Robotic process automation (RPA) has taken us a long way towards unlocking productivity benefits tied up in manual processes over the past few years and galvanised a mindset that things can change without a need for massive systems reengineering. When wholesale change isn't a realistic option for organisations, RPA can act as a catalyst to help businesses progress and add value, enabling them to build strategic plans around investments they've already made into their legacy systems. The expansion into artificial intelligence (AI) is the next step of this granular, faster form of transformation, with more and more business activities either wholly or partially automated by increasingly sophisticated means. This is commonly referred to as cognitive RPA or, CRPA. So, what are some real world-use cases that combine RPA and AI into broader intelligent automation solutions?

We all know that artificial intelligence is playing a huge role in how businesses operate. AI programs and services are helping transform everything from data collection and processing in the marketing department to on-boarding in the HR department. While AI and automation hold tremendous value in terms of time and cost savings internally, there is another area in which AI promises even bigger, more meaningful returns: customer experience. As I've said many times before, customer experience is the root of digital transformation. Every tech decision we make should return to this core foundation.

From driverless trucks and the conquering of Go and other complex board games, to the ability to help diagnose cancer and source great talent for HR teams, the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are seemingly endless. AI is even being used to generate paintings and compose classical symphonies. For NASA most recently, AI helped in the discovery of two new planets. So I'd not be at all surprised if you're wondering how AI will impact aviation? But first, let me give you a definition: AI is a field of computer science that makes machines smart; machines powered by algorithms to solve specific problems or complete tasks that used to be handled by humans.

When Andrew Kaplan reminisces, his engrossing tales leave the impression that he's managed to pack multiple lives into a single existence: globe-trotting war correspondent in his 20s, a member of the Israeli army who fought in the Six-Day War, successful entrepreneur and, later, the author of numerous spy novels and Hollywood scripts. Now -- as the silver-haired 78-year-old unwinds with his wife of 39 years in a suburban oasis outside Palm Springs -- he has realized he would like his loved ones to have access to those stories, even when he's no longer alive to share them. Kaplan has agreed to become "AndyBot," a virtual person who will be immortalized in the cloud for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. If all goes according to plan, future generations will be able to interact with him using mobile devices or voice computing platforms such as Amazon's Alexa, asking him questions, eliciting stories and drawing upon a lifetime's worth of advice long after his physical body is gone. Someday, Kaplan -- who playfully refers to himself as a "guinea pig" -- may be remembered as one of the world's first "digital humans."

You've probably interacted with a number of artificial intelligence technologies today, whether you've asked your... You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid. This email address is already registered. You have exceeded the maximum character limit.

This time around, however, the game of choice is Minecraft. In Minecraft's'Creative' mode, players have been able to recreate complex structures like Star Trek's Enterprise D with just a few simple building blocks. It's that potential for almost infinite creativity with a small set of easy-to-understand tools, in conjunction with the difficulty of teaching an AI to understand natural language, that has Facebook spending countless hours on a private Minecraft server. The hope is to eventually create an AI assistant that can help people with their day-to-day tasks, which is something Facebook has been trying to do for a couple of years now. In 2015, Facebook launched M, an AI-powered personal assistant within the company's Messenger app, only to shut down the platform after two-and-a-half years.

Existing approaches to recipe generation are unable to create recipes for users with culinary preferences but incomplete knowledge of ingredients in specific dishes. We propose a new task of personalized recipe generation to help these users: expanding a name and incomplete ingredient details into complete natural-text instructions aligned with the user's historical preferences. We attend on technique- and recipe-level representations of a user's previously consumed recipes, fusing these 'user-aware' representations in an attention fusion layer to control recipe text generation. Experiments on a new dataset of 180K recipes and 700K interactions show our model's ability to generate plausible and personalized recipes compared to non-personalized baselines.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises impelling potential for the growth of society and economy in today's times. As India is moving on the trajectory of digital transformation, the growing penetration of digital technologies in the lives of Indians and the generation of huge volumes of data at every interaction point projects a germane use-case for an AI-driven economy. However, for making the ocean of data points work in synergy to transform India as the AI leader, we require the power of AI to address the complex challenges that the country is facing across its demographic diversity. According to an Accenture report published in December 2017, AI alone can add $957 billion, or 15% of the current gross value added, to the Indian economy by 2035. The economic value can be unlocked primarily through three ways: augmentation delivered through human and machine collaboration, intelligent automation and productivity that comprise $597 billion, $83 billion and $277 billion, respectively.

Each iteration runs within an experiment and stores serialized pipelines from the automated machine learning iterations until they retrieve the pipeline with the best performance on the validation data set. Once the evaluation has been performed, the data scientist, project manager, and business lead meet again to review the forecasting results. It's the project manager and business lead's job to make sense of the outputs and choose practical steps based on those results. The business lead needs to confirm that the best model and pipeline meet the business objective and that the machine learning solution answers the questions with acceptable accuracy to deploy the system to production for use by their internal sales forecasting application. Automated machine learning is based on a breakthrough from the Microsoft Research division. The approach combines ideas from collaborative filtering and Bayesian optimization to search an enormous space of possible machine learning pipelines intelligently and efficiently.

The Dutch data protection agency has asked Microsoft's lead privacy regulator in Europe to investigate ongoing concerns it has attached to how Windows 10 gathers user data. Back in 2017 the privacy watchdog found Microsoft's platform to be in breach of local privacy laws on account of how it collects telemetry metadata. After some back and forth with the regulator, Microsoft made changes to how the software operates in April last year -- and it was in the course of testing those changes that the Dutch agency found fresh reasons for concern, discovering what it calls in a press release "new, potentially unlawful, instances of personal data processing". Since the agency's investigation of Windows 10 started a new privacy framework is being enforced in Europe -- the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) -- which means Microsoft's lead EU privacy regulator is the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), where its regional HQ is based. This is why the Dutch agency has referred its latest concerns to Ireland.