At Google's official launch in San Francisco at 9:00 PST (17:00 BST), the firm is expected to launch a personal-assistant for the home, alongside the new Pixel phone. The device, called'Home', is an internet-connected device, similar to Amazon's Echo speaker and was first unveiled in May. While Google has declined to confirm any specifics, analysts and industry blogs have suggested that a new virtual reality headset and a home router could also be unveiled. The device, called'Home', is an internet-connected speaker, similar to Amazon's Echo, and was first unveiled in May It is clear that Google is working on virtual reality and augmented reality, but whether a standalone high-end device will be released, remains unclear. Earlier this year, the Mountain View-based firm announced its plans for Daydream, which will be a more advanced version of Cardboard.

In this blog post, we welcome ex-NGDATA collaborator and now university professor Willem Waegeman who reports on a scientific research project he worked on part-time while working with us. NGDATA takes pride in supporting research to advance the field of machine learning. If you want to learn more about our offerings in this area, take a look at our Lab and do not hesitate to contact us. While 2012 has been the year of Big Data technologies, 2013 is becoming the year of Big Data analytics. Gathering and maintaining large collections of data is one thing, but extracting useful information from these collections is even more challenging.

Remember that endangered anteater-esque ball of scales from Favreau's recent film, The Jungle Book? Over one million pangolins have likely been poached and illegally traded in the last decade, especially because of their importance in Chinese medicine and food. And the internet hasn't exactly helped its plight. As wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC reports, their researchers investigated 39 Chinese e-commerce websites over June and July 2016; a single survey in the first month alone detected 153 ads for pangolin scales and meat and live specimen from 94 traders across six sites. Virtual wildlife trafficking poses a serious threat to not just the pangolin.

The Spain-headquartered startup, which today is announcing 6 million in Series A funding, is using deep learning to help startups and larger companies recruit developers. Specifically, its AI tech is analysing the code of millions of developers via their open source contributions in order to match them to appropriate job openings. "We use this analysis to understand how good they are at any given language and framework and match them with companies looking for developers," is how Source{d} co-founder and COO Jorge Schnura explains it. He also says it isn't just about identifying code quality or a developer's ability, but also coding style and other nuances that differentiates one developer from another. "We can [find] people who are similar to your team," adds Schnura. "This is all unsupervised learning since we don't tell our algorithms which features to look for, it defines them itself".

In its quest to maintain a United States military advantage, the Pentagon is aggressively turning to Silicon Valley's hottest technology -- artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter made his fourth trip to the tech industry's heartland since being named to his post last year. Before that, it had been 20 years since a defense secretary had visited the area, he noted in a speech at a Defense Department research facility near Google's headquarters. The Pentagon's intense interest in A.I. -- and by connection the Silicon Valley companies specializing in that technology -- has grown out of the "Third Offset" strategy articulated by Mr. Carter last fall. Concerned about the re-emergence of China and Russia as military competitors, he stated that computer-based, high-tech weapons would give the American military an edge in the future. Third Offset is a reference to two earlier eras when Pentagon planners turned to technology to compensate for a smaller military.

Talking to computers was once for the likes of Captain Kirk, but a new product due to be announced by Google on Tuesday demonstrates that it believes devices that can speak to humans are ready for the living room. The search engine giant is expected to launch its Google Home "personal assistant" speaker system – a squat cylinder that will be able to process search requests and other everyday tasks when instructed to by the sound of a human voice. For many, conversations with computers consist of frustrating attempts to provide credit card numbers to a bank or talking to a bemused mobile phone, but Amazon has transformed the market, with the help of Alexa, its digital assistant, which lives inside its multimillion-selling Echo. A week ago Amazon said it would start selling the Echo in the UK at 149.99, two years after its introduction in the US, where it had become a sleeper hit. Despite a low-key launch the Echo sold 3.5m units in the time it took Amazon to adapt the device to recognise the full gamut of British English accents and voices.

Although technology seems to be everywhere, we continue to fill in the voids. Existing technologies evolve and change at a higher pace every year, making it challenging for some professionals to adjust.We have reached a point where some are having difficulty coping with game-changing technologies that are presumably contributing to progress. Such progress can be difficult to perceive if you are not directly benefiting from it. In my previous article, I discussed the ability of social robotics to make a positive impact on our society. This article provides an optimistic vision of the opportunity for this technology to include the general public in its development.

New times are marked by the sign of the digital age, globalization and the huge amount of mass data generated daily. Big Data is rigged to great challenges and better opportunities. Beyond the famous 5 Vs that characterize it (volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value), Big Data have great possibilities in the most unimaginable fields. And it does, especially, because new technologies have emerged to respond, with unprecedented efficiency, to the needs of storage and analysis of big data. There are many technologies and concepts that are part of this universe of big data, whose growth is unstoppable, as the Internet of Things (IoT), data exchange machine to machine (M2M), the increasingly complex environment of IT or predictive machine learning. The Big Data challenges, in effect, require capable approaches and systems to collect, store, make efficient searches and, finally, carry out analysis, whose results could be conveniently displayed.

The relentless increase in computing power and the accumulation of big data over the years has sparked intense interest in machine learning and its associated techniques. The new SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning software will feed this need for smarter analytics. Advanced analytics offer insight to businesses, but machine learning and deep learning algorithms take it deeper, revealing insights that were previously out of reach. For example, machine learning use can include facial recognition in security systems, speech recognition in customer service applications, accurate product recommendations in e-commerce, self-driving cars and medical diagnostics. "SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning shatters barriers related to data volume and variety, limited analytical depth and computational bottlenecks. That means greater productivity – and faster, deeper insight," said Hugo D'Ulisse, Head of Analytical Platform, SAS UK & Ireland.

This year legal tech companies and law firms that have developed legal AI applications will have a dedicated category for the 2nd'Global Annual Achievement Awards for Artificial Intelligence'. Those developing legal AI technology can join the competition under the: 'Best use of AI in Legal Tech' category, which is defined as an: 'Application of AI in the Legal Tech Industry. This can be applications developed by law firms themselves, technology companies or consultancies providing products and services to the legal sector.' The legal tech category is one of 20 main AI prize categories this year following a successful first year. The awards are organised by UK-based Home.AI, a forum for AI and machine learning across the entire sector, including legal tech, fin tech and more specific areas such as Natural Language Processing and AI in robotics.