CHICAGO – – CHICAGO – February 28, 2017 – Narrative Science, the leader in advanced natural language generation (Advanced NLG) for the enterprise, and Sisense, the Business Intelligence (BI) company that's disrupting the industry by simplifying analytics for complex data, announced a strategic partnership today. With this partnership, Sisense is leveraging the Narratives for Business Intelligence API to power Sisense Everywhere, a program that is changing the way business users consume data by bringing it into their natural environments. They will be demonstrating their joint technology at the "Innovative BI in Action" session at the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit on March 5, 2017. Sisense Everywhere empowers everyday users to further connect with their data by engaging in two-way conversations on their platform of choice. The Sisense platform integrates Advanced NLG from Narrative Science to automatically transform users' data and visualizations into Intelligent Narratives.

Microsoft dropped a major announcement Tuesday, revealing the details of its new Xbox Game Pass program. The new subscription service will work much like Netflix, letting you download and play any game in a rotating collection of Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles. The $9.99/mo service will only be available to Xbox One and Xbox One S owners when it launches later this year, but Microsoft's announcement is clear that it will likely kick into high gear when the company launches its newest console--code-named Project Scorpio--this fall. Here's how it works: the Game Pass roster will include "over 100" Xbox One and backwards-compatible Xbox 360 titles, with some turnover every month. Games in the collection will be available to download and play on your Xbox One or One S, letting users store them on their local machines and presumably play them offline.

Over the span of 20 days early this year, artificial intelligence encountered a major test of how well it can tackle problems in the real world. A program called Libratus took on four of the best poker players in the country, at a tournament at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were playing a form of poker called heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em, where two players face off, often online, in a long series of hands, testing each other's strategies, refining their own, and bluffing like mad. After 120,000 hands, Libratus emerged with an overwhelming victory over all four opponents, winning $1,776,250 of simulated money and, more importantly, bragging rights as arguably the best poker player on the planet. Just halfway through the competition, Dong Kim, the human player who fared best against the machine, all but admitted defeat.

Space exploration aficionados experienced the thrill of anticipation in the hours before President Trump's speech Tuesday night, with advance word that he was going to call for a return to the human exploration of space. Sure enough, in his closing words Trump declared that for a country soon to celebrate its 250th anniversary, "American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream." Trump's brief, offhand comment had the tone of an impulsive notion that, like so many of his other policy pronouncements, won't get any follow-through. Let's hope so, because the idea of sending humans to explore distant worlds is loopy, incredibly wasteful, and likely to cripple American science rather than inspire it. And that's assuming that Trump's notion doesn't have the ulterior motivation of diverting American scientists from their Job One, which is to fight climate change right here at home.

A question that would have been thought of as ridiculous 25 years ago, has now become an actual worry for many workers across the world. The AI revolution is well underway and soon it will not only be the simplest tasks done by machines, but professions such as banking, law and medicine also under threat from superior machine intelligence. When it comes to the automated workforce, people are mainly worried that robots will take their job (a 31 per cent chunk to be exact). The next big worry about the future implications of AI is humans will end up relying on robots (selected by 23 per cent) which could end in disasters that used to be confined to dystopian sci-fi films – Think The Terminator series. Additionally, 20 per cent of those surveyed said they were anxious that robots will play a bigger role in the military.

Secure Channels Inc., SD Times (Media Sponsor), SoftLayer (Platinum Sponsor), SoftNet Solutions, Solinea Inc., SpeedyCloud, SSLGURU LLC, StarNet, Stratoscale, Streamliner, SuperAdmins, TechTarget (Media Sponsor), TelecomReseller (Media Sponsor), Tintri (Welcome Reception Sponsor), TMCnet (Media Sponsor), Transparent Cloud Computing Consortium, Veeam, Venafi, Violin Memory, VAI Software, Zerto Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS - software, platform, and infrastructure as a service. Cloud Expo is the single show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is as "Cloud-Ready" as it can be!

It was one of those amazing "we're living in the future" moments. In an October 2013 press release, IBM declared that MD Anderson, the cancer center that is part of the University of Texas, "is using the IBM Watson cognitive computing system for its mission to eradicate cancer." Well, now that future is past. The partnership between IBM and one of the world's top cancer research institutions is falling apart. The project is on hold, MD Anderson confirms, and has been since late last year.

While many firms are looking to the moon for mining opportunities, one Australian firm believes there could be precious metals a lot nearer to home. Deep-sea robots will be sent to mine mineral deposits in the deep ocean in 2019 in a test for a controversial new scheme. As land-based mineral stores are becoming depleted, the ocean floor is becoming a more attractive mining prospect, containing gold, copper and other precious metal deposits used to make electronics, renewable energy tools and even medical imaging machines. But deep-sea excavation may have a negative impact on deep ocean marine life, as robot mining may destroy their homes and disturb these sensitive species. The Canadian mining company Nautilus Minerals plans to send robots to mine deposits rich in copper and gold in the waters of Papua New Guinea.

Move aside people, robots are here! Robots are becoming smarter, faster and cheaper and their deployment across industrial usage such as automotive and electronics has surged in the last couple of years. From industrial robots to self-driving cars, robotics technology is becoming more cognitive-enabled that replicates human skills and intelligence. For the past years, investment into the robotics sector has risen rapidly. According to CB Insights, the number of funding deals in robotics globally nearly doubled from around $273 million in 2014 to $587 million in 2015. The investment growth in 2015 was 115%, as compared to 55% in 2014 (Figure 1).

Artificial Intelligence has become a topic of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities. Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming Cloud Expo @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York, June 6-8, will find fresh new content in a new track called Cognitive Computing Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning. We are now in the third, and most successful, generation of groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and deployments. With it comes new capabilities for Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), as organizations of all sizes work to create and use new insights from their existing operations while also seeking to develop new ways of making their systems and their organizations much smarter. Cloud Expo is still accepting submissions for this new track, so please visit www.cloudcomputingexpo.com for the latest information.