There has been a lot of press coverage over the summer about robots and more generally Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world of work. BBC news has recently run a special feature on it which included an interactive test to check if your job is at risk (Will a robot take your job?). What is AI and how will it affect recruitment specifically? Artificial Intelligence is the science of how to make machines that can think for themselves according to Stanford University. Increasingly, machines have been able to learn and improve their own performance to produce results that until recently was only thought possible to obtain using human intelligence and social experience.

Nonprofit organization Women Who Tech, is awarding women-led virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) startups with $50,000 cash and other startup friendly services. Women Who Tech who describes itself as a nonprofit organization working to break down barriers to women in the tech industry, announced the fourth Women Startup Challenge pitch in partnership with Craig Newmark of craigslist and the Craig Newmark Foundation. The event is also sponsored in part by startup investors Fred and Joanne Wilson. "VR, AR, and AI are the new frontier in tech and it's vitally important that women and their companies get funded so that their perspective on these life changing products is brought to market," said Allyson Kapin, founder of Women Who Tech, which organizes the competition. "It's estimated that there will be 170 million VR users by 2018. Every major tech company is investing heavily in AI, and it's critical that women-led ventures claim their stake in the space."

The AI that learns by PLAYING: Google DeepMind is making machines'feel' their way around virtual objects Researchers created virtual environment for training artificial intelligence AI learned through a series of experiments where it'played' with objects By manipulating virtual building blocks in a simulation it could work out hidden properties, learning like a child AI learned through a series of experiments where it'played' with objects Google's DeepMind is teaching machines to learn through play, by exploring objects through simulations to work out their properties The ultimate guide to the biggest supermoon in living... Hundreds more species than we thought may be endangered... Alien hunters say they have... Move over James Bond: World's first commercially available... The ultimate guide to the biggest supermoon in living... Hundreds more species than we thought may be endangered... Alien hunters say they have... Move over James Bond: World's first commercially available... If a child were presented with two blocks painted black, one made of wood and one made of lead, they could work out their basic properties through playing with them. So why can't machines learn the same way? Earlier this week, researchers in Italy launched a new project to develop robots which learn by themselves, using a form of open open-ended machine learning.

All around us people are slowly (or sometimes quickly) transitioning into the future of work. The full-time job (9 to 5, traditional career, etc.) is about to become a rarity; only available to a select group of people who represent the core of an organization, or who possess a very specific skill set. Because we live in a society increasingly shaped by tech. Automation will take over many of the tasks previously assigned to people. And the youth of today (and tomorrow) will have no problem transitioning into that situation.

Intel today unveiled new hardware and software targeting the artificial intelligence (AI) market, which has emerged as a focus of investment for the largest data center operators. The chipmaker introduced an FPGA accelerator that offers more horsepower for companies developing new AI-powered services. The Intel Deep Learning Inference Accelerator (DLIA) combines traditional Intel CPUs with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), semiconductors that can be reprogrammed to perform specialized computing tasks. FPGAs allow users to tailor compute power to specific workloads or applications. The DLIA is the first hardware product emerging from Intel's $16 billion acquisition of Altera last year.

NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs and Tesla K80 GPUs will be available on Google Cloud Platform, starting early next year. Delivering the power of our Pascal GPU architecture from the cloud gives businesses another great option for helping to put their data to work and build AI services. On Google Cloud Platform, Tesla P100 GPUs will be available to Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Machine Learning users around the world. The Tesla P100 delivers high performance and efficiency to power the most computationally demanding applications -- including a 12x increase in neural network training performance compared with a previous-generation offering. The Tesla K80 GPU accelerator delivers exceptional performance, with increased throughput that allows researchers to advance their scientific discoveries and developers to boost their web services.

Bill Gates calls this market the "holy grail" of computer science. There are currently 1,031 AI start-ups listed on AngelList, with an average valuation of $5.2 million -- which equals nearly $5.4 billion in venture capital investments. The three most-followed companies on that list are robotics company Autonomous, team productivity software maker Crux, and AI social news aggregator Zero Slant. Leo is a Tech and Consumer Goods Specialist who has covered the crossroads of Wall Street and Silicon Valley since 2012. His wheelhouse includes cloud, IoT, analytics, telecom, and gaming related businesses.

Google is improving its language translation service with a new approach that interprets whole sentences at a time rather than phrases piece-by-piece, the search giant announced Tuesday. The firm says that should make translations from the service, called Google Translate, easier to understand. "It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which it then arranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar," Barak Turovsky, product lead for Google Translate, wrote in a new blog post. This new version of Google Translate is powered by neutral machine translation, which is a new method of teaching computers to translate human languages, according to the Association for Computational Linguistics. Google published updates regarding its research into this field in September; it's now integrating the technique directly into Google Translate.

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This episode brings two esteemed experts to discuss these issues and present guidance for both commercial companies and the public sector policymakers. Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11; volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan to "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues; and serving as a Senior Executive advocating for increased information interoperability, cybersecurity, and civil liberty protections. He serves as a Visiting Executive In-Residence at Harvard University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Visiting Associate at the University of Oxford. He has received both the Arthur S, Flemming Award and Roger W. Jones Award for Executive Leadership. In 2015, he was chosen to be an Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia and in 2016, Business Insider named him one of the top "24 Americans Who Are Changing the World".