If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020. I want you to imagine how, in four years' time, technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns are about to get hyper-personalized thanks to advances in a few exponential technologies. Imagine a candidate who now knows everything about you, who can reach you wherever you happen to be looking, and who can use info scraped from social media (and intuited by machine learning algorithms) to speak directly to you and your interests. Here's what future election campaign marketing might feel like… In 2016, 78% of Americans have a social media profile.

So, began Kimberly Nevala, Director of the SAS Business Strategies, Best Practices and Advisory, and Business Solutions who was in Australia for a flying visit. We caught up following an interview in April this year at the SAS Global Forum. Nevala is a well-published expert on most things "Big Data" and she is not afraid to broach the big issues like Big Data for good or evil. Today we mainly chatted about Big Data and machine learning to get her unique perspective on what is a reasonably controversial subject – big data, machine learning, and the insights and patterns relentless machines can uncover. The interview took the form of a chat, so it is all paraphrased and attributed to Nevala.

Guardian Analytics has released the Guardian Analytics Sentinel, a behavioral analytics and machine learning solution to protect B2B portals. This solution can be used to detect a wide array of fraud types including: account takeover, business email compromise (BEC), fake invoicing, fake purchase orders and modified wire and ACH templates. Built on an open API, Guardian Analytics Sentinel provides a real-time risk-scoring engine that does not require manual intervention. The machine-to-machine architecture allows for deployment as fast as 60 days. Guardian Analytics is a US-based company providing behavior-based fraud detection software and services to identify suspicious financial activities.

The term brings to mind robots, time-travel, science fiction, and other descriptions only fit for the far-reaching future. However, marketing experts are seeing that the future is now. Artificial intelligence (AI) marketing is playing, and will continue to play, a much more significant role in the way brands market to their customers. By 2017, AI marketing is projected to be the dominant force in the marketing industry. Using this technology will allow marketers to manage campaigns and know audiences through a more data-driven and more uniquely personal level than ever before.

What if turning off your computer was like killing a friend? It sounds farfetched, but if smart devices like most phones, computers, and even thermostats were intelligent and sentient, it might be cruel to switch them off. If they could talk, they might try pleading with you to reconsider. You'd feel pretty awful every time you moved towards the button. But a really clever smart-device, one with a complex understanding of society, might push for something more dramatic.

On November 6 2014, Amazon announced Echo, a smart speaker featuring a voice-controlled assistant service called Alexa. The company didn't exactly go out of its way to whip up excitement for these newcomers. In sharp contrast to the rollout of its ill-fated Fire Phone--which kicked off with a press-conference extravaganza starring Jeff Bezos--it simply disclosed that Echo existed and would be sold, at first, on an invitation-only basis to Prime members. But Echo spoke for itself--and not just literally. People quickly saw that the pint-size cylinder was a genuinely new kind of consumer-electronics device.

Check out our Workology Podcast powered by Blogging4jobs. Click here to check out all our episodes. What Does Artificial Intelligence Mean in Human Resources and Recruiting? One of the most talked about trends in HR and recruiting in the second half of 2016 has been AI and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is defined as "an ideal'intelligent' machine [that] is a flexible rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal."

There is evidence all around us that humans are gradually becoming obsolete, the empty cashier lines in the grocery store while customers choose "self"-checkout, being just one example. There was a time when science fiction was just that--fiction--and the fantastic world of technology was just a dream. But reality is different today and the world of James Cameron's "Terminator" suddenly seems more realistic than ever. The most recent development has been the creation of automated automobiles, an idea that has been around for many years but has always seemed too far-fetched. Cruise control has a whole new meaning in these vehicles, as advanced computers use GPS and radar to electronically guide them through the streets. Innovation has occurred mostly in large transportation trucks, 18-wheelers.

Today on In Case You Missed It: MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab have cooked up another autonomously driving vehicle, but this one is a disability scooter. In this newly posted video, you can watch as the scooter navigates around human obstacles when taking a person on the way to their destination. In other AI news, Google and Blizzard Entertainment are teaming up to use Deepmind to train the system to autonomously play Starcraft II. If you, too, have a fondness for Big Mouth Billy Bass, the singing fish trophy, you need to see how one was hacked to be the voice of Alexa. And if you haven't yet played the New York Times' Voter Suppression Trail, you're missing out on both nostalgia and maybe sadness.

Facebook users will be able to record smartphone videos that ape the style of famous artworks with a new feature unveiled Tuesday. Using a technique called style transfer, the feature takes live video and turns it into something that resembles the work of Van Gogh, Picasso and other artists. That effect is probably familiar to people who have used the app Prisma, which uses similar techniques to change the look of photos. Prisma's app can't perform live filtering, and some filters require a connection to the internet. Facebook's system can work offline and render live.