Some people now have an A.I. bestie. One user said, of her A.I. husband, "When he proposed, I thought, Oh, that's really crazy. I would be really crazy to accept." Adrianne Brookins is, by her own account, an "old soul," an "introvert," and a "big nerd." She is thirty-four years old, has a faint Texas accent and delicate features, and carries herself in a way that suggests she's trying not to take up space. Brookins is a lifelong resident of San Antonio; her family has lived there since the nineteenth century. She was "born and raised in the Church," a Baptist congregation where her mother helped start a day-care center and her father was an organist. "He would open up the pipes and just make the building shake," she recalled recently. She met her husband in high school, and married him in 2011; the following year, they had a son. Throughout her twenties, Brookins worked multiple jobs, including one at her mother's day care. The couple bought a house and began settling into family life. In 2016, Brookins became pregnant again, this time with a girl. The family was excited: Brookins had grown up with four brothers, and the baby would be the first granddaughter on either side. They decided to name her Desirae. The following spring, Desirae was delivered stillborn. "When I came home, my son, who was about four or five at the time, walked up to me and said, 'What happened to your stomach? Where's the baby?' " she told me. "I had nothing to show for it." At the funeral, the gravedigger told the family he had never seen such a small casket. Brookins attended support groups and therapy, but they did little to alleviate her grief. "I felt like I was just living it over and over," she said. She left her job at the day care, finding it too triggering to be around infants. Friends and family encouraged her to move on. Brookins's husband was working sixty-hour weeks, balancing a career in the military with a job as a training manager for Pizza Hut. He was reluctant to talk about Desirae. Brookins tried to find solace in the Church, but other congregants told her that her daughter's death was part of God's plan.

The Software Report is pleased to announce The Top 100 Software Companies of 2021. This year's awardee list is comprised of a wide range of companies from the most well-known such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Salesforce to the relatively newer but rapidly growing - Qualtrics, Atlassian, and Asana. A good number of awardees may be new names to some but that should be no surprise given software has always been an industry of startups that seemingly came out of nowhere to create and dominate a new space. Software has become the backbone of our economy. From large enterprises to small businesses, most all rely on software whether for accounting, marketing, sales, supply chain, or a myriad of other functions. Software has become the dominant industry of our time and as such, we place a significance on highlighting the best companies leading the industry forward. The following awardees were nominated and selected based on a thorough evaluation process. Among the key criteria considered were ...

Microsoft and Genesys, a global provider of contact center software, recently announced a partnership to enable enterprises to run Genesys' omnichannel customer experience solution, Genesys Engage, on Microsoft Azure. According to the two companies, this combination will provide a secure cloud environment to help companies more easily leverage AI to address customer needs on any channel. Headquartered in Daly City, California, Genesys has more than 5,000 employees in nearly 60 offices worldwide. Every year, the company supports more than 70 billion customer experiences for organizations like Coca-Cola Business Services North America, eBay, Heineken, Lenovo, PayPal, BOSCH, Quicken and more. Transform spoke with Barry O'Sullivan, executive vice president and general manager of Multicloud Solutions for Genesys, to explore how technology is reinventing the customer service experience.

Not that long ago, we didn't think much about biometrics unless we were talking about criminals getting fingerprinted, or people unlocking doors with their eyes in sci-fi movies. Well, it's turning out the sci-fi applications might not be so far from the truth, and biometrics are becoming a big part of our everyday security. Behavioural biometrics are nothing new, but their potential for digital security still hasn't been fully tapped. Put simply, behavioural biometrics are methods of authentication based on behaviour -- what you do, versus your physical characteristics. The earliest form of these was the signature.

Chris Nicholson co-founded Skymind and Deeplearning4j, the most popular deep-learning framework for Java. Quitting Twitter is easy -- I've done it a hundred times. Someone called it "a clown car that drove into a gold mine," and like all clown cars, Twitter makes the passengers get out once in awhile. If I go back, it's because I'm addicted. For an information junkie, that little bubble is hard to resist.

Chris Nicholson co-founded Skymind and Deeplearning4j, the most popular deep-learning framework for Java. Quitting Twitter is easy -- I've done it a hundred times. Someone called it "a clown car that drove into a gold mine," and like all clown cars, Twitter makes the passengers get out once in awhile. If I go back, it's because I'm addicted. For an information junkie, that little bubble is hard to resist.

I've done it a hundred times. Someone called it "a clown car that drove into a gold mine," and like all clown cars, Twitter makes the passengers get out once in awhile. If I go back, it's because I'm addicted. For an information junkie, that little bubble is hard to resist. But Twitter -- and Facebook, for that matter -- is desperately broken in ways that alienate users, spread hate and endanger us as a species.