When David Godsman joined Coca-Cola as chief digital officer nearly a year ago, his remit was to transform the traditionally brick-and-mortar business into a "consumer-centric beverage brand" for the digital era. Godsman--who spent the past several years in digital banking at Bank of America before heading up the company's payments and commerce unit--is the first person in the role for the beverage brand. Coca-Cola is just one of many brands across a variety of industries grappling with how to serve consumers through new digital platforms. Using data, artificial intelligence and connected devices, it's trying to rapidly test and enact new customer experiences and services. "This is a large digital transformation exclusive to the Coca-Cola Company," he said.

In their quest to get smarter in the way they operate in the face of tightening IT budgets and a lack of skilled manpower, companies in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region have started to dip their toes into the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). Find out how to draw up a battle plan for securing connected devices and the key areas to target. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid. This email address is already registered.

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban has seen a ton of change since he first got in the technology business in 1982, but he argues that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to "change everything, 180 degrees." He warns that if the U.S. allows other countries to take the lead in AI, then it'll be "SOL," an acronym that employs profanity to communicate urgency. "All these things have happened that have changed how we do business, changed how we lived our lives, changed everything, right, the internet. But what we're going to see with artificial intelligence dwarfs all of that," Cuban said in an interview with hedge fund manager J. Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital on RealVision Television, a subscription financial video service. AI is expected to soon bring an increase in productivity, resulting in fewer jobs all while the population continues to grow. "It's not a question of how it plays out over 100 years.

It's true that Bixby didn't have the most auspicious of debuts when it rolled out on the Galaxy S8 earlier this year, but Samsung's clearly got big plans for its smart assistant. Late last year, the company picked up Viv, the new assistant from the folks behind Siri -- an acquisition that occurred too late to have a major impact on Bixby ahead of release. The consumer electronics giant is at it again, picking up fellow South Korean company, Fluenty -- news first noted by The Korea Herald.

During his talk at a tech summit organized by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) on Wednesday, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told his audience that it won't be long before China overtakes the United States in the development of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), according to a report by The Verge. Schmidt, who's now the executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, said that while the U.S. would maintain its leading place in the next five years, China will be able to catch up "extremely quickly."

As revealed by industry analyst Daniel Ahmad, Nintendo is teaming up with NVIDIA to release some of its Wii and Gamecube games in China for the first time. While NVIDIA's Tegra chip is at the heart of the Nintendo Switch, in this case, the games will run on the NVIDIA Shield, which hit the market today in China. NVIDIA confirmed that New Super Mario Bros. Wii, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and PUNCH-OUT!! are all available now for the Shield in 1080p, while others including Super Mario Galaxy are "coming soon." Ahmad posted videos of Nintendo games running on the Shield (sourced from Weibo) and provided some pricing info, saying that the Shield in China costs 1499 RMB (about $226), while each remastered game costs 68 RMB (about $10). We wouldn't expect anything about this arrangement to expand beyond China in the foreseeable future, but the licensing arrangement is a way for Nintendo to crack the market officially.

Global automakers are looking beyond making and selling cars to survive an industry which is being quickly transformed by new services, and a growing number including General Motors Co are applying their expertise in automated driving functions for mass-market cars to develop mobility services.

The government will aim to double the country's labor productivity to 2 percent in the three years through 2020 from 0.9 percent, the average in the five years through 2015, informed sources said. The government is set to include the target in a package of policy measures it plans to adopt on Friday to help realize a "productivity revolution," an initiative designed to ensure sustainable wage growth and overcome deflation, the sources said. The policy package is also expected to call for increasing corporate capital spending by 10 percent in fiscal 2020 from the fiscal 2016 level and achieving wage growth of at least 3 percent every year during the three-year intensive reform period through 2020. The government is set to pledge that it will utilize all policy measures to improve productivity, including the greater use of big data and artificial intelligence technology. Also in the package, the government plans to reduce corporate tax burdens to internationally competitive levels for companies actively boosting their wages and capital expenditures.

We are in the fourth industrial revolution, which is characterized by advances in robotics and self-driving car technology, the proliferation of smart home appliances, and more. At the forefront of all these is artificial intelligence (AI), which is the development of automated computer systems that could match or even surpass humans in intelligence. AI is regarded as the next big thing--so big that future technologies will be dependent on it. But then, do we really know what we are getting ourselves into? Here are ten scary facts about artificial intelligence. Let's assume you're driving down a road.

Count-based exploration algorithms are known to perform near-optimally when used in conjunction with tabular reinforcement learning (RL) methods for solving small discrete Markov decision processes (MDPs). It is generally thought that count-based methods cannot be applied in high-dimensional state spaces, since most states will only occur once. Recent deep RL exploration strategies are able to deal with high-dimensional continuous state spaces through complex heuristics, often relying on optimism in the face of uncertainty or intrinsic motivation. In this work, we describe a surprising finding: a simple generalization of the classic count-based approach can reach near state-of-the-art performance on various high-dimensional and/or continuous deep RL benchmarks. States are mapped to hash codes, which allows to count their occurrences with a hash table. These counts are then used to compute a reward bonus according to the classic count-based exploration theory. We find that simple hash functions can achieve surprisingly good results on many challenging tasks. Furthermore, we show that a domain-dependent learned hash code may further improve these results. Detailed analysis reveals important aspects of a good hash function: 1) having appropriate granularity and 2) encoding information relevant to solving the MDP. This exploration strategy achieves near state-of-the-art performance on both continuous control tasks and Atari 2600 games, hence providing a simple yet powerful baseline for solving MDPs that require considerable exploration.