According to a study published by eMarketer in 2016, the ecommerce sector will experience double-digit growth until 2020, when sales are expected to exceed $4 trillion. Few industries can boast such a bright future, which makes looking forward to what's next in the world of ecommerce all the more exciting. Today, we'll be taking a look at seven of the most significant and potentially disruptive ecommerce trends that marketers and consumers alike can expect in 2018. We'll be examining the current state of each of these areas, as well as taking a speculative look forward for the rest of the year to see what opportunities – and challenges – ecommerce retailers are likely to encounter in 2018. Looking beyond the idiosyncrasies of specific ecommerce platforms, one of the very few remaining genuine differentiators in the ecommerce sector is that of shipping times and delivery logistics.

Infermedica, a Poland and US-based company, has released a white-labeled symptom checker and triage platform after successful pilots with European healthcare insurance companies Allianz Partners, Dovera, and PZU. Infermedica uses artificial intelligence technology which has the potential to significantly improve quality of care, both from a provider and patient perspective. The application advises patients on what to do next when they feel unwell. After asking a series of diagnostic questions, Infermedica's AI suggests possible conditions and suitable actions to take. Infermedica estimates that typically up to 26% of patient cases are self-treatable, and a symptom checker can be used to prevent unnecessary visits by instead providing self-care or teleconsultations.

Paris is gaining ground as a European hub for artificial intelligence research as Alphabet Inc's Google and Facebook Inc pledge to hire staff and invest in labs, after their top executives met with French President Emmanuel Macron. Google said it will create an AI lab dedicated to fundamental research on themes like automatic learning, language and a computer's ability to see, with the aim of applying findings to fields from health to the environment. The end-goal is to grow this group to a size similar to Google's existing team of 120 engineers who do applied research in Paris, working on developments for Chrome and YouTube, a company spokeswoman said. Facebook, which already has an artificial intelligence lab in Paris, said it will double the team there to 100 people by 2022 and spend 10 million euros ($12.2 million) on items including hardware equipment. Both announcements came as part of a broader series of promises by these companies to increase budgets in France, with Google and Facebook also separately vowing to train citizens on digital tools.

Your brain may be the best predictor for whether or not you're a musician, a new study finds. Researchers at Finland's Aarhus University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to capture images of the brain activity of 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians while they listened to different genres of music. The images revealed that certain brain areas are better predictors for whether we are musically talented: specifically, the frontal and temporal areas of the brain's right hemisphere. Researchers at Finland's Aarhus University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to capture images of the brain activity of 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians while they listened to different genres of music The scientists used six varieties of music during the test, including ones representing timbre and rhythm or tonality. Tonality and pulse are the best predictors of musicianship, the scientists noted.

The vast majority (90 per cent) of C-level executives report measurable benefits from artificial intelligence (AI) within their organisations, according to a new study released today at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The research report, Leadership in the Age of AI, released by Infosys, also revealed that almost three quarters (73 per cent) of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their AI deployments have already transformed the way they do business. The research findings point to a fundamental shift in how enterprises operate as AI takes hold. Enterprises are moving beyond the experimentation phase with AI, deploying AI technologies more broadly and realising benefits across their business, the report states. Additionally, the data showed organisations are taking steps to prepare employees and business leaders for the future of work, with 53 per cent of respondents indicating that their organisation has increased training in the job functions most affected by AI deployments.

The use of active learning has received a lot of interest for reducing annotation costs for text and speech processing applications [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. Many applications have the following three characteristics: 1) they have imbalanced data sets, 2) training data annotation is a burden, and 3) support vector machines (SVMs) are able to train highperforming systems for the application. Two examples of such applications are Text Classification (TC) and Relation Extraction (RE). Characteristics 2 and 3 suggest the use of AL-SVM (Active Learning (AL) with Support Vector Machines). Previous work has presented an AL-SVM algorithm that selects (i.e., requests labels for) the examples that are closest to the current model's hyperplane [7], [8], [9], [10]. This "closest"-based algorithm has been shown to need modification for imbalanced data situations [11]. Previous work has presented a method for adapting to imbalanced data situations in the context of AL-SVM by using asymmetric cost factors during model training [11]. The asymmetric cost model has been shown to be most effective when the model is based on prevalence statistics from an unbiased initial sample of data and serves as positive amplification for the minority positive examples.

Generative models such as Variational Auto Encoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are typically trained for a fixed prior distribution in the latent space, such as uniform or Gaussian. After a trained model is obtained, one can sample the Generator in various forms for exploration and understanding, such as interpolating between two samples, sampling in the vicinity of a sample or exploring differences between a pair of samples applied to a third sample. In this paper, we show that the latent space operations used in the literature so far induce a distribution mismatch between the resulting outputs and the prior distribution the model was trained on. To address this, we propose to use distribution matching transport maps to ensure that such latent space operations preserve the prior distribution, while minimally modifying the original operation. Our experimental results validate that the proposed operations give higher quality samples compared to the original operations.

Why not being actively involved in AI carries risks for government agencies (and us all) and what to do about it. A few months ago I introduced Alexa into my home – the voice controlled AI system made by Amazon. For those of you living in the US, UK or Germany this may not seem a big feat, and perhaps even somewhat late given that Alexa was first introduced in 2014, but outside of its designated markets, Amazon is still actively discouraging people from using it. I cannot buy an Alexa device, such as the Echo, on Amazon as it won't ship to the Netherlands. And the app that is required to install and use it is geoblocked in my appstore – quite meticulously I might add. For a company who se main purpose is to sell stuff, I find this quite odd. Nonetheless I have been able to get it up and running, and my Echo Dot has re-joined the fast growing population of Alexa devices. Amazon announced a couple of weeks ago that Alexa devices such as the Echo Dot had been the best-sel ling products overall during last year's holiday season, selling more than 20 million of them.

Siri's news reading feature is no longer limited to the beta testing crowd. Apple has officially released iOS 11.2.5, and the centerpiece is the ability to ask Siri for the latest happenings. If you're in the US, UK or Australia, you can get a briefing from a slew of local sources, such as NPR and the Washington Post in the states or the BBC and Sky News in the UK. And it doesn't have to be general news, either -- you can ask for business, music or sports news as well. Not surprisingly, 11.2.5 is also key to unlocking support for the HomePod speaker.

In 2016, an estimated 65.6 million people across the globe were forced from their homes by everything from war to human rights violations. Climate change and global warming are exacerbating the problem of displaced persons, with millions of people expected to be forced to relocate to other -- often cooler -- countries. The problem is becoming so widespread that New Zealand is even considering creating a new visa specifically for those displaced by climate change. Once they make the difficult decision to leave their home, refugees face a slew of other questions: To which country do they flee? Where in that country should they go?