Babak Hodjat was the Vice President of and a specialist in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning joins Enterprise Radio. Hodjat is the author of the book "The Konar and the Apple". Babak Hodjat is Vice President of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant, and former co-founder and CEO of Sentient Technologies. He is responsible for the core technology behind the world's largest distributed artificial intelligence system. Babak was also the founder of the world's first AI-driven hedge fund, Sentient Investment Management.

"Deep learning is neither deep, nor is it learning," says Babak Hodjat, the vice president of projects for "Evolutionary AI" at IT services giant Cognizant Technologies. Hodjat's critique is part of a fascinating exploration of AI taking shape at IT services firm Cognizant Technology Solutions, a twenty-five-year-old company based in Teaneck, New Jersey that last year made nearly $16 billion in revenue serving some of the biggest companies in the world. For years, this IT giant has talked about "digital transformation," something that is large and significant but also something hard to get one's mind around because it very often seems vague and undefined. And then in December, Cognizant gave a whole new grounding and precision to that digital work by acquiring certain assets from an eleven-year-old AI startup Sentient Technologies. The company, co-founded by Hodjat, has been pursuing a thrilling line of work in what's called "evolutionary computation," where many algorithms, including conventional artificial neural networks, can be tested in parallel for "fitness," to select an optimal network to perform a task.

"Every aspect of our lives will be transformed [by AI]", potentially "the biggest event in the history of our civilization" -Stephen Hawking We are already seeing the tremendous inroads that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made in virtually every industry. Despite AI's rapid expansion, the Artificial Intelligence technology itself is still evolving. AI points towards a future where machines not only do physical work, as they have done since the industrial revolution, but also the "thinking" work – planning, strategizing, prioritizing and making decisions. In fact, the definition of what is considered Artificial Intelligence keeps shifting. What used to be called AI even several years ago is now just widely used and familiar technology, and no longer resides under the AI umbrella.

Alpha Go's victory over Lee Sedol was perhaps one of the most important, but we saw advancements in self-driving cars, the continued embrace of bots and personal assistants for retail, adoption and competition around in-house assistants like Amazon Echo, along with frequent, sometimes weekly, breakthroughs on the academic side, mainly relating to machine learning. With the biggest tech companies in the world--Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others--devoting more and more resources to AI, the momentum is going to increase. For those of us who've been in the field for a while, it's an incredibly exciting time. AI and Machine Learning have come to the fore in the recent past, but we believe that the next few years hold even more far reaching successes. So what advances will we be seeing exactly?