I will dispense with any amenities and cut right to the chase. When it comes to corporate learning and training the numbers are truly staggering. Trust me, there's a lot more where this came from meaning there is no shortage of stats and research that speak to the benefits of e-Learning. In a piece last year for PC Magazine, Rob Marvin wrote something that of course struck a chord with me. I say of course because of me being the pop culture savant that I am.

The news feed below is from my #4IR page. As always, my focus is on investing. The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents change, with tech innovation leading to industrial and economic disruption. The three pillars of THIS Industrial Revolution are Agtech, Fintech, and Artificial Intelligence (in all it's shapes in sizes, from Big Data IOT to Deep Learning). Which companies can we invest in TODAY to take advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

Technology has long been considered a resource-liberating mechanism, granting us better access to resources like information, food and energy. Yet what is often overlooked is the revolutionary impact technology can have on our ability to create art. Many artists are reacting to a world of accelerating change and rapid digitization through their work. Emerging artistic mediums like 3D printing, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are providing artists with unprecedented forms of self-expression. Many are also embracing the rise of intelligent machines and leveraging the man-machine symbiosis to create increasingly powerful works of art.

Facebook has provided more details about its Lumos machine learning platform, which aims to understand images and video, and is designed to be used without deep learning and computer vision training. The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started. The Lumos platform, announced at Web Summit last year, is a scalable system to sort through photos and videos. Lumos is the front end to a new set of 12 image classification changes made to Facebook's automatic alt text (AAT) for photos and its FBLearner Flow system.

One of the hottest topics at the moment is the development of Artificial Intelligence. My question What references are there in the Bible to Artificial Intelligence and to our relationship with this new technology? Obviously there are no direct references but I guess there are references that could be interpreted in this manner.

How a person tells a story could be interpreted in a multitude of ways -- telling your friend about your awesome new car can come across as excitement or a brag, depending on the listener. To help detect the sentiment behind speech, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a wearable app that can parse conversation to identify the emotion behind each part of the story. The app, built into a fitness tracker for this research, collects physical and speech data to analyze the overall tone of the story in real time. Using artificial intelligence, the app can also figure out which part of the conversation was happy or sad, and tracks emotional changes in five-second intervals. In the research, participants were asked to wear a Samsung Simband with the app installed and tell a story.

Artificial intelligence is primed to pervade everyday life, from automonous cars to intelligent ads that anticipate your desires. How will these shifts vary globally, and what do they mean for the future of work, life, and commerce? Two big thinkers share their views: Darrell West, editor in chief of TechTank at the Brookings Institution, and Stephanie Wander, who designs prizes for XPrize. Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11; volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan to "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues; and serving as a Senior Executive advocating for increased information interoperability, cybersecurity, and civil liberty protections. He completed a PhD in from Emory University's business school and two post-docs at MIT and Harvard.

The patter of automated machinery fills the air inside wire-basket manufacturer Marlin Steel's bustling factory in a rugged industrial section of this city. Maxi Cifarelli, 25, of Baltimore, peers through safety goggles at a flat screen, her left knee bent and heel resting on her chair. Two years after earning a fine arts degree from Towson University with a specialty in interdisciplinary object design, she now spends her work days working with a personality-free machine with a name to match: a computer numerical control, or CNC, router. With automation poised to sweep through the economy, some fear that it will kill more jobs than it creates. But Cifarelli's experience is the opposite. She befriended automation, instead of fighting it, and she has a job because of it.

There was one big name missing from the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (AI) member list when the research consortium was announced last September. Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft all pledged to work together to ensure AI is developed safely and ethically but Apple refused to get involved. Now it looks like the world's largest company and a tech giant renowned for keeping its research efforts a secret may have reconsidered its decision. Citing sources with knowledge of the situation, Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Apple is set to join the elite club, going on to say that its admission could be announced as early as this week. Apple has been gradually building up its AI and machine learning capabilities and buying a succession of small AI startups.

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