Movies from The Lawnmower Man to The Matrix to Transcendence have sought to imagine what it might be like if we could literally interface a human mind with a computer. A new movie, MindGamers, is a thriller that will take that to another level by involving the audience to explore that very question. In MindGamers, starring Sam Neill ("Jurassic Park") and Tom Payne (The Walking Dead), a group of brilliant young students discovers the greatest scientific breakthrough of all time: a wireless neural network, connected via a quantum computer, capable of linking the minds of each and every one of us. They determine that quantum theory can be used to transfer motor-skills from one brain to another, and freely spread this technology, believing it to be a first step towards a new equality and intellectual freedom. Other parties are also interested in the technology--but for more nefarious purposes like mass-control to influence populations.

Samsung is expected to replace its S-Voice functionality with an artificially intelligent Bixby voice assistant in its upcoming S8 device. But, how would Bixby fare in comparison with Google Assistant -- the U.S. tech giant's Artificial Intelligence enabled voice assistant? "Samsung and Google will have to continue to maintain their strategic partnership to nurture the AI and the market for the emerging technology," Lee Kyeong-Tae, corporate strategy planning vice-president, Samsung Electronics told The Investor on Tuesday. Samsung has in the past come out with devices having two voice assistants, S-Voice and Google Voice. But this time, the company seems to have different plans for Bixby.

Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services, today announced that it has been awarded in the'Best in Show' category by TM Forum Live! Asia". TM Forum is a leading global industry association for digital business. The award was given for the'Cognitive Digital Agent' - a project championed by Globe Telecom, Philippines along with Infosys, Amdocs and Huawei. The project demonstrated the feasibility of using cognitive computing technologies aligned to telecom business processes to enhance customer experience in a more intuitive and natural fashion. To address changing consumer needs and demands in today's digital economy, Infosys, along with Huawei and Amdocs, established the Cognitive Digital Agent - a five-month project, led by Globe Telecom. This was aimed at creating the next generation of customer care services, leveraging artificial intelligence technologies. The core solution is driven by Infosys' expertise in natural language processing, machine learning and cognitive computing. The Cognitive Digital Agent has the capability to address complex queries and answer questions through omni-channel access including interactive voice responses (IVR), portals and wearables. The Cognitive Digital Agent creates a difference in situations where, if a call center is contacted, the responses are generated using natural language processing - making them more consumer friendly, or on social media platforms and in smart watches where the machine agent responds to queries 24x7. TM Forum recognized the project for some of these exceptional demonstrations of business outcomes across channels, and the inventive use of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). "Our goal has been to explore the use of cognitive computing and artificial intelligence technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning to create the next generation of customer care services, which, in turn, enabled us to create this compelling project that can significantly improve customer satisfaction.

Founding Attorney Chad Van Horn says, "We are excited to add ROSS to our already busy team of bankruptcy attorneys. ROSS will allow us to continue to be at the forefront of assisting consumers with their legal issues while keeping attorneys fees at an affordable level. ROSS will assist in equaling the playing field between boutique law firms and big law. In short, we're excited to add ROSS to our extremely talented team of legal professionals." ROSS is an artificial intelligence, and as such has never been to law school or passed the bar, but his research is impeccable.

Last week, I introduced the notion that businesses can gain deeper customer insights if they connect their disparate data silos. Similar to how oncologists can leverage information from genome sequencing to tailor cancer treatments for a specific patient in order to improve health outcomes, businesses can use all customer data from disparate data silos to personalize interactions with their customers to improve customer loyalty. Using the 2 2 graphical approach to understanding data size (i.e., number of customers and number of variables), we can see how the value of your integrated business data is greater than the sum of its parts. Figure 1 illustrates these two components of size by examining four different scenarios of how businesses use their data. In the lower right quadrant, it is business as usual; when departments keep their data siloed, each department only knows a few things about the customers.

Machine learning is the process of building analytical models to automatically discover previously unknown patterns from data that indicate associations, sequences, anomalies (outliers), classifications, and clusters and segments. These patterns reveal hidden rules as to why an event happened--for example, rules that predict likely customer churn. The widely used Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) methodology is used to develop predictive analytical models. CRISP-DM includes six phases: business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, model development using supervised and unsupervised learning, model evaluation and model deployment. The business understanding phase involves defining the business problem or use case, the business objectives and the business questions that need to be answered.

When investors think of artificial intelligence stocks, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) isn't usually the first name that comes to mind. Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) as the leader in at-home AI, due to the success of the company's Echo device, while "Watson" from International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) is arguably the top turn-key artificial intelligence solution for enterprise-level entities. Those investors who believe AI is the future, however, may want to put MSFT stock back on their radar as a way to play the movement. The software giant's recent acquisition of Maluuba speaks volumes about its artificial intelligence ambitions and what it actually wants to "do" with it. Maluuba isn't a household name, but within artificial intelligence circles (and these are VP of AI Research Harry Shum's words), "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."

Banks are already experimenting with robotic process automation in areas like their compliance functions. But robotics technology may soon find its way to nearly all aspects of running the bank. As banks become more comfortable with the relying on software robots to replicate the actions of a human interacting with machines to handle rote tasks, experts say they will be quick to deploy the technology companywide as a way to trim expenses and redirect employees to more crucial tasks. "I think we're going to see it move from a few narrow functions to across the enterprise," said Alan McIntyre, the industry managing director for banking at Accenture. "It's going to become an indispensable technology for banks, rather than an interesting experiment."

Oren Boiman, CEO and co-founder of Magisto talks about how as marketers, we need innovation in digital video. Mass consumer adoption of video is forcing us to overcome the challenges of a fragmented audience and learn to manage risk. The field of video marketing is a particularly hot topic right now. Marketing innovation is being driven by mass consumer adoption of digital video in a myriad of shapes and sizes. In the broadest terms, the marketing trade is behind the curve and eager to fill the gap and find audiences beyond our reach. One of the challenges of finding and speaking to a fragmented audience is creating marketing video content with agility, scale and with a voice.

Deals to AI startups reached a record high last year, from 160 deals in 2012 to 658 in 2016. Although non-US deal share has been increasing over the time period, well over a majority of deals, around 70%, went to startups in the US in the last 5 years. The top 3 states for deals were California (51%), New York (11%), and Massachusetts (9%). Using the CB Insights database, we mapped the most well-funded AI startups in each of the 35 states where there have been equity deals to an AI company in the last five years. The map only includes companies that have not exited and only includes equity financing.