In the next three to five years, organizations will see an unprecedented amount of disruption with the advancement of cognitive computing. And the pace of technological change isn't set to slow down any time soon. Communicate Influence speaks to Nigel Willson, a Global Strategist with Microsoft UK, about cognitive computing. Cognitive computing is set to have a massive impact on how businesses and individuals perform transactions, communicate, and interact with the world around them. Companies will face immense pressure to keep with technological change as software developments move ahead at warp speed.

Author Bruce Sterling is best known for his futuristic science fiction, but he's equally comfortable writing about the past. His new novella Pirate Utopia is an alternate history set just after World War I, and takes place in the real-life city of Fiume (now Rijeka), which experienced a brief period as an independent state run by artists and revolutionaries. "Believe me, what went on in the Fiume enterprise was truly one of the weirdest things that happened in the 20th century," Sterling says in Episode 238 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Fiume served as a breeding ground for radical ideas, everything from socialism to anarcho-syndicalism to fascism. Sterling says it's hard for many people to understand the allure of fascism, but that it makes more sense when you look at it sort of like a big-budget sci-fi blockbuster that overwhelms your brain with its dazzling special effects.

MEPs have voted to propose granting legal status to robots, categorising them as "electronic persons" and warning that new legislation is needed to focus on how the machines can be held responsible for their "acts or omissions". The draft report, tabled by Mady Delvaux-Stehres, a socialist MEP from Luxembourg, states current rules are "insufficient" for what it calls the "technological revolution", and suggests the EU should establish "basic ethical principles […] to avoid potential pitfalls". Ms Delvaux-Stehres's resolution was easily passed by the European Parliament's legal affairs committee, and a vote by the full parliament on the resolution is likely to take place in February. The report suggests that robots and other manifestations of artificial intelligence such as bots and androids are poised to "unleash a new industrial revolution, which is likely to leave no stratum of society untouched". "The more autonomous robots are, the less they can be considered simple tools in the hands of other actors (such as the manufacturer, the owner, the user, etc.)," they said.

This is the continuation of my mini-series on sentiment analysis of movie reviews, which originally appeared on recurrentnull.wordpress.com. Last time, we had a look at how well classical bag-of-words models worked for classification of the Stanford collection of IMDB reviews. As it turned out, the "winner" was Logistic Regression, using both unigrams and bigrams for classification. The best classification accuracy obtained was .89 So, bag-of-words models may be surprisingly successful, but they are limited in what they can do.

Before he took office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to end America's grueling conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his second term, he pledged to take the country off what he called a permanent war footing. "Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue," he said in May 2013. "But this war, like all wars, must end. But Obama leaves a very different legacy as he prepares to hand his commander-in-chief responsibilities to Donald Trump. U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama's tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Yet the U.S. faces more threats in more places than at any time since the Cold War, according to U.S. intelligence. For the first time in decades, there is at least the potential of an armed clash with America's largest adversaries, Russia and China.

We know that automation is affecting the labor market, but forecasts differ on how swift and dramatic the future impact will be. A new report now suggests things may happen more slowly than some have predicted. Last month, it was reported that Foxconn plans to replace almost every human worker in some of its manufacturing plants with a robot. Perhaps more worrying for office workers was the news that a Japanese insurance firm was sacking over 30 staff because artificial intelligence could calculate payouts just as well as humans. No wonder that two-thirds of Americans believe that robots will soon take on the majority of work currently performed by people.

Now is the time of the year when every marketer should well reflect on the achievements of 2016 and holistically examine what the New Year is going to mean for marketing, branding, and business. With this article I proceed with a good tradition by following-up on my previous and related articles for 2016, 2015, and 2014. As we all know, paying attention to what's on the horizon does offer valuable insights. Knowing the below-listed 16 marketing trends which I consider as highly relevant for 2017, should help you to build, expand, and keep strong brands. Although this should have been ingrained in every marketer s DNA for years, however, with all the data, tech, and buzzwords flying around, one of the biggest marketing challenges of 2017 will be to stay calm, focused, and to be obsessed with the only one that matters: Your customer! How to identify her, to reach her, to engage her, to make her purchase, to have her stay loyal, to make her to recommend you, and to have her even re-purchase more of your products in the future? There is a certain risk that (marketing) managers – more than ever – get confused and fall into the trap of mixing up data-driven insights with a real customer-centric business philosophy. Therefore successful companies and brands don t worship the data gods for the sake of it; instead they have a comprehensive and deeply rooted digital transformation strategy in place which is flanked by a crystal clear marketing action plan. Enhanced and lived by every employee of the organization and not only by a chief digital officer who very often is floating around the company in search for a home base.

The robots are coming, but the march of automation will displace jobs more gradually than some alarming forecasts suggest. A measured pace is likely because what is technically possible is only one factor in determining how quickly new technology is adopted, according to a new study by the McKinsey Global Institute. Other crucial ingredients include economics, labor markets, regulations and social attitudes. The report, which was released Thursday, breaks jobs down by work tasks -- more than 2,000 activities across 800 occupations, from stock clerk to company boss. The institute, the research arm of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, concludes that many tasks can be automated and that most jobs have activities ripe for automation.

WebRTC services have already permeated corporate communications in the form of videoconferencing solutions. However, WebRTC has the potential of going beyond and catalyzing a new class of services providing more than calls with capabilities such as mass-scale real-time media broadcasting, enriched and augmented video, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Luis Lopez, CEO of Kurento, introduced the technologies required for implementing these ideas and some early experiments performed in the Kurento open source software community in areas such as entertainment, video surveillance, interactive media broadcasting, gaming or advertising. He concluded with a discussion of their potential business applications beyond plain call models. Speaker Bio Dr. Luis Lopez is associate professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, where he works in the creation of advanced multimedia communication technologies.

The symptom checker was developed and validated by over 200 clinicians and we believe it to be one of the safest and most accurate symptom checkers of its kind globally. Our pre-launch research found it to be 17% more accurate than the senior, experienced emergency nurses and 13% more accurate than the juniors doctors we tested the symptom checker against. We fully acknowledge the role for human interaction in care delivery and feel the use of AI helps to significantly augment the human touch through freeing up precious time and resources to do so.