Sure, Alexa looks up things and answers questions for you. But as of Tuesday, you can ask the virtual personal assistant inside Amazon's Echo to make hotel reservations for you too. It's a Kayak-driven application that could rock the travel-booking world as more consumers shift to using their voice instead of their fingers when using cellphones and tablets. Kayak developed the interface that right now applies only to hotel bookings through its website. To use voice-command reservations, you first have to tell Alexa, which comes with Amazon's Echo voice-enabled speaker, who you are and link up your Kayak account.

The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts is updating its image with a number of new achievement badges aimed at encouraging young women into science and technology. My memories of the Girl Guides involve marshmallow toasting, tying knots and being assessed on my table-laying skills for a badge no doubt long-consigned to the archives. Fast forward some 25 years and it's clear much as changed. In an international organisation that liaises with Google and Microsoft among others, today's young guides are just as likely to be gathered round an engineering bench as a campfire. Sixteen-year-old Catherine Young is on a mission to boost girls' interest in engineering and has found the Girl Guides a valuable platform for her campaign.

Telecom operators have started using artificial intelligence (AI) technology capabilities that process and analyze real-time customer data to recommend and automatically trigger the next best action. Ooredoo, a top telecom operator in the Middle East, is investing in artificial intelligence technology to ensure next-generation customer experience to its mobile phone users in Qatar – as part of its digital strategy. Vodafone India faced 4.8 percent churn in fiscal 2017 as compared with 4.3 percent n fiscal 2016 due to competition. Churn of post-paid customers was 1.9 percent against 1.8 percent. Churn of pre-paid users was 5 percent against 4.5 percent.

One thing that makes ISIS so hard to fight is that the terrorist network is diffuse and scattered, with small cells of operatives all over the world. Not only does this make it hard for law enforcement to predict where the group might strike next; it makes it incredibly complicated to track activity on the network--activity like banking transactions. Small sums of money flow from foreign fighter to foreign fighter, yet banks struggle to identify it within their systems. Banks have long used anti-money laundering systems to flag suspicious activity, and in the aftermath of September 11th, they have turned to those same legacy tools to catch terror-related transactions, too. But these legacy tools are not up to the job.

Around midnight one Saturday in January, Sarah Jeong was on her couch, browsing Twitter, when she spontane ously wrote what she now bitterly refers to as "the tweet that launched a thousand ships." The 28-year-old journalist and author of The Internet of Garbage, a book on spam and online harassment, had been watching Bernie Sanders boosters attacking feminists and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. In what was meant to be a hyper bolic joke, she tweeted out a list of political carica tures, one of which called the typical Sanders fan a "vitriolic crypto racist who spends 20 hours a day on the Internet yelling at women." The ill-advised late-night tweet was, Jeong admits, provocative and absurd--she even supported Sanders. But what happened next was the kind of backlash that's all too familiar to women, minorities, and anyone who has a strong opinion online. By the time Jeong went to sleep, a swarm of Sanders supporters were calling her a neoliberal shill. By sunrise, a broader, darker wave of abuse had begun. She received nude photos and links to disturbing videos. One troll promised to "rip each one of [her] hairs out" and "twist her tits clear off." The attacks continued for weeks. "I was in crisis mode," she recalls. So she did what many victims of mass harassment do: She gave up and let her abusers have the last word.

Here are 100 upcoming meetings and conferences, for July 2017 and beyond. You can also find the latest list on KDnuggets Meetings page Color code: Business-Oriented meetings in Blue, Research meetings (with calls for papers and program committee) in green Top countries: India, France, Australia: 3 New York City regained the top billing this month - here are the top cities for meetings: San Francisco, Boston: 8 Seattle, New Orleans, Berlin, Atlanta: 3 July 2017 Jul 5-8, 2017 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS). Register now and save 15% with code KDN15. Space is limited - register soon and save 20% extra w. Save 20% on most passes with discount code PCKDNG.

Responding to Walter Pike's article, Did Publicis dumping the Cannes Lions come as a surprise to you?, Rita Doherty writes that she doesn't agree that interruptive advertising will be replaced by relevance advertising. She believes the two systems will co-exist... Pike was therefore thrilled when the new Publicis Groupe CEO, Arthur Sadun pulled out of Cannes saying the money would be spent instead on artificial intelligence technology. Pike adds, 'certainly this is a huge blow to the egos of the people in creative departments, but should we care?' Pike's vision of a world with no advertising interrupting people is exciting, but unfortunately, it's a vision based on dangerous fallacies. Pike is right about some things. He's right to point out the age of big data, artificial intelligence and programmatic media is upon us and this'digital trinity' will be the key to future brand growth.

"OK Google, what can you do when connected to Talend?" In this tutorial, I will show how to create an Agent in API.AI that will respond to commands spoken to Google Home. The Agent will reverse the words in a sentence spoken to Google Home by making use of a Talend web service which is used to carry out the word reversal. A very simple example, but it demonstrates the ground work you will need to create some really quite interesting applications. You do not need one to try this tutorial out as Google has provided an emulator, but I can highly recommend the device. Recently Google opened up access to the Actions on Google API. You can either use the Actions SDK or use API.AI. API.AI was recently acquired by Google. While API.AI is really quite simple to use, it is quite limited in how it can be used with Google Home at the moment.

Ninety percent of all the data available online today has accumulated over the last couple of years. This pool of data is projected to grow exponentially as we all contribute to it each day through 500 million tweets, 4.3 billion Facebook posts, 5.75 billion "likes," and 6 billion daily Google searches. The Ridacati Group reports that 205 billion emails were sent each day in 2015, and it estimates that by 2019 that number will increase 20 percent to reach 246 billion emails. This data growth is inextricably linked to the development of AI. Deep learning models have become routine in almost every area that deals with data.

In 1999, Bill Gates wrote a book titled "Business @ the Speed of Thought." In it, Gates made 15 bold predictions that at the time might have sounded outrageous. But as Markus Kirjonen, a business student, said on his blog, Gates' forecasts turned out to be eerily prescient. Here are the 15 predictions Gates made nearly 20 years ago -- and how close they've come to being true. Gates' prediction: "Automated price comparison services will be developed, allowing people to see prices across multiple websites, making it effortless to find the cheapest product for all industries."