Communicating with customers is at the top of many a business' list of things to do right. Point of contact can make or break a company, so setting up easy, quick engagement strategies is paramount. But still, many large companies are using email or telephone as their main contact strategy, even though messaging has been proven to be much preferable for billions of people. Those companies in the know have started to use chatbots to field the FAQs and cut down call center times, but chatbots can be limited in their use cases and complicated to set up. Palo Alto company OwnerListens has bridged the gaps in chatbot marketing strategy by linking them with already existing messaging platforms, helping businesses and customers instant message with each other safely and at scale. I was able to speak with Adi Bittan, Founder and CEO of OwnerListens, to get her advice on the biggest challenges with chatbots, and how to circumvent them.

This year the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)– an international consumer electronics and technology innovation trade fair – was celebrating its 50th anniversary. The January Las Vegas event, which venue extends over close to 250.000m2, can sometimes almost overwhelm its audience with its vast and varied array of innovative technologies but it serves as a valuable indicator of the technology trends that are now helping to propel corporate transformation and drive changes in consumer behaviour. Last year self-driving connected cars were the stars of CES, but this year artificial intelligence (AI) topped the polls by a long way, with the prospect of integration into tomorrow's road vehicles confirmed by announcements from Santa Clara, USA-based tech company Nvidia. Indeed the company's AI technology can now be embedded in'smart' co-pilot systems for car drivers. It can also be integrated into the virtual assistant systems that help users on a daily basis, incorporated into your'smart home' and its connected objects, underpinning the voice commands that regulate the temperature and lighting levels and close doors at your house, and can also order you a taxi.

A U.S. military service member was killed Sunday during a raid against al-Qaida militants in central Yemen that also left nearly 30 others dead, including women and children. The loss of the service member is the first-known combat death of a member of the U.S. military under President Donald Trump. "Americans are saddened this morning with news that a life of a heroic service member has been taken in our fight against the evil of radical Islamic terrorism," Trump said in a statement. The U.S. has been striking al-Qaida in Yemen from the air for more than 15 years, mostly using drones, and Sunday's surprise pre-dawn raid could signal a new escalation against extremist groups in the Arab world's poorest but strategically located country. An al-Qaida official and an online news service linked to the terror group said the raid left about 30 people dead.

Machine learning-based natural language processing systems are amazingly effective, when plentiful labeled training data exists for the task/domain of interest. Unfortunately, for broad coverage (both in task and domain) language understanding, we're unlikely to ever have sufficient labeled data, and systems must find some other way to learn. I'll describe a novel algorithm for learning from interactions, and several problems of interest, most notably machine simultaneous interpretation (translation while someone is still speaking). This is all joint work with some amazing (former) students He He, Alvin Grissom II, John Morgan, Mohit Iyyer, Sudha Rao and Leonardo Claudino, as well as colleagues Jordan Boyd-Graber, Kai-Wei Chang, John Langford, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Alekh Agarwal, Stéphane Ross, Alina Beygelzimer and Paul Mineiro.

There is tremendous potential for facial recognition technology, such as informing visually impaired persons if someone they know is approaching them. I find it difficult to believe just how fast things are moving with regard to using artificial neural networks (ANNs) and deep learning techniques (for example, see Deep learning machine vision system aids blind and visually impaired, Deep learning hits a sweet note, Machine learning platform speeds optimization of vision systems, Unlocking the power of AI for all developers, and Push-button generation of deep neural networks). Of course, one really interesting application is to perform object detection and identification, including the really tricky task of recognizing and identifying faces in images and videos. This sort of task benefits from the extreme parallelism offered by FPGAs. Of particular interest are Intel's current generation of FPGAs, whose hard-core DSP slices offer both fixed-point and floating-point capabilities, making them suitable for a wide range of artificial intelligence (AI) and embedded vision applications.

A U.S. military service member was killed Sunday during a raid against al-Qaida militants in central Yemen that also left nearly 30 others dead, including women and children. The loss of the service member is the first-known combat death of a member of the U.S. military under President Donald Trump. The U.S. has been striking al-Qaida in Yemen from the air for more than 15 years, mostly using drones, and Sunday's surprise pre-dawn raid could signal a new escalation against extremist groups in the Arab world's poorest but strategically located country. An al-Qaida official and an online news service linked to the terror group said the raid left about 30 people dead. Among the children killed was Anwar, the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Yemeni-American cleric killed in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in 2011, according to the girl's grandfather.

Announced last Summer, Soul of Chogokin Voltron from Bandai is almost upon us. Released in Japan at the end of last year, fans of the classic Voltron will be happy to know that it is coming Westward very soon and is indeed a truly epic toy. While many may know of the original Voltron series from the 80's, the series actually comprised of two disparate anime, Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. While Voltron at the time in the West may have seemed unique, in Japan the original series were already somewhat late to the party as to the use of the combination gimmick. Most super robot shows of that era used the "gattai", or combination, approach to their mecha.

A kind of ethics fever has taken hold of the AI community. As smart machines displace human jobs and seem poised to make life-or-death decisions in self-driving cars and health care, concerns about where AI is taking us are gaining increasing urgency. Earlier this month, the MIT Media Lab joined with the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to anchor a $27 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence initiative. The fund joins a growing array of AI ethics initiatives crisscrossing the corporate world and academia. In July 2016, leading AI researchers discussed the technologies' social and economic implications at the AI Now symposium in New York City.

Artificial intelligence and automation are now considered to be amongst the biggest threats to job creation and industry voices across the board agree that so-called traditional jobs may soon cease to exist. According to Infosys' chief executive officer, Vishal Sikka, advances in technology removing a lot of mechanical and scripted jobs, besides many related to business process outsourcing, IT and IT infrastructure operations. But automation will also lead to creation of a new set of jobs, Sikka added. Around 20 crore middle class young people would have no jobs by 2025 if our education system doesn't keep pace with the changes in automation and technology, Mohandas Pai, the chairman of Manipal Global Education Services told BloombergQuint in an interview. And the level of automation is only going to get higher. Both ICICI and HDFC Bank say this is only the start, and there's a lot more to come.

They say the Sunday attack at dawn in Bayda province killed Abdul-Raouf al-Dhahab, Sultan al-Dhahab, and Seif al-Nims. The al-Dhahab family is considered an ally of al-Qaida, which security forces say is concentrated in Bayda province. A third family member, Tarek al-Dhahab, was killed in a previous U.S. drone strike years ago.