"Today, in the era of Big Data, it is essential to have a central platform to house all of the government's data, a platform that taps into the potential of artificial intelligence to spread happiness among the people." A tech disruptor at a conference looking to tout the revolutionary capabilities of AI in hopes of attracting a public-private partnership? One of the many bloggers with a utopian take on the power of the cloud, AI, and smart cities? No, it was Crown Prince Shaikh Hamdan of Dubai. Dubai, a United Arab Emirates city with a population of nearly 3 million, is deploying the Dubai Pulse platform as part of its effort to turn Dubai into a smart city--and to promote "happiness among the people." Dubai Pulse is a cloud-based infrastructure accessible via smartphone.

Software developers are quickly adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, such as natural language understanding, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, image understanding and machine learning (ML). Across a broad range of industries and sectors, AI-infused software applications and cloud services drive innovative customer experiences, augment human capabilities and transform how we live, work and play. New tools, cloud-hosted APIs and platforms make it even easier to build such applications. Modern AI applications live at the intersection of cloud computing, data platforms and AI tools. The cloud provides a powerful foundation for elastic compute and storage, while supporting special-purpose hardware such as graphics processing units (GPUs) that accelerate demanding calculations.

New KDnuggets Cartoon looks at how AI and the new technology, such as self-driving cars, can change Christmas. Reindeer: With those new self-driving sleighs we can finally relax. This cartoon was ably drawn by Jon Carter. Here are other KDnuggets Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science Cartoons and KDnuggets posts tagged cartoon. Cartoon: What Else Can AI Guess From Your Face? Cartoon: Future Machine Learning Class Cartoon: The First Ever Self-Driving, Deep Learning Grill Cartoon: Mother Of All Data Cartoon: Machine Learning - What They Think I Do Cartoon: the distance between Espresso and Cappuccino Cartoon: Taxes, Artificial Intelligence, and Humans Cartoon: What Happens When AI Masters the March Madness Causation or Correlation: Explaining Hill Criteria using xkcd Cartoon: Perfect Valentine's Dates Found With Data Analysis Cartoon: When Self-Driving Car Machine Learning takes you too far ... A Funny Look at Big Data and Data Science Cartoon: Thanksgiving, Big Data, and Turkey Data Science.

The paper, which is the third edition released by the digital performance marketing agency, takes a look at how brands can make the most of machines in 2018, from facilitating seamless consumer experiences to delivering greater efficiencies. The agency interviewed 250 of their global clients, including FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies, and used the real-time feedback to outline key insights and priorities necessary for businesses to thrive in our fast moving, high expectation digital economy. Feedback showed that the transformative impact of Voice, AI, and Machine Learning is being felt across the entire business landscape with 55% of marketers surveyed agreeing that Machine Learning will allow them to make better decisions in 2018. Based on the feedback, the 2018 future focus whitepaper discussed the new machine rules including enhanced customer experience, how digital assistants are the new gatekeepers, how AI and machine learning transform marketing, how commerce is everywhere and the rise of Amazon as an'everything store'. "As we look towards an increasingly tech-enabled future, we believe success will be delivered by brands that can effectively leverage both advances in Machine Learning and the strengths of their human strategic capital," said Bowan Spanbroek, head of product and strategy in Asia Pacific at iProspect.

A recent Intel India report, undertaken by the International Data Corporation (IDC) has revealed that there has been an increase in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India, which in turn is expected to spike organisation spends on this technology over the next 18 months. The report surveyed 194 Indian organisations across sectors. According to the survey, nearly 75 per cent firms anticipate benefits in business process efficiency and employee productivity with the use of AI, while 64 per cent of the respondents believe that the technology can empower them in revenue augmentation through better targeting of offers and improved sales processes. Although AI does benefit greatly in the country, the survey also pointed out that 76 per cent of the companies believe that they will face a shortage of skilled personnel if AI is implemented into processes. "We all talk about the opportunity that India presents for AI, but often the types of industries that will embrace AI, the challenges that AI can address, and the roadblocks in implementation, are vague. This research is a small step towards comprehending this knowledge, and enabling companies such as ours, shape strategy and move ahead in the right direction."

With Christmas approaching, online retailers are facing an onslaught of fraudsters, and machine learning could prove vital to pattern detection. Stripe has revealed insights from its data to help online businesses fight online fraud this Christmas, and has recommended that retailers add machine learning tools to their respective arsenals. Stripe examined transaction data from hundreds of thousands of its customers across 25 countries. 'We recommend using anti-fraud tools based on machine learning trained on large amounts of data, to ensure businesses are making the right trade-offs between battling fraud and maximising profits' – MICHAEL MANAPAT While chip-enabled credit cards have made bricks-and-mortar shopping safer, fraudsters are increasingly targeting online stores. However, unlike physical stores, online businesses are unfortunately responsible for paying the associated costs.

BENGALURU: Indian enterprises have been quick to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) with nearly one in five organizations implementing it in some way, said an Intel India commissioned report undertaken by research firm IDC. By mid-2019, about seven in 10 firms are anticipated to deploy AI. IDC surveyed 194 Indian companies across four verticals -- telecom, media & technology (TMT); retail; banking, financial services, & insurance (BFSI) and healthcare. The report said nearly 75 per cent of the firms surveyed anticipate benefits in business process efficiency and employee productivity with the use of AI, and 64 per cent of the respondents believe that this technology can empower them in revenue augmentation through better targeting of offers and improved sales processes. Despite a higher propensity to adopt AI, firms believe they will face a shortage of skills to unlock the opportunities through AI. "We all talk about the opportunity that India presents for AI, but often the types of industries that will embrace AI, the challenges that AI can address, and the roadblocks in implementation, are vague. This research is a small step towards comprehending this knowledge, and enabling companies such as ours, shape strategy and move ahead in the right direction," said Prakash Mallya, managing director for sales and marketing at Intel India.

Humans don't get to do much with Google in China, where the world's most popular search engine has been unavailable for more than five years. But artificial intelligence is another matter entirely, as Google announced Wednesday plans to open an AI research center in Beijing. While the various Google sites have been unavailable in mainland China ever since the company declined to continue censoring search results, the country's emergence as a global power means Google can't stay out of China entirely. In this case, the focus is on harnessing China's growing dominance of machine learning research, hence the new Google AI China Center. "Chinese authors contributed 43 percent of all content in the top 100 AI journals in 2015--and when the Association for the Advancement of AI discovered that their annual meeting overlapped with Chinese New Year this year, they rescheduled," Fei-Fei Li, Google's chief scientist for AI and machine learning, wrote in a blog post Wednesday explaining the move.

When it comes to disruptive technologies that will drive businesses in the coming years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is touted as the most promising and Indian enterprises across the spectrum began embracing it to enhance real-time user experiences. Picking up the pace globally, AI gradually cemented its position as the technology is quite transverse and perceived as less gimmicky, impacting several functions to improve productivity and business results, says Thomas Husson, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester. From flushing out fake and terror-related content to making sense of humongous data for self-driving cars, from helping identify when someone might be expressing thoughts of suicide on Facebook to empower NASA explore space communications, AI-based tools gained a definite momentum. Microsoft pledged $50 million over the next five years to put AI technology in the hands of those who are working to mitigate climate change. When it comes to India, AI started playing a significant role in not just developing smart devices but in improving engagement with end-consumers -- be it government or corporates.

There is a war a-brewin', but this war will be fought with wits and not brute strength. Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin's declaration that "the nation that leads in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be the ruler of the world," the press and analysts have created hysteria regarding the ramifications of artificial intelligence on everything from public education to unemployment to healthcare to Skynet. Note: artificial intelligence (AI) endows applications with the ability to automatically learn and adapt from experience via interacting with the surroundings / environment. See the blog "Artificial Intelligence is not Fake Intelligence" for a more detailed explanation on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Fast Company article "How to Stop Worrying and Love the Great AI War of 2018," projected that the AI battle would ultimately boil down between the "AI Big 6": Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft.