The Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh may not seem a likely setting for a major scientific breakthrough. But on Tuesday, it was: Libratus, an AI system developed by Carnegie Mellon University, beat the world's top four human players in a 20-day tournament of Head's-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker. Libratus, developed by Carnegie Mellon's Tuomas Sandholm, a professor of computer science, and Noam Brown, a Ph.D. student in computer science, competed against Dong Kim, Jimmy Chou, Daniel McAulay, and Jason Les in a competition called "Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante"--during which 120,000 hands were played. "This is the last frontier," said Sandholm during a press conference on Tuesday.

It was no surprise that artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on business was a key talking point at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (Davos 2017), especially as concern of AI-powered machinery displacing human workers grows. Speaking at an AI panel at Davos 2017, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed how simple it was to eliminate human input altogether: "its augmentation or replacement – that's a design choice. You can say replacement [of humans] is the goal, or you can say augmentation is the goal." But while Microsoft are developing tech to aid with human interaction, others may be less willing to design AI machinery that interacts with humans, instead opting to replace them altogether. However, the way in which AI is currently being developed is to work alongside individuals, or, as IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at the panel puts it, "in service" of them.

We want to apply new data to our network and classify inputs If we overtrain / overfit our network to our training data then our accuracy will be deceiving. It might work very well for training data, but will not work on test data. In order to prevent overfitting we implement preprocessing techniques and tune our hyper parameters.

The company has developed a kind of "App Store" for medical care complete with 40 predictive and prescriptive apps targeting Physicians, Care Managers, Hospital Ops and Finance teams. Their claim is what used to take months to build and deploy, can now happen in a matter of weeks at a significant cost reduction regarding both deployment and ongoing platform operation. The market opportunity is huge. The United States has the biggest healthcare industry in the world, spending approximately $3 trillion a year. By 2018, healthcare will comprise close to 18% US gross domestic product.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Conference Guru has been named "Media Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. A valuable conference experience generates new contacts, sales leads, potential strategic partners and potential investors; helps gather competitive intelligence and even provides inspiration for new products and services. Conference Guru works with conference organizers to pass great deals to great conferences, helping you discover new conferences and increase your return on investment. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.

What could your company accomplish if every customer and employee interaction with technology was an intelligent one? The Accenture Technology Vision 2017 delves into a fascinating trend that's at the heart of my daily responsibilities--and I know of substantial interest to our clients. The AI Is the New UI chapter looks at how artificial intelligence (AI) will quickly become more than an underlying technology capability; it will permeate intelligent enterprises and advance to a fundamental tool for daily engagement with people--both customers and employees. We also describe in the Tech Vision how AI will, in time, become the digital spokesperson for leading enterprises. Customers will experience a company's brand through personalized, 100 percent consistent and natural interactions with AI service agents--and even engage with the brand through other companies' AI interfaces. This post highlights how we see this tech trend unfolding.

The history of Artificial Intelligence is long, but it's only been recently that technology companies and markets have begun to get excited about it… Why? After a few decades of exploration of symbolic AI methods, the field shifted toward statistical approaches, that have as of late started working in a broad array of tasks due to the explosion of data and computing power, this in turn has led to machine learning and, most importantly, enabled deep learning. This is great news for the tech industry. The downside is that there aren't enough data scientists that understand deep learning. For those who do, there is a huge demand for their services.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry. A great deal has been written recently on the growing importance of voice-driven computing devices, such as Amazon's Echo, Google Home and others like them. At the same time, there's been a long-held belief by many in the industry that software innovations will be the key drivers in moving the tech industry forward ("software is eating the world," as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously said more than five years ago). The combination of these two -- software for voice-based computing -- would, therefore, seem to be at the very apex of tech industry developments. Indeed, there are many companies now doing cutting-edge work to create new types of software for these very different kinds of computing devices.

Machines have already surpassed humans in terms of image recognition ability. In the next 20 years, experts predict that machine learning will continue to make great strides on a number of human tasks. If this innovation is done in an ethical way, we can build a future in which humans are not competing with machines or being overtaken by robots, but instead entering into a new era of collaboration that frees up the human spirit for more meaningful tasks that require emotional intelligence.

Intended for executive leadership who are looking to better understand the implications of AI, and need to decide where to focus time and investment in machine learning (AI) technologies. The idea of AI--of machines that can sense, classify, learn, reason and interact--has been around for decades. Yet today, the combination of massive and available data sets, inexpensive parallel computing and advances in algorithms has enabled machines to function in ways not possible before. While "shiny" examples such as robotics, driverless cars and intelligent agents dominate the news – artificial intelligence has wide implications for all types of organizations – not just cutting edge technology giants. This report lays out the current state of AI for business, describes primary and emerging use cases, and states the risks, opportunities and organizational considerations that businesses are facing.