Practically, however, there are three main AI techniques that are proving useful today. There is supervised learning, in which an algorithm is given historical data inputs and outputs, and learns to predict outputs for those inputs. There is unsupervised learning, in which an AI system finds patterns for itself: for example, identifying groups of visitors to your site, without any clear distinctions about what defines a'group' from the outset. Games are a great example of this: give a reinforcement AI the rules of the game, and what defines'winning', and it will iterate until it has developed a strategy that'wins' according to those rules. We cover types of machine learning in more detail on our blog.

Load up the homepage for e-commerce giant, Alibaba – a wholesale shopping site that's more or less China's answer to eBay – and you'll find images and descriptions of anything you could wish to buy, from kitchen sinks to luxury yachts. Every item has a short headline, but most are little more than lists of keywords: hand-picked search terms to ensure this USB phone charger or that pair of flame-resistant overalls float to the top in a sea of thousands upon thousands of similar items. It sounds simple, but there's an art to this copywriting. Yet Alibaba recently revealed that it is training an artificial intelligence to generate these item descriptions automatically – and they're not the only ones. Over the last few decades AIs have been taught to compose music, paint pictures and write (bad) poems. "Generative bots are the new chatbot," says Jun Wang at University College London.

Rael wanted to combine his years of knowledge in the finance world with advertising. He quit his job soon afterwards and after contacting Dr. Jun Wang who had papers on the very same subject, they both decided to co-found MediaGamma. Rael Cline shares with me how MediaGamma is helping companies harness the power of their customer data to drive better customer-centric products. Hi Rael, thanks for agreeing to share your story on YHP. Can you give us some background information about yourself?

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MediaGamma has announced the launch of a new Audience Prediction product, which is set to make a major impact on the ad tech market. By applying deep learning to unique data sets, coupled with MediaGamma's unique AI Decision Support Engine, the product is set to provide players in the ecosystem with over 90% certainty about a user's interests and demographic profile. The new product will help people to navigate uncertainty to make better decisions, and a major telecoms company has already signed up. The Audience Prediction product is the latest in a broad portfolio of products created by MediaGamma (http://www.mediagamma.com/), The start-up's world-renown team of data scientists deliver bespoke real time, prediction-based data science solutions focusing on online user behaviour.

MediaGamma has announced the launch of a new Audience Prediction product, which is set to make a major impact on the ad tech market. By applying deep learning to unique data sets, coupled with MediaGamma's unique AI Decision Support Engine, the product is set to provide players in the ecosystem with over 90% certainty about a user's interests and demographic profile. The new product will help people to navigate uncertainty to make better decisions, and a major telecoms company has already signed up. The Audience Prediction product is the latest in a broad portfolio of products created by MediaGamma (http://www.mediagamma.com/), The start-up's world-renown team of data scientists deliver bespoke real time, prediction-based data science solutions focusing on online user behaviour.