Artificial intelligence is an increasingly prevalent part of our everyday lives. From live-updating, turn-by-turn driving directions to responsive voice-controlled digital assistants--all in the palms of our hands--we are constantly interacting with computer programming where machines learn from experience and adjust to new data to perform human-like tasks. For children growing up right now, AI will undoubtedly be a part of their future lives and jobs. So, it's critical that students understand computational thinking and know how machine learning works. "It's important that kids leave our classrooms with real-world knowledge and industry-standard software and technical experience under their belt," says Teresa Blizman-Schmitt, a sixth through eighth grade computer science and business education teacher in Vernon, CT.

The second day of Microsoft's annual Future Decoded conference in London kicked off with a keynote presentation discussing how data growth is becoming the new Moore's Law. Through Moore's Law, the technology industry has seen exponential growth in computing power, with processor performance doubling every 18 months to two years. But now, according to Microsoft, data is driving a new approach to software development, where data is doubling every two years and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will be used to exploit this data. Chris Bishop, technical lead at Microsoft Labs in Cambridge, said: "Moore's Law has driven the digital revolution. I believe there is a revolution in the way we create software. In the last decade, we have handcrafted software to achieve the desired outcome. With AI, there is a radically different approach – we tell the computer how to learn."

Swiss pharma giant Novartis has partnered with tech giant Microsoft and launched its Novartis AI innovation lab as a means to leverage data and artificial intelligence to transform drug discovery and development. The new Novartis AI lab aims to significantly bolster Novartis AI capabilities from research through commercialization and help accelerate the discovery and development of transformative medicines for patients worldwide, the company announced Monday. As part of the strategic collaboration between the two companies, Novartis and Microsoft have committed to a multi-year research and development effort with a focus on AI empowerment and AI exploration. With AI empowerment, Novartis said the goal is for every employee in the lab to have the AI program on their computer. Using Novartis' datasets and Microsoft's AI solutions, the company said the lab will create new AI models and applications that can augment their discovery and development capabilities.