No longer simply the subject of science-fiction movies, artificial intelligence is making its way into the insurance enterprise. According to Accenture, four in five insurers are planning to or have deployed some sort of artificial intelligence technology in their enterprises. Allstate Business Insurance deployed ABie -- the Allstate Business Insurance Expert -- virtual assistant to help walk agents through the quoting process for complex products. The context-aware technology understands agents inputs and is able to direct them through the process without using the call center. AIG has partnered with Human Condition Safety to deploy devices that "couples wearable technology with artificial intelligence (AI) and building information modeling."

When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all around us. In a recent poll, machine intelligence experts predicted that computers would gain human-level ability around the year 2050, and superhuman ability less than 30 years after.1 But, like a tribe on a tropical island littered with World War II debris imagining that the manufacture of aluminum propellers or steel casings would be within their power, our confidence is probably inflated. AI can be thought of as a search problem over an effectively infinite, high-dimensional landscape of possible programs. Nature solved this search problem by brute force, effectively performing a huge computation involving trillions of evolving agents of varying information processing capability in a complex environment (the Earth). It took billions of years to go from the first tiny DNA replicators to Homo Sapiens.

We're experiencing artificial intelligence every day of our lives, even if we don't know it or just take it for granted. Whether it's Spotify using machine learning to give us a better music playlist, or Apple using natural language processing to make Siri our digital assistant, AI is truly everywhere. As the leader of Salesforce's Marketing and Analytics Clouds, I want to outline what exactly intelligence means for marketing and analytics professionals. Starting from the top, we all know and can understand that customers expect faster, smarter, more personalized engagement. But delivering on these expectations is challenging.

Kalingrad is a Russian seaport named for a Soviet revolutionary. It sits near the Baltic Sea, between Poland and Lithuania, and it's a place where pre-Putin Russian leaders would occasionally threaten to install nuclear missiles. But in the 18th century, it was a city called Königsberg in the German kingdom of Prussia. And it was a math problem. Königsberg stretched across both banks of the river Pregel, and it included two islands in the middle of the river.

Add Google to the list of companies with big fall announcements. The Android-maker and search engine giant announced late Monday that it will be holding an event on October 4 in San Francisco. In invitations sent out to media, the company was fairly vague as to what it would be showing off, though it was a bit more revealing in teaser on the company's website, madeby.google.com, Google has long used fall events to showcase its latest versions of Android, often introducing new variants to its Nexus line of phones and tablets. This year, the company is expected to follow a similar path, with new devices built by HTC said to be on the way.

Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man suspected of planting a series of bombs in New York and New Jersey over the weekend, praised Anwar Awlaki in handwritten notes found on his person after he was wounded in a shootout Monday. FBI agents recovered a notebook from Rahami after he was wounded by police in Linden, N.J., a U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times. In the notebook, Rahami describes his affinity for Awlaki, the American-born Islamic cleric who became a leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen. Awlaki was killed in a CIA drone strike in 2011, but his legacy has spread among jihadists thanks to online audio and video sermons. The notebook also contained ramblings about the Boston Marathon bombers, the official said.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

President Obama, in his final address as president before the U.N. General Assembly, called Tuesday for more global cooperation especially in helping refugees from war-torn countries – while making only passing reference to the Islamic State and the ever-expanding scourge of like-minded terror groups. The president called for a "course correction" for globalization to ensure nations don't retreat into a more sharply divided world, while pushing back against an isolationist approach gaining popularity in many countries. He advocated for open democracies and open economies, while railing against the example set by Russia and calling for more tolerance in all nations. He also took what appeared to be a jab at Donald Trump, saying: "The world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall" and prevent extremism from affecting societies. With that message in hand, Obama urged nations to "follow through even when the politics are hard," in helping refugees fleeing conflict.

On the morning of March 9th at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, the world changed forever. A computer program called AlphaGo used the relatively new social science of cognitive computing to strategize and beat one of the top masters in the world at the ancient Chinese board game Go. It was hailed as one of the most defining moments in the development of artificial intelligence so far. At NETSCOUT, we watched the development of the AlphaGo program, originally created by British company DeepMind before being acquired by Google in 2014, with great interest. Cognitive computing is something we do every day at NETSCOUT to ensure that our solutions deliver the digital strategies of our clients with maximum efficiency. We like to sometimes compare ourselves to conductors helping to keep the trains of digital networks running on time, and while that is an accurate description of our service assurance platform, it doesn't really dive deeply into the intelligence that our products provide.

Spending on cognitive systems in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) will reach over US 1.9 billion in 2019 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 65.36 percent from 2014 - 2019. According to IDC findings, more than 40 percent of all cognitive systems spending throughout the forecast will go to software, which includes both cognitive applications and cognitive software platforms, which facilitate the development of intelligent, advisory, and cognitively enabled solutions. "The barriers of artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning are rapidly dropping," says Chwee Chua, AVP, Big Data and Analytics and Cognitive Computing, IDC Asia/Pacific. "As such, cognitive systems will soon be powering data-driven applications across a wide spectrum of solutions. "This new generation of tools and capabilities is capable of offering intelligent assistance, advice, and recommendations to end users; thus enhancing their competitive edge or supplementing information for better decision making." Cognitive applications is the largest and fastest-growing category in cognitive systems in APeJ, with spending expected to reach US 909.33 million by 2019. Cognitive-related services (e.g. business services and IT consulting) represent the second largest spending category while hardware spending, which is mostly on servers and storage, will grow nearly as fast as software spending. "Cognitively enabled solutions are the next evolution in analysing structured and unstructured data," Chua adds. "Cognitive platforms are offering innovators the ability to build new products and services that would have been previously impossible without large resources." The manufacturing industry currently spends the most on cognitive systems, representing nearly 32 percent of the total APeJ spend throughout the forecast - leading uses in manufacturing include quality management, recommendation systems, and research. Other verticals actively leveraging on cognitive systems are the retail and healthcare industries with an estimated combined spending on cognitive systems over US 675 million in 2019. The leading use cases in retail are automated customer service agents and merchandising for omni-channel operations while the leading use case in healthcare is diagnosis and treatment systems. "We are already seeing use cases for cognitive systems being implemented in Asia/Pacific to address problems across verticals," adds Qiao Li, Senior Market Analyst, Asia/Pacific Big Data and Analytics, IDC Asia/Pacific. "For instance, banks are using cognitive applications to improve customer experiences with recommendations based on customer profile and changing market conditions.