Dr Cédric Villani, director of Pierre and Marie Curie University's Institut Henri Poincaré and recipient of the Fields Medal, gave a talk about Henri Poincaré at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana.

And pretty soon, they'll come for us. That seems to be the story today, whether from Hollywood or in breathless articles in popular tech magazines about artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. We've teamed up with Product Hunt to offer you the chance to win an all expense paid trip to TNW Conference 2017! In a world where machines can learn, once humans push the "on" button, there's no stopping our robot overlords, right? When machines become more intelligent, humans are freed to become more creative.

"According to merriam-webster.com, the simple definition of artificial intelligence: 'an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence; the power of a machine to copy intelligent behavior.'" Ready or not, artificial intelligence is here; and it's here to stay. Businesses and organizations that have taken an early lead in the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (be it natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, or cognitive computing) are simply scratching the surface of its potential to not only improve sales, service, marketing and operations, but to discover and deliver new digital business models. In the 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit report, Artificial Intelligence in the Real World, 75% of more than 200 business executives surveyed said AI will be actively implemented in their companies within the next three years. And while many are wary of its potential to reduce human employment, 27% say introducing artificial intelligence to business will improve decision making; 26% believe it will improve customer service; 29% say it will improve operating efficiency; and 17% said it will increase sales revenue.

When you examine the lives of history's most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest "working" hours. How did they manage to be so accomplished? Can a generation raised to believe that 80-hour workweeks are necessary for success learn something from the lives of the people who laid the foundations of chaos theory and topology or wrote Great Expectations? If some of history's greatest figures didn't put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret of their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored but how they rested, and how the two relate. Let's start by looking at the lives of two figures. They were both very accomplished in their fields.

Professor Stephen Hawking recently said, "the rise of powerful AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. We do not know which". AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning are pushing new frontiers, with the hype now reality across almost all industries. Breakthroughs in AI by the likes of Google, IBM, Facebook and other tech giants are being achieved faster than many predicted. While some argue that it is only a matter of time before deep learning, where machines learn better than humans, takes over completely, we believe that AI needs a healthy dose of HI (Human Intelligence) to support it.

Will an AI system ever create art that can equal a work created by a human? Researchers and artists are already making attempts to find out by translating creativity into algorithms. To answer whether these attempts are likely to generate artwork -- music, poetry, fiction, visual art -- that can pass for human-created work starts with understanding how human creativity functions. While the potential for rational thinking and mathematical ability in humans are present at birth, we still require education to fully realize these capabilities. So we study the laws of nature, logic puzzles, ethical dilemmas, and so on.

Chatbots offer the promise of frictionless access to goods, services and information, but creating effective bots can be deceptively tricky. The flip side of the opportunity to interact with users in a seamless, natural way is that user expectations can be prohibitively high. Bots need to be smart and provide greater convenience than apps -- a very effective UI paradigm tailored for today's mobile devices that has been carefully refined for more than a decade. The good news is that the belief that bots must master human language or replace apps to succeed is false. Bots will engage with consumers in new ways that combine the strengths of humans and machines to allow both structured and unstructured information to be exchanged naturally and efficiently.

And pretty soon, they'll come for us. That seems to be the story today, whether from Hollywood or in breathless articles in popular tech magazines about artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us. In a world where machines can learn, once humans push the "on" button, there's no stopping our robot overlords, right? When machines become more intelligent, humans are freed to become more creative.

In the popular TV show Sherlock, visual depictions of our hero's deductive reasoning often look like machine algorithms. And probably not by accident, given that this version of Conan Doyle's detective processes tremendous amounts of observed data--the sort of minutiae that the average person tends to pass over or forget--more like a computer than a human. Sherlock's intelligence is both strength and limitation. His way of thinking is often bounded by an inability to intuitively understand social and emotional contexts. The show's central premise is that Sherlock Holmes needs his friend John Watson to help him synthesize empirical data into human truth.

A couple of weeks ago, Coca-Cola's global senior digital director Mariano Bosaz told Adweek he wanted "to start experimenting" with "automated narratives," including using bots for music and editing the closing credits of commercials. Algorithms are already foundational to programmatic advertising and will likely only grow to be a bigger part of media buying, but can machine learning ever completely replace the creative process? It's no surprise that agencies adamantly say no, that brands still need human creatives to handle strategy and come up with ideas. But creative shops are still preparing for a time when there will be fewer people to handle some parts of the business, especially those that involve time-consuming and manual tasks. "To be honest, some of the first people who will lose their job because of AI will be marketing managers," said Firstborn's executive creative director Dave Snyder.