The theory that humans will eventually be able to upload our brains to computers has fascinated futurists and neuroscientists for years. By transferring our minds into machines we could live forever, unmoored from the feebleness of our physical bodies. The concepts of death and bereavement as we know them now would cease to exist. Currently the idea lives within whitepapers and sci-fi movies, and the only thing (most) researchers agree on is that it won't be possible for a really long time. But while we're far from achieving that pinnacle of immorality, technology in the here-and-now has already started giving us a sliver of eternal life while shaping how we grieve our loved ones if and when they die.

Richard Craib is a 29-year-old South African who runs a hedge fund in San Francisco. He leaves that to an artificially intelligent system built by several thousand data scientists whose names he doesn't know. Under the banner of a startup called Numerai, Craib and his team have built technology that masks the fund's trading data before sharing it with a vast community of anonymous data scientists. Using a method similar to homomorphic encryption, this tech works to ensure that the scientists can't see the details of the company's proprietary trades, but also organizes the data so that these scientists can build machine learning models that analyze it and, in theory, learn better ways of trading financial securities. "We give away all our data," says Craib, who studied mathematics at Cornell University in New York before going to work for an asset management firm in South Africa.

This year's news about what artificial intelligence can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learned to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavors might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be--though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome. Last summer, a team of Russian developers released Prisma, a mobile app based on the work of some German artificial intelligence researchers. The neural network behind it could redraw an image using techniques it had learned from studying the oeuvre of a number of painters, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. The end product was impressive: Prisma could reproduce brushstrokes and palettes, using only a photo for guidance, almost the way a human painter could have.

A change in political leadership with Donald Trump's presidential victory and GOP control of Congress has raised expectation of policy shifts that could affect the regulatory compliance process. The incoming administration is promising to work to "dismantle the Dodd-Frank Act and replace it with new policies to encourage economic growth and job creation." This scenario would have plusses and minuses. On one hand, bank stocks are on the rise because of Trump's promise to lessen regulation. On the other hand, a complete dismantling of Dodd-Frank would mean that banks would have to overhaul the compliance processes that they have spent billions of dollars to put in place over the past six years.

Enabling autonomous vehicles and personalizing advertising are two of the highest opportunity use cases for machine learning today. Additional use cases with high potential include optimizing pricing, routing, and scheduling based on real-time data in travel and logistics; predicting personalized health outcomes, and optimizing merchandising strategy in retail. McKinsey identified 120 potential use cases of machine learning in 12 industries and surveyed more than 600 industry experts on their potential impact. They found an extraordinary breadth of potential applications for machine learning. Each of the use cases was identified as being one of the top three in an industry by at least one expert in that industry.

When conversation with my non-data scientist friends turns to AI it's almost inevitable that at least one will remark on the wonders of Watson. To many of the uninformed, Watson is synonymous with AI and clearly it's already here. So without getting so technical that their eyes glaze over, and that can happen pretty fast, here's a little bit of explanation you can use if you're caught in the same circumstance. The Watson that lives in the imagination of so many folks is the Watson that won the widely televised contest on Jeopardy in 2011. Fewer people are aware that the month following its televised debut, Watson went to Washington and played an untelevised set of matches against members of the House of Representatives where it also won.

Within Machine Learning many tasks are - or can be reformulated as - classification tasks. In classification tasks we are trying to produce a model which can give the correlation between the input data and the class each input belongs to. This model is formed with the feature-values of the input-data. For example, the dataset contains datapoints belonging to the classes Apples, Pears and Oranges and based on the features of the datapoints (weight, color, size etc) we are trying to predict the class. We need some amount of training data to train the Classifier, i.e. form a correct model of the data.

My colleague Amy Nicholson is the UK expert on Azure Machine Learning, the following blog post is after a quizzing session to get understand how to get started with Azure Machine Learning" Each student receives $100 of Azure credit per month, for 6 months. The Faculty member receives $250 per month, for 12 months. The Azure machine learning team provided a very nice walkthrough tutorial which covers a lot of the basics. This tutorial is really useful as it takes you through the entire process of creating an AzureML workspace, uploading data, creating an experiment to predict someone's credit risk, building, training, and evaluating the models, publishing your best model as a web service, and calling that web service. Now you need to learn how to import a data set into Azure Machine Learning, and where to find interesting data to build something amazing.

Artificial Intelligence, the possibility of merging consciousness with computers, and singularity are discussed in this mind expanding conversation with Dr. Susan Schneider. Are we prepared to face the implications of the success of our own technological innovations? Is the universe teeming with postbiological super Artificial Intelligence? Can silicon based entities bond with carbon based lifeforms? Explore the philosophical questions of superintelligence on the Antidote, hosted by Michael Parker.

There is no doubt 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 chief information officers 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.