Machine learning has long powered many products we interact with daily–from "intelligent" assistants like Apple's Siri and Google now, to recommendation engines like Amazon's that suggest new products to buy, to the ad ranking systems used by Google and Facebook. More recently, machine learning has entered the public consciousness because of advances in "deep learning"–these include AlphaGo's defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Sedol and impressive new products around image recognition and machine translation. In this series, we'll give an introduction to some powerful but generally applicable techniques in machine learning. These include deep learning but also more traditional methods that are often all the modern business needs. After reading the articles in the series, you should have the knowledge necessary to embark on concrete machine learning experiments in a variety of areas on your own.

Christina is audience development editor. After graduating from the University of Nottingham reading philosophy and theology in 2013, Christina joined a tech start-up specialising in mobile apps. She has a keen interest in the mobile platform and innovative tech. In recent years AI has brought us some pretty impressive and widely used tech, from the image recognition being used by Facebook to speech recognition technology at work in Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri. It's these breakthroughs in deep learning and neural networks that have led to some of the most exciting yet also worrying times in tech. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates (to name a few) have all warned us about the dangers of unregulated AI development.

While AI is having significant impact with the consumer market -- witness the explosion of AI-driven bots and digital assistants -- businesses are realizing the important ways they can take advantage of AI. One of the biggest areas of growth is in AI Marketing (AIM). Start with the fact that computers are great at crunching numbers, quickly providing results from complex math formulas, and handling repetitive tasks without complaint. Add in software that uses well-designed machine-learning algorithms, and you have the potential of a powerful AIM process to deliver detailed analytics and offer valuable insights. AIM software will revolutionize the role of the marketer -- for the better.

The internet strongly agrees there's an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution going on, and it's come to pharma marketing. IBM Watson, the AI brain being infused all over healthcare, will form the backend of an interactive display ad for GSK Consumer Healthcare's Theraflu. The cold-and-flu product was one of seven brands, across four beta partners, to sign on with Watson Ads, an initiative announced this past summer by the Weather Co. -- an IBM property -- aiming to develop a new wave of ads that people will be able to communicate with. According to the firm, it marks the first consumer use of IBM's cognitive technology for advertising. "This is a whole new foray into marketing," says D. J. Reali, SVP, national ad sales for the Weather Co.

The thought of handing important parts of your business over to artificial intelligence can seem rather scary and alarming, but many businesses are discovering that it's not as challenging as they first believed. In fact, A.I. technology is allowing thousands of businesses to save the one thing they can't get back: time. When people look back at the span of time between 2015 and 2020, they'll likely recognize this window as an important catalyst in the technological revolution that bred powerful applications that would transform life for years to come. At the heart of this revolution is A.I. And while products of A.I. are finally coming to fruition, it's not exactly a brand-new idea.

We are entering the age of the CUI, the conversational user interface. Already, there are 8.2 million voice-first devices in homes, mostly Amazon Echos. By the end of this year, that number will balloon to 33 million. That's the prediction from VoiceLabs, a startup that helps companies monitor and measure people's interaction with their Alexa Skills or Google Actions. Skills and actions are integration points between Alexa or Google Assistant and your technology; they are the conversational user interface equivalent of apps on Android or iOS smartphones.

Do you wonder how Internet of Things Will Affect Your Social Media Strategy? What part does Artificial Intelligence and Technology Play in Social Media? It all may sound like a sci-fi movie at first, but this is real life. New technologies are shaping the world we live in and at a rapid pace. Here's a quick guide to help you understand some of these emerging technologies and how they will affect social media.

Two summers ago, Magna International Inc. and Royal Bank of Canada brought together some of Canada's brightest entrepreneurs and innovators to brainstorm what Canada needs to foster the development of emerging technologies and tech companies. Fast forward to today and we are on the cusp of the next great technological revolution, driven by artificial intelligence (AI). The term may conjure up visions of science-fiction movies with apocalyptic outcomes, but the reality is we are already living in a world infused with AI, from music and movie recommendation services, to driver assistance systems in cars, to virtual personal assistants in our phone or in our home. Over the past few years, the pace of technological innovation and exploration of AI has increased exponentially, with futuristic ideas such as self-driving cars becoming tangible products of today. At the recently concluded World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, one of the major themes centred on AI as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Artificial Intelligence has another champion and watchdog. Four months after its formation, the Partnership on AI, a group dedicated to tackling AI opportunities and challenges finally, officially welcomed Apple as a member. Tom Gruber, Apple's head of advanced development for Apple's digital assistant, Siri, joined the Partnership on AI's board of Trustees on Friday. Gruber joins science, research and AI leaders from a disparate group of companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and DeepMind (part of Google), along with leaders from the ACLU, UC Berkeley and the Association for the Advancement of AI. "We're glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI. We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers." said Gruber on the Partnership on AI site.

Machine learning is a mechanism to provide popular functionality like recommendation engines, predictive maintenance, and is a cornerstone of future IoT workflows. Cloudera customers are delivering strategic functionality with machine learning at its core. As an example, a popular dating site Zoosk uses Cloudera Enterprise for creating successful matches and reduce user churn using big data and machine learning. MMO gaming company Wargaming uses machine learning on Cloudera to elevate customer experience and engage users in advanced gameplay. And one of America's leading financial services companies Transamerica uses Cloudera to test and validate data models at a much faster scale.