There is no doubt that the technology landscape is changing at a frenetic pace and staying ahead of the major trends reshaping today's world will ultimately separate the winners from the losers. We have all heard the mantra of these days, "you either disrupt yourself or you will get disrupted". The risk of becoming irrelevant has never been greater. It's the role of CIOs to look beyond today's solutions and be ready for what lies ahead. However, the list of innovations can be endless and keeping up with the latest emerging technologies and new tools is no easy task.

A lot of companies have job titles that include "Research" and/or "Scientist." Be aware that these tend to have stricter requirements on graduate degrees. But, also know that the same company may have Engineering roles which aren't as strict. Take a look at this pair from Recursion Pharma: Machine Learning Engineer vs Deep Learning Scientist. The requirement for a PhD is going to change over time. These techniques have been so cutting-edge that a graduate degree has been about the only way for employers to find candidates with a few years of experience.

Earlier this month, Apple's Director of AI Research, Russ Salakhutdinov, announced that the company was getting into publishing research. The six researchers who published the paper belong to a recently formed machine learning group. Synthetic images and videos are being used to train machine learning models. They are readily available, less costly, and customizable. Although the new technique reportedly has a lot of potential, it is risky because generated images do not meet the same quality standards as real images.

GE was still essentially a startup when its managers hired young MIT chemistry professor Willis Whitney to open the company's first laboratory in 1900. Unlike Thomas Edison's Menlo Park "invention factory" in New Jersey, the place was a modest affair. It was located in a wooden barn behind the house of GE's resident polymath and engineering wizard Charles Steinmetz in Schenectady, New York, where GE co-founder Edison moved in the 1880s. The lab -- dedicated to "fundamental research" -- went up in flames the next spring, but Whitney's career and momentum continued. He rebuilt the lab and brought in researchers such as Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir.

MANGALURU: To provide continued access to world-class treatment to the people of Mangaluru, KMC Hospital announced the launch of a new block at Dr B R Ambedkar Circle. The new block, which is equipped with state-of-the-art multidisciplinary facility to cater to people with all types of ailments, will be inaugurated by defence minister Manohar Parrikar on Sunday. Dr Krishna Prasad, medical oncologist at KMC Hospital Mangaluru, said, "On the occasion, the IBM Watsons for oncology will be inaugurated at the hospital. "The supercomputer uses artificial intelligence as a tool for diagnosis and treatment of cancer," said Dr Prasad. Manipal Hospitals is only the second hospital chain in the world to deploy the technology, the first being Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, New York," he claimed.

Various estimates suggest the American employment mill could shrink by 30% by the year 2025. The United Nations' assessment is even grimmer. They project two-thirds of the human workforce will be replaced in the next decade. Usually, the major sectors included in these loss reports are manufacturing, retail, and blue collar jobs. However, a new analysis suggests white collar jobs are not immune, and now the world's largest hedge fund is replacing its managers with artificial intelligence.

Manoj Saxena is the executive chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs' Fund IV (TEF), a $100m seed fund focused exclusively on the cognitive computing space. Saxena is also the chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio branch and Chairman, SparkCognition an Austin based cognitive security and safety analytics company. Prior to joining TEF, Saxena was general manager, IBM Watson, where his team built the world's first cognitive systems in healthcare, financial services, and retail. Earlier he founded, built and sold two Austin based software startups. Saxena will be speaking at Gigaom AI Now in San Francisco, February 15-16th.

The Apple logo is displayed at the Apple Store June 17, 2015 on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Earlier this December, Apple created a noise when they express the artificial intelligence (AI) research community that the secretive company will start making AI papers of its own. A month later, Apple is already starting to keep their promise. Apple revealed its very first AI paper last December 22. The AI paper was submitted last November 15 for publication.

Kristina: We're seeing more businesses use chatbots for customer service. How are consumers using chatbots? Amit Sharma, CEO, Narvar: Shoppers have an increasing appetite for chatbots and AI-powered technology, given the customized, data-driven, contextual experience they provide. An analysis of conversations with the Narvar chatbot on Facebook Messenger found that 65 percent of people communicate with bots as they would a human by acknowledging the bot with a thank you or thumbs up. Communicating with consumers in a natural, human way without being in the same physical location is a key benefit of chatbots and conversational tools.

Driving your car until it breaks down on the road is never anyone's favorite way to learn the need for routine maintenance. But preventive or scheduled maintenance checks often miss many of the problems that can come up. An Israeli startup has come up with a better idea: Use artificial intelligence to listen for early warning signs that a car might be nearing a breakdown. The service of 3DSignals, a startup based in Kefar Sava, Israel, relies on the artificial intelligence technique known as deep learning to understand the noise patterns of troubled machines and predict problems in advance. The startup has even chatted with companies about using their service to automatically detect problems in future taxi fleets of driverless cars.