Farming is, by far, the most mature industry mankind has created. Dating back to the dawn of civilization, farming has been refined, adjusted and adapted -- but never perfected. We, as a society, always worry over the future of farming. Today, we even apply terms usually reserved for the tech sector -- digital, IoT, AI and so on. So why are we worrying? The Economist, in its Q2 Technology Quarterly issue, proclaims agriculture will soon need to become more manufacturing-like in order to feed the world's growing population.

The power behind self-driving cars, real-time facial recognition, and intelligent robots is called machine learning,a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI).The first formal definition of AI came from Arthur Samuel in 1959: "A field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed."They've Currently, machine learning not only enablescomputers to park our cars and win at Jeopardy, it also allows them to beat humans at chess and Go, and to learn for itself how to play new games without any instruction.Although these are all very flashy applications of this technology, the business applicability has so far been limited. Nevertheless, understanding how machine learning algorithms work can be very useful in a business context. This can also lead to potential applications in sales, marketing, finance, and HR that can drive better decisions and give you a competitive edge.

Google has invested a total of $4.5 million CAD ($3.4M US) in AI research in Montreal's Institute for Learning Algorithms, with an academic fund covering three years that will help pay for seven faculty members across various Montreal academic institutions, including the University of Montreal and McGill. The investment is also continued backing for deep learning expert Yoshua Bengio's work, and is part of Google's continued bet on Canada's strong expertise in machine learning and AI research, both of which are becoming increasingly important to its core business. To that end, along with the investment, Google is also opening a brand new deep learning and AI research group in Montreal at its existing office in the city. The new team will be a remote arm of its Google Brain team based in Mountain View, and will be led locally by Hugo Larochelle, a deep learning expert who's returning home to Montreal from a role with Twitter in Boston specifically for the new position. Google notes that its total investment in academic research in Canada to date now amounts to around $13 million Canadian over the past 10 years, and it hopes that the new investment will help with the ongoing formation of an AI supercluster in Montreal, which is becoming a hotbed for AI startups as well as academic research.

We're 30 years removed from the final episodes of the original Knight Rider, the hit series in which David Hasselhoff was aided in his crime fighting by automotive artificial intelligence assistant, KITT. But that doesn't mean that we're not still clinging on for the perfect in-car AI system -- and thanks to new Kickstarter Dashbot, we may not be waiting too much longer. Heck, it even has the quasi-retro interface working in its favor! Dashbot is a smart AI assistant, designed to be 100 percent voice-controlled so drivers keep their hands on the wheel and, just as importantly, their eyes on the road. Connecting to your smartphone via Bluetooth, it promises to be the on-the-road smart assistant we have been hankering after.

David Cheng is an investment manager at DCM Ventures where he focuses on opportunities in the consumer internet, mobile applications and SaaS space. In living organisms, evolution is a multi-generational process where mutations in genes are dropped and added. Well-adapted organisms survive and those less fortunate go extinct. Resilience is great, but if you don't grow gills in time for the flood, then tough luck. Engineering, on the other hand, is a deliberate process with reliable steps designed to reach a stated objective.

The release continues, "FinTech Studios' cloud-based intelligent information network seamlessly integrates FinTech apps, news, research, financial data and big-data analytics from dozens of cloud partners. FinTech Studios targets millions of investors, portfolio managers, research analysts, bankers, brokers, financial advisors, RIAs, traders and corporate executives at banks, brokerage firms, asset management firms, hedge funds, financial advisory firms, private equity firms and venture capital firms, as well as public and private companies… FinTech Studios cloud platform includes advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to automate the intelligent indexing of business and financial content from millions of web sites, blogs and online sources integrated with actionable market data, research and big-data analytics to simplify and enrich information discovery, research, analysis, workflow and collaboration."

The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, launched in the fall of 2014, is a longterm investigation of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its influences on people, their communities, and society.

In past @ThingsExpo presentations, Joseph di Paolantonio has explored how various Internet of Things ( IoT) and data management and analytics (DMA) solution spaces will come together as sensor analytics ecosystems. This year, in his session at @ThingsExpo, Joseph di Paolantonio from DataArchon, added the numerous Transportation areas, from autonomous vehicles to "Uber for containers." While IoT data in any one area of Transportation will have a huge impact in that area, combining sensor analytics from these different areas will impact government, industry, retail and other processes, as well as life-style choices. These changes to transportation are happening now, but at varying maturity levels as we advance along a model of Connect, Communicate, Collaborate, Contextualize and Cognition. Attendees will come away with specific ideas on identifying value from transportation IoT data and sensor analytics in their own industry.

Google Play Music, Google's music streaming service, is getting smarter. On Monday, an update to the Google Play Music app will kick in a new feature that can predict what you want to hear next. In fact, Google is so confident in the app's accuracy, that it completely revamped the welcome screen on Play Music so you can just tap to start listening to a playlist suited for you based on the time, your location, and a variety of other factors. Google says it's able to accomplish this through machine learning, the technology that's starting to power a lot of intelligent services Google makes like Google Photos and the new Google Assistant. It also plays into Google's broader mission to use machine learning and artificial intelligence in all of its products.

At times, modern artificial intelligence still feels like science fiction. A few decades ago, the kind of AI programs of today would have seemed almost outrageous -- self-driving cars, systems that have mastered the most challenging game in the world, and even programs that could alert doctors to medical errors before they happen. Despite the incredible progress and potential, public opinion of AI remains rooted in science fiction -- evil entities, out to destroy mankind. The area gets a bad rap in the press, in Hollywood, and even from tech and science leaders like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and longtime AI researcher, says this depiction of an "evil AI" is far off the mark from the reality of today's tech.