In an era of historic innovation fueled by unprecedented access to data and technology, the low cost and risk of entering new markets has leveled the playing field for business. Today, any ambitious innovator can easily introduce a new application or product that can reinvent business models and transform the client experience. In their Day 2 Keynote at 19th Cloud Expo, Mercer Rowe, IBM Vice President of Strategic Alliances, and Raejeanne Skillern, Intel Vice President of Data Center Group and GM, discussed how clients in this new era of innovation can apply data, technology, plus human ingenuity to springboard to advance new business value and opportunities. Speaker Bios Mercer Rowe is Vice President, Strategic Partners for IBM's Cloud Business Unit. In this capacity, he plays a pivotal role in IBM's growth and transformation by teaming with IBM's global strategic business partners to mutually enhance IBM's industry leading cloud portfolio of technology and services.

The German car manufacturer admitted cheating emissions tests. Which companies are impacted directly or indirectly by these revelations? James Phare from Data To Value used graph analysis and open source information to unravel the impact of the VW scandal on its customers, partners and shareholders. Since September 18 when VW admitted to modifying its cars to disguise their true emissions performances, the news has made headlines worldwide. In all this noise, it's difficult to piece together the important information necessary to assess the event's impact.

Chris Nicholson co-founded Skymind and Deeplearning4j, the most popular deep-learning framework for Java. Quitting Twitter is easy -- I've done it a hundred times. Someone called it "a clown car that drove into a gold mine," and like all clown cars, Twitter makes the passengers get out once in awhile. If I go back, it's because I'm addicted. For an information junkie, that little bubble is hard to resist.

My family was in the next room, laughing and screwing around with Legos or puzzles or something. I was standing in the middle of a rocky amphitheater, that looked like Monument Valley, Arizona. I really don't know where I was, but it was at the edge of a sandstone dais, and something like Stonehenge was orbiting overhead. The GearVR strapped to my noggin didn't feel heavy at all. I was in Land's End, having a blast, solving my own puzzles in virtual reality.

While many people in the world are worrying that robots will take over human jobs once artificial intelligence (AI) is fully developed, it's a safe bet that no one put "author" at the top of the robot job list. Yet, now that a Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize, it seems that no occupation is safe. The robot-written novel didn't win the competition's final prize, but who's to say it won't improve in its next attempt? The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn't enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close.

Being a 40-something non-Japanese leaving a job in Tokyo to move to the countryside seems to make me a little bit different from your average person in this part of the world. I've been receiving a number of invitations to interesting and exciting activities and events. On Sunday, November 6th, I was invited to a talk event at the opening of a facility for the study of Japanese traditional culture in Himeji. Along with the Hyogo Prefectural Governor, Toshizo Ido; a professor of music and shakuhachi expert, Satoshi Shimura; and an arts and culture producer, Masako Hamada, we discussed questions surrounding the importance of the provinces in disseminating culture, and how to share Japanese traditional culture overseas. I was asked to give the view from gaikoku on Japanese traditional culture.

HOW HAS ARTIFICIAL intelligence, associated with hubris and disappointment since its earliest days, suddenly become the hottest field in technology? The term was coined in a research proposal written in 1956 which suggested that significant progress could be made in getting machines to "solve the kinds of problems now reserved for humans…if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer". That proved to be wildly overoptimistic, to say the least, and despite occasional bursts of progress, AI became known for promising much more than it could deliver. Researchers mostly ended up avoiding the term, preferring to talk instead about "expert systems" or "neural networks". The rehabilitation of "AI", and the current excitement about the field, can be traced back to 2012 and an online contest called the ImageNet Challenge.

Marc Carrel-Billiard, Managing Director Global Technology R&D, AccentureBangalore: AI can double annual economic growth rates by 2035 by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine, according to Accenture Research. The impact of AI technologies on business is projected to boost labour productivity by up to 40 percent by fundamentally changing the way work is done and reinforcing people's role to drive growth in business. In an interview with ETCIO, Accenture's Managing Director Global Technology R&D, Marc Carrel-Billiard talks about company's technology labs and its focus areas, new technologies and its impact and key tech trends that CIOs and businesses need to look for and much more. Marc is with Accenture for the past 18 years and currently oversees the Accenture Technology Labs, Accenture Open Innovation, Accenture's global technology R&D organization which explores new and emerging technologies, across seven locations around the world. Which are the key technology domains that you are trying to focus on?

Google says its artificial intelligence has taught itself to'translate between languages that it doesn't even know' 'Zero-shot translation' can translate between languages it doesn't know Deep-learning researchers developed Google Neural Machine Translation GNMT developed algorithm that'self-teaches' it to translate languages'Zero-shot translation' can translate between languages it doesn't know GNMT developed algorithm that'self-teaches' it to translate languages Google headquarters in Menlo Park, California is seen in the above stock photo. Google says it has built an algorithm that allows its Google Translate service to translate languages it doesn't even know Google says that its artificial intelligence uses a'token' at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language to translate to Skating on thin ice: Wife of Vladimir Putin's spokesman... 'This had nothing to do with Donald': Rosie O'Donnell... Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. says ...

Deep learning is impacting everything from healthcare to transportation to manufacturing, and more. Companies are turning to deep learning to solve hard problems, like speech recognition, object recognition, and machine translation. One of the most impressive achievements this year was AlphaGo beating the best Go player in the world. With the victory, Go joins checkers, chess, othello, and Jeopardy as games machines have defeated human at. While beating someone at a board game might not seem useful on the surface, this is a huge deal.