Salesforce.com Inc. CRM 0.18 % 's annual Dreamforce customer conference, set to blanket downtown San Francisco next week, will be an unusual blend of business, technology, entertainment, philanthropy and personal empowerment. The conference, which is the world's largest tech get-together sponsored by a single company, will be an expression of the business-software provider's socially conscious corporate culture and the idiosyncratic character of its Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The event, which is expected to draw 170,000 attendees--17% more than last year--comes as Salesforce, whose public profile to date has been confined largely to salespeople and marketers, is stepping onto a larger stage. The company on Thursday vowed to block Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.35 % 's 26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn Corp. LNKD 0.13 %, after failing in its own effort to buy the online network of 450 million mostly professional members. Meanwhile, Salesforce is considering a bid for the consumer-focused messaging service Twitter.

Amsterdam, September 29, 2016 – One of the world's first automated inspections by an intelligent drone with deep learning capabilities was demonstrated at the GPU Technology Conference Europe today by Aerialtronics, a Dutch manufacturer of technologically advanced drones, Neurala, a pioneer in deep learning software, and NVIDIA, the world leader in GPU-accelerated computing. This new "intelligent drone" identifies objects and their condition in flight, which dramatically increases the efficiency and accuracy of documenting assets, lowering costs, and making it easier for frequent inspections. It adds to the use of commercial drones to help businesses access difficult and dangerous areas, such as cell towers and turbines. The resulting system can visually inspect a cell tower and recognize the equipment mounted on the mast. This is the first step required to start automating the documentation of assets, and assessing the mechanical functionality and condition of the cell tower to identify rust and other defects.

One Friday afternoon, I decided to check out a pea-sized lump on my neck that was causing me consternation. I started by calling my GP's surgery in south London. A recorded message informed me there were no appointments that day; after a few minutes, a receptionist came on the line and said that I could have an appointment on Monday. Not too bad, I thought, until I realised she was not talking about the Monday three days hence, but the one 10 days away. I could also try for a walk-in slot or a phone consultation from 8am to 10am on weekday mornings. The homepage was purple and teal, the writing welcomingly blobby.

When Jeff Bezos revealed in May that Amazon employed more than 1,000 people working on Echo and Alexa products, he warned: "It's just the tip of the iceberg." The Echo and Alexa groups are currently looking to fill 400 positions, according to Amazon's Alexa job page. The open positions run the gamut from data engineers to product managers to machine learning scientists. And the job locations are as varied: From Amazon's headquarters in Seattle to other U.S. cities like Tempe, Ariz.; Cambridge, Mass.; and Sunnyvale, Calif. Overseas, Amazon's voice technology groups are also hiring in places like Gdansk, Poland.

UK-based artificial intelligence startup PROWLER.io has raised 1.5 million pounds in seed funding. The investors were Passion Capital, Amadeus Capital and Infocomm Investments. Cambridge, UK – 30th September, 2016 – Cambridge-based startup PROWLER.io has secured 1.5 million in seed investment to fund development of its sophisticated decision-making AI engine designed to revolutionise autonomous system design. This 1.5 million investment will enable PROWLER.io to build a prototype version of its platform with select partners. Initially the company will target games developers, with numerous other sectors to follow.

The online world isn't as simple as we've thought it to be. Behind the seemingly quiet and vast space of nothingness, huge amounts of data are uploaded and downloaded in fractions of a second. Data science does not only keeps track of these numbers, but also attempts to analyze and organize them. Algorithms are created to keep tabs on searches in search engines, analyze user data preference, and so on and so forth. The demand for qualified data scientists have become very high. A recent Bloomberg article predicted that there will be a shortage of data scientists in the US by the year 2018.

In this post, I propose that IoT analytics should be a part of'Smart objects' and discuss the implications of doing so The term'Smart objects' has been around from the times of Ubiquitous Computing. However, as we have started building Smart objects, I believe that the meaning and definition has evolved. Some of these analytics could be performed on the device itself ex computing at the edge concept from Intel, Cisco and others. To manage multiple sensor feeds, we need to understand concepts like sensor fusion (pdf) (source freescale). In addition, the rise of CPU capacity leads to greater intelligence on the device – for example Qualcomm Zeroth platform which enables Deep learning algorithms on ... So, in a nutshell, its a evolving concept especially if we include IoT analytics in the definition of Smart objects (and that some of these analytics could be performed at the Edge) ..

STOCKHOLM – It is serendipity: from America to Viagra, history is full of great discoveries helped along by chance, as more than a century of Nobel prizes can attest. Among the chance discoveries that have been honored with the prestigious prize are X-rays (physics, 1901), penicillin (medicine, 1945), fullerenes that paved the way for nanotechnology (chemistry, 1996), conductive polymers (chemistry, 2000), and the bacteria responsible for ulcers (medicine, 2005). But, as the father of pasteurization Louis Pasteur noted in 1854, "In the fields of observation, chance only favors the prepared mind" -- a remark made in reference to the discovery of the link between electricity and magnetism by Danish scientist Hans Christian Orsted. Orsted happened to notice that a compass needle deflected from magnetic north when an electric current from a battery was switched on and off -- a pioneering discovery in electromagnetism. Like Pasteur, Dutch scientist Pek Van Andel also believes in the unexpected.

Will artificial intelligence replace humans, or assist humans? We'll see this debate play out over and over, from the Westworld HBO television show that begins on Sunday to tech events that happen every week in the valley. I recently moderated a debate about artificial intelligence in the CEO suite at the NetEvents Global Press & Analyst Summit at the beautiful Mountain Winery in Saratoga, Calif. A.I. is on an accelerated improvement path. Deep learning neural networks have made huge progress in the last five years. We're seeing improvements in tech such as voice recognition, face recognition, autonomous cars are coming. So the question is, will we have The Terminator and Skynet? Or Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is aided by all the computers that he needs? Science fiction has taught us to distrust A.I. and to believe in human intuition, instead. But what happens in the CEO suite?

One of the small drones aboard the ISS taught itself how to go around station with just one eye, and it was a lot harder than you might think. For starters, the SPHERE drone (that's short for Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellite) learned on its own by using machine learning. That method isn't typically used for space applications, because if it fails, it could result in a costly catastrophe. This is the first time a drone in space employed the technique to teach itself. Plus, the drone was operating in microgravity, floating around in a place where there's no up or down.