Rather than leading to the violent downfall of humankind, artificial intelligence is helping people around the world do their jobs, including doctors who diagnose sepsis in patients and scientists who track endangered animals in the wild, experts said Thursday (Oct. Advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) haven't always been met with enthusiasm. Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned on several occasions that a fully developed AI could destroy the human race, and Hollywood sci-fi movies are rife with fierce robots battling humans for control. But at yesterday's conference -- attended by the country's leading researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and students -- scientists explained how newly developed AI is accelerating research and improving lives. Here is a look at five AI inventions that are already redefining technology.

Artificial intelligence has been around since 1956 and has made some giant leaps in that time: beating the best human at chess, the best human at US gameshow Jeopardy and recently beating the best human at complex strategy game Go. Brands have only recently started adopting artificial intelligence for core consumer services. Google's voice recognition technology now claims 98% accuracy and Facebook's DeepFace is said to recognise faces with a 97% success rate. IBM's Watson, which uses artificial intelligence to perform its question-answering function, is 2,400% "smarter" today than when it achieved the Jeopardy victory five years ago. There is no doubt that the relationship between men and machines is changing, and brands are on the cusp of making artificial intelligence an everyday element of their customer offerings.

Westworld's AI world might not be science fiction. If you needed any clarification that Artificial Intelligence is on everyone's mind, you need only tune into HBO's new buzzed-about series Westworld. But AI is quickly making its move from the futuristic and fictional to the realm of reality with many practical AI tools already available today. From space, robotics, transportation, healthcare, marketing, music, photography and more, many industries are affected by AI, and we've only just began to see the changes that are yet to come. Since AI is developing at such an astonishing rate, many industries are reaping the rewards of its integration.

Facebook has started rolling out its "Caffe2Go" AI platform that does advanced style transfer video effects in real time using only your iOS or Android smartphone's horsepower. While the painterly effects are cool (see the video, below), the tech behind it is much more interesting. Deep learning normally requires content "be sent off to data centers for processing on big-compute servers," Facebook wrote, but with Caffe2Go, the processing can be done "in the palm of your hand." The new platform is part of a larger AI effort that includes the machine-vision Lumos app used to suss out images that violate its community standards. It has also open-sourced similar tech on Github to non-Facebook developers.

This is my multi-month study plan for going from mobile developer (self-taught, no CS degree) to machine learning engineer. My main goal was to find an approach to studying Machine Learning that is mainly hands-on and abstracts most of the math for the beginner. This approach is unconventional because it's the top-down and results-first approach designed for software engineers. Please, feel free to make any contributions you feel will make it better. I'm following this plan to prepare for my near future job: Machine learning engineer.

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.