This series of talks is part of the Foundations of Machine Learning Boot Camp. Videos for each talk area will be available through the links above.

The big data paradigm has changed how we make decisions. Armed with sophisticated machine learning and deep learning algorithms that can identify correlations hidden within huge data sets, big data has given us a powerful new tool to predict the future with uncanny accuracy and disrupt entire industries. What if some decisions can't be based just on data? That may sound like a heresy to people who have devoted themselves to the religion of data, to the business leaders who have declared their allegiance to making data-driven decisions. Sure, there may be obstacles to overcome, such as data cleanliness, governance, and security concerns.

Nokia has announced two new services for operators to boost their efficiency with the use of AI and predictive analytics. Jumping on the digital assistant trend, MIKA (Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant) is a specialist helper for telecoms operators which provides quick access to detailed information. Based on Nokia's AVA platform, MIKA will improve the efficiency of engineers by connecting them with best practice solutions to problems. Nokia claims MIKA is the first assistant'trained' for the telecommunications industry and provides more concise help over the general information provided by other assistants. The automation it provides helps to save time spent looking for solutions on the internet or waiting to speak with someone who has knowledge of how to solve the issue.

Their machine-learning platform predicted a trio of reagents that was able to generate a never-before-seen cancer-like phenotype in tadpoles. The research, reported in Scientific Reports on January 27, shows how artificial intelligence (AI) can help human researchers in fields such as oncology and regenerative medicine control complex biological systems to reach new and previously unachievable outcomes. The researchers had previously shown that pigment cells (melanocytes) in developing frogs could be converted to a cancer-like, metastatic form by disrupting their normal bioelectric and serotonergic signaling and had used AI to reverse-engineer a model that explained this complex process. However, during these extensive experiments, the biologists observed something remarkable: All the melanocytes in a single frog larva either converted to the cancer-like form or remained completely normal. Conversion of only some of the pigment cells in a single tadpole was never seen; how, the researchers asked, could such an all-or-none coordination of cells across the tadpole body be explained and controlled?

When people talk about artificial intelligence, they usually don't mean supervised and unsupervised machine learning. These tasks are pretty trivial compared to what we think of AIs doing - playing chess and Go, driving cars, and beating video games at a superhuman level. Reinforcement learning has recently become popular for doing all of that and more. Much like deep learning, a lot of the theory was discovered in the 70s and 80s but it hasn't been until recently that we've been able to observe first hand the amazing results that are possible. In 2016 we saw Google's AlphaGo beat the world Champion in Go. We saw AIs playing video games like Doom and Super Mario.

Researchers are trying to distill smart transit philosophy into a machine-learning algorithm. Scientists hope their smart transit model will reveal a recipe for a smarter city, organized in way that relieves the congestion common on the mass transit systems of major cities. "Singapore needs an efficient transport system to support people's activities given the existing and planned infrastructure," project leader Christopher Monterola, a researcher at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's Institute of High Performance Computing, explained in a news release. "To guide planners, we needed a model that could predict ridership under the regional centers plan." Like many cities, Singapore consists of a large central downtown, or an inner central business district, surrounded by less dense residential and industrial zones. With so many commuting in and out of the central business district at rush hour, the setup promotes congestion.

As an amateur futurist I'm always watching the trends of innovation, here are some technology trends I'm keeping a close eye on as we approach 2017. Now we are entering a period where the convergence of multiple technologies and integrations results in an exponentially increasing potential for disruption in the future of work, commerce, manufacturing, Bigdata and AI. Distributed ledger technology that are decentralized databases that are hacker and fraud proof don't just have the potential to impact Banking and FinTech, but transform how our digital identity and customer reviews work. In an era where trust in at an all-time low between citizens and institutions, the blockchain can give the fallen credibility of various institutions a new measure of legitimacy. You would not have thought Amazon's 9-inch tall cylinder speaker controlled by a cloud-based voice assistant that goes by the name Alexa would change the world, but it's becoming increasingly apparent this product is a deal-breaker that not only tap into chatbots, product search and ecommerce but the future of how apps work together via a personal assistant.

GovTech Business Watch is a weekly roundup of news in the government technology market. Following the explosive popularity of body cameras at police departments across the country, a video analytics company is training up programs that could help automate some of the work it takes to get value out of the huge volume of visual data those cameras produce. Dextro, a New York-based company founded in 2013, has traditionally sold its services to the private sector. But now, according to an article from the Knight Foundation-backed news site Undark, the company is building up its artificial intelligence capacities to handle video from police departments. With companies such as Taser selling thousands upon thousands of cameras, many of them now producing high-definition video, police departments are beginning to compile terabyte-sized archives of data.

For the last day of this week, I've chosen to play poker with artificial intelligence (AI). Past this metaphorically first sentence, i would like to share with The Information Age a recent post from the MIT Technology Review, another irresistible one, and this time about a most recent AI conquest of a typically human capacity – the card game of Poker. This is a game that involves several human psychological traits that we might think an artificial device would never master. For example, the human ability to read other people's minds would have seemed intractable form an AI perspective; or the ability to induce contradictory beliefs in others, like when the poker players uses the strategy of bluffing. Strategic thinking under uncertainty and imperfect information appears to being conquered by the AI community of computer scientists and software geeks. Or so that is what is claimed in the article below, where a few links to some of the pioneers is well recommended a follow through, as well as the full readership of the paper DeepStack: Expert-Level Artificial Intelligence in No-Limit Poker, that is also provided below in this post, with its abstract description.

Most of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions which result in mainstream are mainly focus on the customer experience. In a certain way, the AI solutions that fashion brands apply are tangible and visible to customers' eyes. From the style advisor to the suggestion for complete looks from any item to the pic to purchase, or which is the same: the possibility to buy an outfit with only upload a picture to the eCommerce. But the AI Solutions developed by Wide Eyes Technologies can also be used as tools to improve the internal processes and even make an estimate of the sales or analyze trends. Provide the managers of eCommerces and marketing and advertising departments with powerful tools is one of the Wide Eyes Technologies objectives.