Walt Martin is kneeling, legs folded behind him, butt resting on his heels. "I've got to practice my yoga," he says, clearly joking. Never mind that we're in the cab of an 18-wheeler cruising through Colorado at 55 mph and Martin was, until a moment ago, the guy at the wheel. Maybe he was feeling cocky. After all the truck, outfitted with 30,000 worth of hardware and software from San Francisco startup Otto, had just hours before made the world's first autonomous truck delivery.

Vector representations of words have heralded a transformational approach to classical problems in NLP; the most popular example is word2vec. However, a single vector does not suffice to model the polysemous nature of many (frequent) words, i.e., words with multiple meanings. In this paper, we propose a three-fold approach for unsupervised polysemy modeling: (a) context representations, (b) sense induction and disambiguation and (c) lexeme (as a word and sense pair) representations. A key feature of our work is the finding that a sentence containing a target word is well represented by a low rank subspace, instead of a point in a vector space. We then show that the subspaces associated with a particular sense of the target word tend to intersect over a line (one-dimensional subspace), which we use to disambiguate senses using a clustering algorithm that harnesses the Grassmannian geometry of the representations. The disambiguation algorithm, which we call $K$-Grassmeans, leads to a procedure to label the different senses of the target word in the corpus -- yielding lexeme vector representations, all in an unsupervised manner starting from a large (Wikipedia) corpus in English. Apart from several prototypical target (word,sense) examples and a host of empirical studies to intuit and justify the various geometric representations, we validate our algorithms on standard sense induction and disambiguation datasets and present new state-of-the-art results.

In one of my previous articles I envisioned the state of Customer Success in the year 2041. The future looks bright for our community, but in fact the future is happening right now. Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference is taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area even as I write these words, creating the perfect setting for a topic that underlies all my earlier predictions. You see, while the future of Customer Success will definitely include Automation, Virtual Reality (VR), and The Internet of Things (IoT), the thread linking all of these advancements together is Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this article I will discuss how AI can both help and hinder Customer Success. All new technologies present the possibility of a double-edged sword, and we have never been faced with a blade quite as sharp as AI.

We tend to think of R and other such ML tools only in the context of the workplace, to do "weighty" things aimed at saving millions. A little judicious use of R may help us hugely in our personal lives too. The ideas of regression, classification trees etc. can be powerful tools in valuation, as I found out. Recently, I was in a five-car accident on the infamous 101 in the San Francisco bay area. Luckily, none of us required an ambulance and all of us walked away.

The Cupertino tech firm has significantly scaled back its auto department, with hundreds of employees - from a team of around 1,000 - said to have left, according to new reports. The company is thought to be refocusing its efforts on developing software for self-driving cars, rather than building its own vehicle. Earlier this year, a concept video revealed ideas for a futuristic-looking Apple car, with a wide dashboard display and smart capabilities. Claims that Apple is working on cars may seem like a leap, but it isn't the first time such projects have been discussed by the Californian firm. In an interview last year, Apple board member Mickey Drexler said that before his death in 2011 Steve Jobs had considered building a car.

Technology company Nauto has entered into agreements with BMW i Ventures and Toyota Research Institute, as well as with Allianz Ventures, part of the leading global financial service provider and insurance company Allianz Group. Nauto developed deep learning capabilities that run both in the cloud and on retrofit devices that can be mounted in any vehicle. Nauto is already deployed into commercial passenger, logistics and delivery fleets and enables these fleets to manage vehicle and driver safety and operate more efficiently. Nauto detects driver attention, coaches drivers and warns of collisions, keeps fleet managers in touch with their drivers and helps them optimize vehicle deployment. In fact, Nauto claims, its algorithms provide 5X more risk differentiation between the best and the worst drivers.

The World Economic Forum has made an important discovery: San Francisco is a major center for discussing innovation, policy, and the future of civil society. On Monday, the venerable international organization announced the opening of its third office outside its Geneva headquarters, after New York and Beijing. Dubbed the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco, the new office takes its name from the current big-think thesis of WEF's founder, German business theorist Klaus Schwab. As Alan Murray explained earlier this year, Schwab's first three revolutions featured steam power, electricity, and computers; the new one involves sensors and artificial intelligence. WEF is famous for its snowy annual thinkfest in Davos, Switzerland, where global leaders and other opinionated folks come together to discuss the state of the world.

Samsung is all out to join the artificial intelligence (AI) race as the South Korean giant has agreed to acquire Viv Labs, the startup behind Viv an AI assistant system which is "radically simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything." Interestingly, Viv was co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, the creators of Apple's Siri. The trio founded Viv in 2012, which is an intelligent assistant and an open platform wherein any developer can add more knowledge and capabilities to it. Viv was unveiled at Disrupt NY tech conference in New York back in May. The news about Samsung acquiring Viv Labs was confirmed by TechCrunch, and also through a blog post by Kittlaus.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. on Thursday said it agreed to acquire Viv Labs Inc., the company behind open artificial intelligence platform Viv. The financial details of the transactions were not disclosed by the company. With Viv, Samsung will be able to unlock and offer new service experiences for its customers, including one that simplifies user interfaces, understands the context of the user and offers the user the most appropriate and convenient suggestions and recommendations, the company said in a statement. As part of the acquisition, the founding team will work closely with Samsung's Mobile Communications business, but continue to operate independently under its existing leadership, the statement added. Viv was founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, the original creators of Siri, in 2012.

From Siri creator Dag Kittlaus comes Viv, a product that aims to be the next generation personal assistant. Kittlaus sat down with USA TODAY's Ed Baig to talk about Viv and where he thinks its headed. Samsung plans to make its range of smartphones smarter with its acquisition of Viv, an AI virtual assistant platform started by the man who created Siri. SAN FRANCISCO -- Samsung Electronics just accelerated into the voice-assistant fast lane. The South Korean electronics company, which has been grappling with extended fallout from its recalled Galaxy Note 7, announced Wednesday that it was buying Viv, the machine-learning virtual assistant company started by Siri founder Dag Kittlaus.