Johann Sebastian Bach is widely considered one of the great composers of baroque music. Bach lived and worked in Germany during the 18th century and is revered for the beauty of his compositions and his technical mastery of harmony and counterpoint. One form of music that Bach excelled in was a type of polyphonic hymn known as a chorale cantata. These are based on Lutheran texts and sung by four voices. The composer starts with a well-known tune which is sung by the soprano and then composes three harmonies sung by the alto, tenor, and bass voices.

What if you knew the concerns that were uppermost in your customer's mind, right now? Or, which of the folks in your Eloqua database are most intensively researching the topic of the white paper you're about to blast out -- this week? Or, best of all: Which Fortune 1000 companies are intent about buying something you have on offer -- ASAP? I recently learned these things actually are knowable, today, given just a few machine-learning algorithms and a database the size of a small outer planet. As a former editor-in-chief and current content marketer, such news makes my heart race.

Health care is moving away from the traditional fee-for-service model to an outcomes-based model that takes a more comprehensive view of treatment and prevention. For health insurers, this means reacting dynamically and changing business models to stay responsive to market demands. New developments in cognitive computing can help insurers stay on top of changing consumer and regulatory expectations. Historically, health insurance has been a volume game. Insurers understood their business in terms of the number of claims processed, but rarely looked at other variables, including how much expense and repetitive work goes into claims management or how specific groups of policyholders use their health insurance.

Over a shaky WebEx connection, NoHold CEO and Co-Founder Diego Ventura showed me how one can take form in just a few moments. The chatbot had a very simple job. It was created to be an Amazon Kindle savant. You could ask it anything, like "Where's the Wi-Fi settings?" Normally, this would take time, effort and the combined skills of a team of software developers.

Knowmail, a company building a Personalized Artificial Intelligence platform to help employees communicate and collaborate better, announced it closed a new $3.5 million investment led by CE Ventures with managing partner Tayman Kan also joining the board. This round also includes existing shareholders AfterDox, Plus Ventures, 2B Angels, INE Ventures and notable private investors. The additional funding will be utilized to continue building out Knowmail's functionality and expand its customer base globally. Founded in 2014, Knowmail is led by Haim Senior (CEO), previously executive at EMC, seasoned entrepreneur Oded Avital (COO) and previous Verint Systems ASG director Avi Mandelberg (CTO) in order to, in their own words, "liberate corporate employees from slavery created by information overload". "We are thrilled to lead this latest round of funding for Knowmail and strongly believe in the team and vision."

This new service brings many of the machine learning smarts Amazon has developed in-house over the years to devs outside the company. For now, the service only makes three different tools available, but the plan is to add more over time. The first of these new services under the Amazon AI umbrella is an image recognition service called "Rekognition." It allows you to recognize objects and scenes, similar to services already available from Google, Microsoft and others. The second is Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service that uses a lot of machine learning smarts under the hood. The third, and probably most important new service is called "Lex."

Loom.ai is a software designed to transform 2D selfies into 3D avatars Machine learning calculates the details of a person's face And artificial intelligence fills in missing areas of the 2D image The more data it is fed, the better it is at predicting expressions and features Loom.ai is a software designed to transform 2D selfies into 3D avatars Machine learning calculates the details of a person's face Loom.ai Bizarre'Death Star' spotted over Japan: Alien hunters claim... What would REALLY happen if an asteroid struck the ocean:... Revealed: 'Natural thermostat' that cools the air in Earth's... Meet Cameron, the adorable four-year-old who has created 9... Bizarre'Death Star' spotted over Japan: Alien hunters claim... What would REALLY happen if an asteroid struck the ocean:... Revealed: 'Natural thermostat' that cools the air in Earth's... Meet Cameron, the adorable four-year-old who has created 9... The 3D avatar faces are complete with emotions that can be seen in their eyes mouth and the movement of their face. They can appear sad, happy (like Rihanna's avatar), interested or even angry - however, there is only a small set of emotions available at the moment. Users just have to upload a font facing image, such as this image of Elon Musk (left) of themselves or someone else to the Loom.ai

Our annual Innovation Festival--a four-day event this fall with over 200 speakers, and events spanning more than 100 locations across New York City--requires an extreme amount of coordination. The success of the event is contingent on over-communicating with our nearly 6,000 attendees to ensure that they know the where, when, and what of the sessions on their agendas. With all the talk of chatbots and consumer communications moving to messenger platforms, I thought the format could help ensure attendees get answers to logistical questions in real time. To test the idea, we partnered with Work & Co, a digital agency led by designers Joe Stewart and Felipe Memoria, among others, to create the FCNY16 Bot on Facebook Messenger. Marcelo Eduardo, the agency's technology partner, led the charge on our collaboration.

Some of the brightest minds in machine learning and deep learning are gathered this week in Barcelona for the annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. This is the 30th year for the NIPS conference, and the main event was sold out well in advance of the opening. That says a lot about the importance of this event for machine learning researchers and data scientists – and the increasing industry focus on this field. For the first time, Intel is a sponsor of this machine learning and deep learning conference. We are showcasing Intel technologies and initiatives that advance artificial intelligence (AI).

A hedge fund that gives away all of its data to people it doesn't know and still stays private. Smart sales conducted from a smartphone with its own virtual assistant--these are all artificial intelligence projects expanding right now, and these are just the ones that received a new boost of funding this week. Numerai, a double-blind hedge fund that sends out encrypted data to anonymous data scientists it then pays in bitcoin, has just announced $6 million in new funding led by Union Square Ventures. Additionally, Element AI--a platform for corporations to better explore artificial intelligence solutions--and Tact, a CRM startup that turns a smartphone into a virtual sales assistant, have both announced funding rounds with Microsoft Ventures as an investor. What Tact does is apply AI to the user and their workflow, helping them become more productive.