You might feel more optimistic about the future today than you did last year. But that's not exactly a high bar to clear: The slog of the past 18 months has shown us that we've still got a few kinks to work out in this whole society thing. That's why we bring you RE:WIRED. Navigating the future is going to take some serious work, as well as the willingness and insight to rethink how we shape the world. For two days--November 9th and 10th--WIRED is hosting a series of sessions with some of the top thinkers on the planet (and top thinkers about the planet).

Hassabis is a co-founder of Deep Mind, a UK AI startup acquired by Google in 2014. His work has focused on the development of artificial neural networks by combining machine learning with neuroscience. Deep Mind's most publicised success so far has been its AlphaGo AI which last year became the first computer programme to beat a professional human Go player. Before this breakthrough, even the best AIs were only capable of playing at the level of human amateurs and could be defeated by most people with practice.

Every day it seems we are hearing of new advances made by AIs thanks to Machine Learning, from improving healthcare to beating us at poker, it is often easy to forget that, behind every successful robot, there's a clever human. The swift pace of change we are seeing today is due to a concerted effort across industry and academia to find practical uses for the ever-growing amount of data we are generating and collecting. So, in this post I am going to highlight some of the current movers'n' shakers, whose breakthroughs in machine learning are proving to be fundamental to developing the digital tools and technologies making AI possible, from social networks to self-driving cars, to the industrial internet. Ng has just resigned from his post as chief data scientist at Chinese online giant Baidu. As well as that he is the founder of the online training resource Coursera and associate professor at Stanford University's computer science department.

Every day it seems we are hearing of new advances made by AIs thanks to Machine Learning, from improving healthcare to beating us at poker, it is often easy to forget that, behind every successful robot, there's a clever human. The swift pace of change we are seeing today is due to a concerted effort across industry and academia to find practical uses for the ever-growing amount of data we are generating and collecting. So, in this post I am going to highlight some of the current movers'n' shakers, whose breakthroughs in machine learning are proving to be fundamental to developing the digital tools and technologies making AI possible, from social networks to self-driving cars, to the industrial internet. Ng has just resigned from his post as chief data scientist at Chinese online giant Baidu. As well as that he is the founder of the online training resource Coursera and associate professor at Stanford University's computer science department.