Computers have helped us to calculate the vastness of space and the minute details of subatomic particles. When it comes to counting and calculating, or following logical yes/no algorithms – computers outperform humans thanks to the electrons moving through their circuitry at the speed of light. But we generally don't consider them as "intelligent" because, traditionally, computers haven't been able to do anything themselves, without being taught (programmed) by us first. So far, even if a computer had access to all of the information in the world it couldn't do anything "smart" with it. It could find us a picture of a cat – but only because we had told it that certain pictures contain cats.

Please join Firebrand Talent, Aquent and Vitamin T at our next free'Put it to the Panel' event on Thursday, 1st June focusing on AI in digital marketing. Industry experts have dubbed 2017, "the year Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to disrupt how publishers, advertisers and marketers conduct their business and engage with consumers". There is no denying it, we are living in a machine age! What is AI, why it exists and why should you care as a marketer? On the panel, we're delighted to have four industry experts: Join us for a great opportunity to hear from industry leaders in a relaxed and social environment where we will provide drinks and snacks.

"Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest subjects these days, and recent advances in technology make AI even closer to reality than most of us can imagine. Robots are no longer limited to traditional blue-collar jobs, fully automated assembly lines and high-frequency trading algorithms. White-collar jobs are ripe for automation, and robots are replacing bank tellers, mortgage brokers and loan officers in the financial industry." And I can speak from personal experience on the matter: my background is in financial planning, private banking, and portfolio strategy. I saw the Robos coming, saw my skills quickly losing relevancy, and got out of the industry as soon as I had researched where I could have a future impact.

So, you want to build a chatbot. There are more than 34,000 chatbots on Facebook Messenger alone, and many of these were already built by and for brands. Increasingly, they are helping customers answer questions and solve issues on their own as well as taking work off of the shoulders of contact center agents. But even though you're not too late to the game, you might be asking yourself: where to begin? The following instructions are designed to guide you through the vital steps necessary to build a customer service chatbot from scratch.

The current language when talking about Artificial Intelligence, Robots and Automation – (what we can name the'AIRA' technologies), and their impact on jobs is often fearful or aggressive. The'robots will take your job and everything is ruined' mentality seems pervasive. The headlines are pitched to grab your attention while pulling at your fears. However, increasing anxiety over job security is understandable as we're seeing artificial intelligence, robots and automation, taking over in areas we previously thought were safe. Undeniably there is a huge change happening thanks to these technologies. Yes, many jobs are under threat – but that isn't the whole story by any stretch of the imagination.

A ground-breaking artificial intelligence (AI) visual search tool – the first within the UK arts space – has been launched by AI specialist Visii for digital image licensing platform Artimage. Disrupting keyword search, Visii's intelligent visual search tool gives users the power to discover artworks they'll love based on their visual preferences. Users can focus on a subject, an artwork's composition or an artist's style, without needing to describe it or know of its existence; meaning discovery of hidden gems now becomes possible and easy. Visii uses advanced artificial intelligence methods to infer users' interests and generate visually relevant results. Its deep learning technology analyses thousands of visual descriptors within each image, the comparison of which is incredibly fast, returning results from large catalogues in less than 350 milliseconds.

I am giving a talk (in French) at the 85th edition of the ACFAS congress, May 9. I will discuss the engineering aspects of doing machine learning. But more importantly, I will discuss how Semantic Web techniques, technologies and specifications can help solving the engineering problems and how they can be leveraged and integrated in a machine learning workflow. The focus of my talk is based on my work in the field of the semantic web in the last 15 years and my more recent work creating the KBpedia Knowledge Graph at Cognonto and how they influenced our work to develop different machine learning solutions to integrate data, to extend knowledge structure, to tag and disambiguate concepts and entities in corpuses of texts, etc. One thing we experienced is that most of the work involved in such project is not directly related to machine learning problems (or at least related to the usage of machine learning algorithms). And then I recently read a survey conducted by CrowdFlower in 2016 that support what we experienced.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is more than a stylish trend. One by one, B2B vendors are rolling out their AI chops -- targeting platform Demandbase, CRM and marketing platform Salesforce, account engagement platform YesPath, conversational platform Conversica, and B2B predictive marketer CaliberMind, among a growing list of others. To get some insight into what this means for businesses selling to businesses, we talked with Raviv Turner, CEO and co-founder of CaliberMind. First of all, selling to a business is complicated.

Such softwares reduce or totally eliminate the need for human intervention in the investing or trading process that is present in the traditional human discretional approach through fund managers and brokers. CPG is one of the few quant fund operators in Singapore today with total assets under management at slightly below US$100mil (RM434mil). Locally, BIMB Investment Management Bhd, which is a unit of Bank Islam Malaysia Bhd, recently launched its fund using AI technology. Whether or not quant funds outperform the traditional discretionary approach of investing is still very much open to debate.

There are only a few industries in which automation isn't threatening some job roles. "While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next decade, it will affect portions of almost all jobs to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the type of work they entail," according to McKinsey Quarterly. Roles that require empathy, like therapists and psychologists, as well as jobs that are highly reliant on social and negotiation skills, like managerial positions, are less threatened by automation, according to The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? Those of us in roles that require creative thinking and original ideas -- like content creation -- are also deemed at less risk of having our jobs swiped from under our noses by something harder-working, "smarter," and cheaper to maintain. It's pretty tough to envision a machine generating great content ideas, not to mention creating that content -- content worth consuming.