In yet another episode of man versus machine, an artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Melon University has been absolutely dismantling a team of professional poker players, accumulating a staggering lead of almost $800,000. The showdown takes place as part of the "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence" competition which pits a group of four poker pros against the crafty supercomputer Libratus in a heads-up game of No-Limit Texas Hold'em slated to continue for 120,000 hands. TNW Conference won best European Event 2016 for our festival vibe. See what's in store for 2017. Since January 11 when the contest initially kicked off, the players have now passed the midway point of the the race, having completed almost 65,000 hands in total.

Theresa May is due to announce details of the "Modern Industrial Strategy" at a regional meeting of the cabinet in the North West. The new plan will center on ten key strategic pillars, according to the release unveiled by the Prime Minister on Sunday. "We must become a more innovative economy and do more to commercialize our world-leading science base to drive growth across the UK," reads the first point, called "Investing in science, research, and innovation." The government is going to spend £4.7 billion ($5.85 billion) on the new strategy with the money steered to such areas as AI, "smart" energy technology, robotics, and 5G wireless. The project will improve living standards and drive economic growth across the whole country, according to Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark.

In early August, IBM announced that it will acquire Merge Healthcare Inc., a company that sells systems that help medical professionals access and store medical images. This move is a critical step in IBM's plan to put AI to work medically by training its Watson software to identify maladies like heart disease and cancer. Merge is valuable to IBM because it owns 30 billion images, including computerized tomography, X-rays, and magnetic-resonance-imaging scans. The company can use these images in its deep learning training program. IBM is hoping that the same kind of software that lets Flickr recognize your face or a dog in your photos can help Watson identify symptoms of diseases.

As we head into 2017, artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging technology trend that is generating increasing buzz among business leaders of both start-ups and well-established companies. From virtual assistants to image recognition to self-driving cars, we're only just beginning to scratch the surface of how AI-related technology will impact our daily lives and transform how businesses operate. IBM's Chief Innovation Officer Bernie Meyerson optimistically predicts 2017 will be "the year of the solution as opposed to the year of the experiment." The worlds of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) are poised to collide. This year's CES conference in Las Vegas was packed with all kinds of smart devices touting new AI capabilities.

This is the first article in a series "quick guide to digital tech", where I will cover some of the most discussed topics in digital technology. With the series I aim to give a simple understandable overview, with examples most readers can relate to or have heard of. In the end, I will give a short comment on where I think the technology is today and where I see it heading in a near and far future. Artificial Intelligence may be the most disruptive technology the world has seen since the Industrial Revolution. It describes every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence that can be described so precisely that a machine can simulate it.

We all know AI, the super villain from Hollywood movies which intends to finish the human race. The Artificial Intelligence, the one watching us all the time, knows our every step, even correctly predicts our future steps. Even outside of the science fiction arena, in our real world Artificial Intelligence is feared to be the job killer. So, how does a company sell this fictional super villain, a real life job killer? How do you sell products based on AI, when people are so scared of them?

Would be naive to think that it's just our personal lives that are dramatically enhanced by the recent progress in artificial intelligence. As a founding partner at a venture studio we embrace these trends and try to help startups we work with to focus on the future rather than how it works today, since the technology we create will definitely create new opportunities and markets tomorrow. And the best way to be prepared for the change is to understand what is driving it and which trends are the most distinguished in a current strive for technological singularity. More and more big companies are trying to outsource their processes to machines or at least break them apart into pieces that can be automated, which may be a major concern to an unskilled layer of workers but can also be a stimulus to spend those saved costs on creating more qualified specialists in the missing areas instead. The part that we still don't get is how machines make certain decisions, even Google engineers are out of touch how their algorithms work now thanks to the complexity of a given system, which is a serious concern and a stopping point for us to completely trust AI.

Until recently, artificial intelligence (AI) was similar to nuclear fusion in unfulfilled promise. It had been around a long time but had not reached the spectacular heights foreseen in its infancy. AI is swiftly becoming the foundational technology in areas as diverse as self-driving cars and financial trading. Self- learning algorithms are now routinely embedded in mobile and online services. Researchers have leveraged massive gains in processing power and the data streaming from digital devices and connected sensors to improve AI performance.

The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze large patient data sets promises to change the face of population health management in a way that will be far reaching across the industry and a game changer to the way physicians monitor and care for their patients. AI's ability to raise the level of evidence-based medicine can help primary care physicians make better decisions in several areas. These include the ability to determine appropriate treatments for their patients and to how best to monitor their care during and after hospitalization, to improving efficiency and productivity in care team workflows and finding better ways to reduce overall costs associated with patient care. Supercomputers that compare and analyze large groups of patients' clinical data, diagnostic images and claims data, are capable of identifying subtle patterns and changes in health and wellness that can foreshadow the start of an illness, monitor the effectiveness of drug treatments and identify patients' health risks. For example, when researchers at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, wanted to find out which patients with pulmonary hypertension had the greatest risk of heart failure, they used AI software to analyze images of patients' hearts and constructed a smart 3D heart that predicts patient survival rates.

Artificial intelligence (AI) got a lot of press in 2016, not least because of the victory of Google's AI program over Lee Sedol, the world's best Go player. That triumph of machine over human elicited numerous responses, some enthusiastic and some anxious, all sharing the assumption that the goal of artificial intelligence is to achieve "human-level intelligence" or, as some predict, "superintelligence." "I don't care so much whether what we are building is real intelligence," says Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google. "We know how to build real intelligence--my wife and I did it twice, although she did a lot more of the work. We don't need to duplicate humans. That's why I focus on having tools to help us rather than duplicate what we already know how to do. We want humans and machines to partner and do something that they cannot do on their own."