McCann Erickson Japan is upping its artificial intelligence game by creating and naming the world's first artificial intelligence (AI) creative director. Named AI-CD?, the AI bot was developed through the "Creative Genome Project", one of the first projects undertaken by McCANN MILLENNIALS, an innovative taskforce that was launched last September by members of the agency's millennial generation. AI-CD? is artificial intelligence that is able to give creative direction for commercials. To develop the A.I., the MILLENNIALS team deconstructed, analysed and tagged a wide range of TV commercials, including the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation's annual CM Festival (ACC CM Festival) awards for the past 10 years. The A.I. is designed to mine the Festival's database and creatively direct the optimal commercial for any given product or message.

WATERLOO, ON--(Marketwired - Mar 29, 2016) - Maluuba, a deep-learning company helping machines think, reason and communicate with human-like intelligence, today announced it has opened an R&D lab in Montreal. As part of the labs, Maluuba has partnered with machine learning and neural computation expert, Yoshua Bengio from the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) and reinforcement learning expert Richard Sutton from the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning, to further Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and artificial intelligence (AI) advances. The research lab, staffed by 13 deep learning research scientists, is led by Maluuba's CTO, Kaheer Suleman, an information retrieval and artificial intelligence expert. With a focus on the development of proprietary algorithms to solve language problems, Maluuba's goal is to build the world's most advanced research facility in deep learning and AI. "While we're closer to the goal of getting machines to exercise reasoning and understand conversational language, we still have a long way to go," said Yoshua Bengio.

Smartron is headed by founder chairman Mahesh Lingareddy who is also the co-founder and CEO of Soft Machines Inc, a United Statesbased semiconductor company with operations in the US, India and Russia. It has research and development centres in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Smartron is riding on the back of the IoT wave by innovating in the areas of smart, sensor, robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud and big data technologies to bring next generation smart devices, services and care, targeting consumer, enterprise, industrial and infrastructure markets. The company is funded by investors from the US, India and West Asia, among others.

Microsoft launched an artificial intelligence chat "bot" last week, thinking this would be a way to show off its AI programming skills. Unfortunately, within 24 hours Tay had turned from a naive young AI into a rude, anti-Semitic pro-Nazi jerk. Also: Taliban kills 76 Christians in Pakistan on Easter; LGBTQ activists upset at North Carolina; Disney, Marvel and the NFL bully Georgia; CIA-armed Syrian rebels shooting at Pentagon-armed rebels; more evidence for Planet 9; and Mexicans celebrate Easter by burning Donald Trump in effigy.

David Nordfors is the co-chair and co-founder of the i4j Innovation for Jobs Summit together with Vint Cerf. There is a common misunderstanding about the coming automated economy that may destroy us all. Most people in business and finance (and most people, frankly) think that the new economy (of artificial intelligence and autonomous machines) is like the old economy: satisfying customers' needs for products and services. The real heart of the new economy will be about helping people need each other more. To build a new economy (and a decent, functional society), innovation must help us need each other more and in better ways… to bind us to each other.

Join us live at Entrepreneur's Accelerate Your Business event series in Chicago or Denver. But the time may come soon since an AI recently impressed judges of a Japanese literary prize. The novella, The Day a Computer Writes a Novel, was co-written and edited by a team of humans. The story itself follows a computer program as it recognizes its talent for writing and leaves behind its preprogrammed duties. Initially, the book was included in the group of 11 AI-authored submissions allowed to enter the contest for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, according to Smithsonianmag.com.

For such a vital human capacity, consciousness is still a mystery to us. The question "What is consciousness?" has long been explored by philosophers but traditionally shunned by scientists, "because it was considered'spooky' or too vague or new-agey", according to author Andrew Smart. But that is starting to change, with neuroscientists and theorists in artificial intelligence joining the quest to locate what might be called the defining characteristic of humanity. Smart's new book Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics and Consciousness puts forward a tantalising hypothesis: that consciousness is a type of hallucination that may have evolved through the aeons as a survival mechanism. To answer the question "What is consciousness?" one must imagine how a computer could become human, he says.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) are each pursuing unique visions of the smart home, the home as an ever-connected smart device. Home automation has been around as long as the PC, but is still struggling to find the right user interface and functionality that will make this compelling. The fundamental question that remains is just how smart do consumers want or need their homes to be? Amazon's answer to this question is simple: smart enough to understand your voice. Last week, The Information profiled Tony Fadell and the difficulties Nest has had in introducing new products since being acquired by Alphabet. For those who don't subscribe to The Information, there was also a good synopsis of the article in Fortune called The Mess at Nest.

Biologists have long puzzled over why neurons have thousands of synapses. Now neuroscientists have shown they are crucial not just for recognizing patterns but for learning the sequence in which they appear.

It's happening in many, if not most industries; its application in the business environment is growing fast. On many estimates, over the next 10 years, enterprise spending on AI technology will increase from 200m to over 60billion. AI is already driving business growth, and rather than detracting from human contribution it will release workers to complete more creative and valuable tasks. A number of leading organisations spanning finance, law, healthcare, manufacturing, transport, energy, education and many more are looking to implement the technologies or have already started! AIBusiness.org has launched the first ever ecosystem map of AI solutions for enterprise organisations looking at vertical and cross-vertical applications.