A recent National Business Research Institute (NBRI) survey of 235 business executives found that 38% of enterprises are already using AI technologies and 62% plan to use them by 2018. Big data has spawned the current interest and increased investment in artificial intelligence. The availability of large volumes of data--plus new algorithms and more computing power--have finally pulled AI out of its long "winter." At Straight Talk, we like to hear directly from tech executives, in this case those who have been applying machine learning, predictive analytics, text analysis, voice processing and other AI technologies to their organizations' data, processes, and interactions with customers. At Schneider Electric, Prith Banerjee, executive vice president and CTO, reports on the successful marriage of machine learning with another emerging set of technologies--the Internet of Things or the IoT.

SYS-CON Events announced today that HTBase will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. HTBase (Gartner 2016 Cool Vendor) delivers a Composable IT infrastructure solution architected for agility and increased efficiency. It turns compute, storage, and fabric into fluid pools of resources that are easily composed and re-composed to meet each application's needs. With HTBase, companies can quickly provision resources and deploy unique, mission-critical, self-designed solutions to add-onto or create any type of infrastructure as per the business requirement. HTBase is the first company to enable a true multi-cloud strategy, enabling organizations to automate movement of data and workloads between private and public clouds.

AI is touted to change the world in the same way electricity did. But are we moving too fast? While AI has created impact in some sectors, there are some documented instances of enterprises claiming to have automated systems, but actually relying on humans behind the scenes. For our future to stay bright, the real AI startups will need to stand up. On March 22, 2017, Andrew NG, who had been heading Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts at Chinese tech giant Baidu, announced that he was resigning from the company.

Tech-savvy paedophiles are using a series of digital techniques known as "masking" and "breadcrumbing" to hide illegal materials from regular web users online, while allowing others to track down criminal images and film by following a series of covert clues. The trend was exposed by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in its latest annual report, which covers new information on how child sex abuse images and videos are being hosted, distributed and identified online. Normally used by cyber-criminals, the tricks are used to hide illegal material in plain sight. "If you access the site directly, you just get legitimate content," Sarah Smith, a technical researcher at the IWF, told The Independent. "If you follow the pathway through links from other sites, then it unlocks the child sexual abuse imagery. "It's stored in the browser, and it drops a cookie into the browser so it can see the trail that you've come along to actually access the site.

In a strong indication of the links in tech between China and Silicon Valley, social network giant Tencent has acquired a 5 percent stake in U.S. electric car maker Tesla for $1.8 billion. The rationale behind the deal is potential collaboration on automated ride-sharing and delivery services as well as related information, entertainment and e-commerce content. Alibaba-backed search engine startup Quixey in Silicon Valley has failed with strategic misalignment, cultural differences and disagreements over a commercial contract to blame. Quixey was one of Alibaba's first bets in Silicon Valley tech startups, and the Chinese conglomerate led financing of well more than $100 million in Quixey, starting from 2013 and ending with a $30 million loan and $10 million in cash last summer. It's a high-profile fail for Alibaba and its U.S. investment strategy.

NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) graphic cards have long been favorites among hardcore gamers, but who would've thought the chipmaker's stock would explode the way it has in recent times? The share price has more than tripled in just the past year, turning NVIDIA into a near eight-bagger in just five years. It's more an artificial intelligence computing company today, having made huge headway in two of the hottest technology fields of our times: AI and self-driving cars. For investors looking to find the "next NVIDIA," the trick is to find a company that is sitting on a big growth opportunity, or is already tapping into a soon-to-heat-up trend, but that is still flying under Wall Street's radar. These are stocks with the potential to soar.

Up to around 30% of existing UK jobs could face automation over the next 15 years, but new AI-related technologies will also boost productivity and generate additional jobs elsewhere in the economy, according to new analysis by PwC in its latest UK Economic Outlook report. This involves looking in detail at the task composition of jobs in different industry sectors and occupations, using machine learning techniques to model the potential impact of AI in the future based on OECD data. The study estimates that the UK (30%) has a lower proportion of existing jobs at potential high risk of automation than the US (38%) and Germany (35%), but more than Japan (21%). PwC's analysis finds the likely impact of automation varies significantly across industry sectors: transportation and storage (56%), manufacturing (46%) and wholesale and retail trade (44%) have the highest proportion of jobs facing potential high risks of automation among the larger sectors. Education and health and social work are estimated to face the lowest risks of automation given the relatively high proportion of tasks that are hard to automate (see table below).

Researchers at UC Berkeley's RISELab have developed a new distributed framework designed to enable Python-based machine learning and deep learning workloads to execute in real-time with MPI-like power and granularity. Called Ray, the framework is ostensibly a replacement for Spark, which is seen as too slow for some real-world AI applications, and should be ready for production use in less than a year. Ray is one of the first technologies to emerge from RISELab, the research group at Berkeley that followed highly successful AMPLab, which generated a host of compelling distributed technologies that have impacted the field of high performance and enterprise computing alike, including Spark, Mesos, Tachyon, and others. One of the advisors for the old AMPLab and the current RISELab, Computer Science Professor Michael Jordan, discussed the core principles and drivers behind Ray during the recent Strata Hadoop World conference in San Jose, California. "Spark was developed because my students were complaining about Hadoop," Jordan said during a keynote address on March 16.

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When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S8 and S8 to the public last Wednesday, it also introduced its new AI assistant, called Bixby. The Siri rival basked in the spotlight as Samsung officials talked about what makes it stand out and different from other smart assistants during the Unpacked event. Bixby is rumored to come to other devices, but it's hard to imagine how it would be implemented in older devices that do not have the dedicated hardware button found on the new flagship phones. Interestingly, some developers have successfully deployed Bixby on older Galaxy smartphones, most especially on the 1-year-old Galaxy S7. On the Android website XDA-Developers, software developers shared that hey got Bixby working on their Android smartphones with the help of Bixby's Android Package Kit (APK) that was shared by user takerhbk.