Artificial intelligence today is making progress exponentially and opening new horizons as to the possibilities it provides us. While some view it as a chance at eradicating hunger and solving illiteracy and poverty, others are concerned about a future where machines surpass human intelligence and make decisions that endanger our safety and survival. The birth of artificial intelligence has greatly promoted technological growth. Today the tech giants are employing AI to work on combatting issues such as hunger, poverty, illiteracy and even crime. How does AI help in all this?

The University of Minnesota conducted a study and found that a messy desk could be the sign of a creative genius. Keri Lumm (@thekerilumm) has more. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. The University of Minnesota conducted a study and found that a messy desk could be the sign of a creative genius.

Our vision at Typeform is to "make things a little more human." By leveraging its beauty and simplicity, we allow real people to learn about each other -- creating a context where conversational data collection can thrive. As the man in charge of analytics I wonder: what does this mean for our team? How can we data scientists make things a little more human? The team's long-term vision for AI is ambitious: reproduce what's going on in an actual human conversation.

"The last 10 years have been about building a world that is mobile-first, turning our phones into remote controls for our lives. But in the next 10 years, we will shift to a world that is AI-first, a world where computing becomes universally available." What we call AI is Artificial Intelligence, a term created in 1956 by John McCarthy, an assistant at Dartmouth College, which describes a machine capable of performing tasks usually requiring human intelligence. The field of Artificial Intelligence is so wide that it is difficult to measure its density. This area covers different disciplines including understanding, calculation, reasoning, learning, perception and natural language dialogue.

Artificial intelligence applied to the right tasks can reveal insights that wouldn't otherwise be surfaced, and do it faster thn manual human efforts. But there are still some tasks that humans perform better than machines. Eric Williams, VP of Data Science & Analytics at Omada Health provided a view into how his digital therapeutics company is combining AI with human intelligence to help pre-diabetic patients lose weight. Williams provided these insights during the Interop ITX session, Where Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Intelligence: Building Digital Healthcare for the Future. At the very beginning of his presentation, he noted that while we know that diet and exercise and weight loss can prevent Type 2 diabetes, motivating individuals to make the necessary changes to their lifestyles is difficult.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing how we experience our world. We are living in the age of the empowered, connected consumer--which is to say that today's consumers are smarter, savvier, and have greater expectations than the customers of the past. As consumers, we like our desires to be met instantaneously and intuitively, ideally by a company that recognizes us without us having to open our mouths or pass through painful and repetitive authentication processes. Certainly, none of this is a secret: Whether we're talking AI or apps, technology has fundamentally altered the way we interact with companies. We use our Starbucks app because it remembers what we like to order, how we like it prepared, and where we prefer to go to pick it up.

A study found smart people have fewer genetic mutations that negatively affect intelligence and health, rather than having more mutations that make them smarter. Scientists said the results could be used to guide gene editing - as'fixing' these mutations could make people healthier and smarter at the same time. The researchers used statistical techniques to work out the effect of rare genetic mutations on intelligence. The rare genetic mutations studied by the researchers are thought to have a negative impact on intelligence and health.

Just as manufacturing automation cuts into human jobs, the prospect of creative artificial intelligence raises the specter of robot writers, robot artists and robot musicians who never sleep and always agree with their patron. Robert and Christian discuss some possibilities in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.

Once a sci-fi theory, cognitive computing has entered the realm of concrete reality across industries, promising to redefine supercomputing and significantly impact work. At its core, cognitive computing uses hardware and software to simulate human intelligence, using all the processes of human intelligent behavior--acquiring and processing data and using relevant information to run a system. Cognitive computing, used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications, enables machines to learn from data by applying statistical models to understand patterns from occurrences over time. A competent cognitive system even has the capability to generate reasoning by accessing huge amounts of data, mimicking the way the human brain functions. Rapid advancement in various AI algorithms in anomaly detection, regression, two class, multi-class, and clustering has opened up the floodgates, and going forward cognitive computing can be leveraged to re-imagine business models and transform everyday functions.