage of development: when presented with naturally occurring inputs, they can outperform humans. Machine learning has not yet reached true human-level performance, because when confronted by even a trivial adversary, most machine learning algorithms fail dramatically. In other words, we have reached the point where machine learning works, but may easily be broken.

Microsoft has a mission, "To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more" and they are great words, but action speaks louder than words. You will also hear the phrase'Democratizing AI" being used increasingly over the following months, in other words making Artificial Intelligence available to everyone. I have had the pleasure of working with some of Microsoft's finest over the last two days at a Hackathon in London, covering a number of aspects of Machine Learning, Cognitive Computing and Data Analytics - this post is making some of the learning accessible and available to you. Whether you are just curious or want to start a Data Science journey, this will get you started on your first data science experiment! You need nothing to get started, no previous knowledge, no credit card, just curiosity and a little patience.

In the coming decades, artificial intelligence will replace a lot of human jobs, from driving trucks to analyzing X-rays. But it will also work with us, taking over mundane personal tasks and enhancing our cognitive capabilities. As AI continues to improve, digital assistants--often in the form of disembodied voices--will become our helpers and collaborators, managing our schedules, guiding us through decisions, and making us better at our jobs. We'll have something akin to Samantha from the movie Her or Jarvis from Iron Man: AI "agents" that know our likes and dislikes, and that free us up to focus on what humans do best, or what we most enjoy. Anyone who's used Siri (on Apple products) or Alexa (on Amazon Echo) has already spoken with a digital assistant.

Today is an exciting day for the advancement of AI at Microsoft. We have agreed to acquire Maluuba, a Montreal-based company with one of the world's most impressive deep learning research labs for natural language understanding. Maluuba's expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help us advance our strategy to democratize AI and to make it accessible and valuable to everyone -- consumers, businesses and developers. We've recently set new milestones for speech and image recognition using deep learning techniques, and with this acquisition we are, as Wayne Gretzky would say, skating to where the puck will be next -- machine reading and writing. Maluuba's vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans -- a vision exactly in line with ours.

Smart TVs are being used to monitor their viewers as they sit in front of them. Television maker Vizio and a subsidiary will pay millions of dollars in fines to settle allegations that it had been secretly tracking people's viewing habits and then selling that information on. The data was then used by marketing companies and data brokers for a range of things, including measuring how effective ad campaigns were and whether people watched them. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

An online poll commissioned by BT has highlighted a number of slang words and phrases used by children communicating over social media and messaging apps. Over 4,500 adults took part in the poll, created to raise awareness of Safer Internet Day 2017, which takes place today. Just 4% of respondents were able to work out the meaning of the acronym MIA (bulimia). The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

The lives of marketing technology officers, chief marketing technologists, and other martech professionals are often complicated and draining. Whether they're in control of buying decisions or implementing new marketing tools, the swing between the excitement for a new solution to the drudgery of actually supporting those solutions can take a large toll. From budget burdens to committing their team's man hours--the payoff for every new implementation has to be worth it. As a marketer for a large B2B company, imagine you're presented with a scalable solution that would improve the efficiency of your customer service, reduce overhead, and could operate 24/7. Oh, and it would be entirely in-house--no third-party service or call center that's likely to muddle your brand image. Sounds like a dream, right?

This repository contains the lecture slides and course description for the Deep Natural Language Processing course offered in Hilary Term 2017 at the University of Oxford. This is an advanced course on natural language processing. Automatically processing natural language inputs and producing language outputs is a key component of Artificial General Intelligence. The ambiguities and noise inherent in human communication render traditional symbolic AI techniques ineffective for representing and analysing language data. This is an applied course focussing on recent advances in analysing and generating speech and text using recurrent neural networks.