Humanoid robots who are all named Pepper, are greeting shoppers in two Westfield malls in California. They will be at the malls during the holiday season and might go well beyond that, according to Steve Carlin, the vice president and general manager for Softbank Robotics America. The friendly robots welcome the shoppers to the mall, dance with them, or play games with them like card matching. The Pepper robots can also take selfies and teach six languages to anyone who's interested, as well as conduct a customer service survey. Pepper ready to welcome visitors (Image Credit: SFGate) There's no plan to replace human clerks with the robots, though.

London: Scientists have discovered a way to remove specific fears from the brain, using a combination of artificial intelligence and brain scanning technology, an advance that may lead to new treatments for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and phobias. Currently, a common approach is for patients to undergo aversion therapy, in which they confront their fear by being exposed to it in the hope they will learn that what they fear is not harmful. However, this therapy is unpleasant. Researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK have found a way of unconsciously removing a fear memory from the brain. They developed a method to read and identify a fear memory using a new technique called'Decoded Neurofeedback'.

Holiday shoppers have an infinite digital world of products available for viewing at their fingertips. Stepping into a brick-and-mortar store seems to have lost its appeal. In reality, 85 percent of customers still preferred to shop at physical store last year according to Time Trade. Though that's positive news for brick-and-mortar retailers, many brands still aren't doing enough to meet consumer demands that rival the online experience. Last year, our research showed only a small percentage of retailers met consumer's expectations.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have gained prominence in the recent years with Google, Microsoft Azure and Amazon coming up with their Cloud Machine Learning platforms. But surprisingly we have been experiencing machine learning without knowing it. The most primary use cases are Image tagging by Facebook and'Spam' detection by email providers. Now Facebook automatically tags uploaded images using face (image) recognition technique and Gmail recognizes the pattern or selected words to filter spam messages. Let's take a look at some of the important business problems solved by machine learning.

The creative and advertising industries are built on experts. Pretty much every industry is.In fact, every part of life – society, education and even mastering a tricky cheesecake you saw on The Great British Bake Off – is based on expertise. To be more specific, it's about learning from experience and putting it into practice. Speaking of experts – meet Lucy. Lucy is awesome at designing ads and reads all the magazines (just for the ads), scours the internet in her spare time (for the latest ads) and even keeps a nerdy list of her favourite ads.

The hospitality industry has not always been at the forefront of high-tech innovation or implementation. Until recently, most of the bookings, transactions and administrative tasks at a hotel were handled manually. Revenue management – the process by which a revenue manager determines the best room rate at a given time, in order to maximise bookings and revenue – was a particularly difficult task. Revenue managers had to manually collect, review and analyse numerous data sets each time the rate needed to be updated, and then calculate the ideal room rate based on those variables. Even before the Internet, this was a very time-consuming task, which meant that revenue managers could not update rates as often as necessary (to ensure a property's continued financial success).

A survey in 2013 by Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom asked hundreds of scientists when they believe machines will achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), meaning human-level intelligence. The median years for 10, 50, and 90 percent probability of reaching AGI were 2022, 2040, and 2075, respectively. But, there are still many challenges to reaching human-level intelligence. The first is domain limitation. Today's artificial intelligence primarily applies a mathematical approach that can solve a finite set of statements for a finite set of terms described under a finite set of rules.

The A.I. Behind Google Translate Recently Did Something Extraordinary Those translations aren't making us laugh as much as they used to. As someone who lives between two countries, I've relied heavily on machine translation for a number of years. It took me years before I could communicate casually with my in-laws (they're fluent in German and Polish, but not English), without my wife serving as an interpreter. I realize that nothing beats a skilled human translator. But who has time (or money) to hire a person to translate simple, everyday tasks?

This question has been asked for centuries, from the golem of Jewish folklore to Frankenstein to I, Robot. There are various answers, but at least one computing pioneer knew well where she stood. "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything," said Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage's collaborator, in 1843, removing any doubt about what a computing machine can ever hope to do. "It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform," she added. "It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths."

Chief Data Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Operation Officers, Chief Data Officers and Heads of Innovation from the top 250 insurance and re-insurance companies form the advisory board and the panel of speakers and participants. Dozens of artificial intelligence, machine learning and IOT experts and enthusiasts will be joining the panels and debates, with some of the most senior C-level executives from the world's largest insurance giants, as well as medium size underwriters, brokers and small companies, to explore the future impact of AI and IOT on your business. In short, if you want to know what AI is going to do for you, then instechAI20/20 is the place to be.