Every day, millions of people make buying decisions based on search – products to buy, restaurants in the neighborhood, and tons of other choices. According to the Nielsen Report "Global Trust in Advertising" however, while consumers rely on online opinions or price comparisons, more often than not, it's word-of-mouth recommendations that are the most effective. The most credible advertising comes straight from the people we know and trust, and over 83% of respondents completely or somewhat trust the suggestions of friends and family. So when we make a final decision to buy, it's reasonable to assume that we ask a spouse, relatives or close friends for advice. After all, they are the ones who know us, our tastes, preferences, sense of fashion, etc.

Black holes are indisputably weird. These objects, formed when the center of massive stars collapse in upon itself, are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Let's, for argument's sake, suppose you have the bad luck to venture too close to a black hole and get pulled past its event horizon but you are lucky enough to make it past the event horizon alive (without being spaghettified). Believe it or not, things get much, much weirder once you cross the event horizon. You are now headed toward the center of the black hole -- the singularity, which is an infinitely small region of infinite density.

The task of determining item similarity is a crucial one in a recommender system. This constitutes the base upon which the recommender system will work to determine which items are more likely to be enjoyed by a user, resulting in more user engagement. In this paper we tackle the problem of determining song similarity based solely on song metadata (such as the performer, and song title) and on tags contributed by users. We evaluate our approach under a series of different machine learning algorithms. We conclude that tf-idf achieves better results than Word2Vec to model the dataset to feature vectors. We also conclude that k-NN models have better performance than SVMs and Linear Regression for this problem.

Jude Ower loved playing video games as a child, but this daughter of a monk from Dundee never dreamed that her passion would eventually become a force for good and win her accolades and honours. After 12 years making games for education and training, she went on to create a games platform with a social conscience - Playmob. "After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Zynga, the creator of Farmville, launched a campaign to raise funds for the victims by selling an in-game item, with a percentage of each purchase going to help the victims," she explains. "It was massively successful and raised over $1m in a matter of days. It was then I thought: 'Maybe I could make a platform that connected games and causes?'"

In his session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Lachapelle, CEO of the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB), will provide an overview of various initiatives to certifiy the security of connected devices and future trends in ensuring public trust of IoT. Speaker Bio Eric Lachapelle is the Chief Executive Officer of the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB), an international certification body. His role is to help companies and individuals to achieve professional, accredited and worldwide recognized certification against various international standards. He also has extensive experience as a trainer and an educator in the fields of Information Security, Risk Management and IT. Throughout his career, he has worked in North America, Latin America and Asia with individuals and various companies of all sizes.

And for most businesses, it can't get here fast enough. But are you ready for better business intelligence? More users than ever before are taking advantage of BI systems. In a report by Howard Dresner, President, Founder, and Chief Research Officer at Dresner Advisory Services, more than 81% of business organizations reported having plans to roll out BI more fully in the years leading up to 2019. What's exciting about this growth is that IT and upper management NIL no longer leading it.

Growth is shifting, disruption is accelerating, and societal tensions are rising. Confronting these dynamics will help you craft a better strategy, and forge a brighter future. "The trend is your friend." It's the oldest adage in investing, and it applies to corporate performance, too. We've found through our work on the empirics of strategy that capturing tailwinds created by industry and geographic trends is a pivotal contributor to business results: a company benefiting from such tailwinds is four to eight times more likely to rise to the top of the economic-profit performance charts than one that is facing headwinds. It's easy, however, to lose sight of long-term trends amid short-term gyrations, and there are moments when the nature and direction of those trends become less clear. Today, for example, technology is delivering astounding advances, and more people are healthy, reading, and entering the global middle class than at any period in human history. At the same time, the post–Cold War narrative of progress fueled by competitive markets, globalization, and innovation has lost some luster. Those contradictions are showing up in politics, and the long-term trends underlying them are reshaping the business environment.

If you look past the hype, existential concerns, and fear that Alexa is a CIA mole, there are some genuinely exciting developments happening in the world of artificial intelligence. Some of these have very specific applications, such as medical imaging, diagnostic capabilities, or satellite imagery recognition. Others, like digital assistants -- or even robots -- are poised to dramatically impact how we live and work on a broader scale. Of course, most of us care about more than just a series of clever tricks. We want AI that does more than the bare minimum -- which thus far has been defined as tedious manual tasks that are a nuisance for humans to complete.

Cassini, the spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn for 13 years, is running out of fuel and nearing the end of its mission. Over the next few months, Cassini will dive into the space between Saturn and its rings, moving closer and closer to the planet until it eventually disintegrates in its atmosphere in September. This week, NASA released a short animation showing these final moments, set to a majestic, brassy overture. "On its final orbit, Cassini will plunge into Saturn, fighting to keep its antenna pointed at Earth as it transmits its farewell," a comforting voice narrates as the music swells. "In the skies of Saturn, the journey ends, as Cassini becomes part of the planet itself."

The global market of artificial intelligence is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of over 60% during 2017-2022. On the basis of application, global artificial intelligence market has been broadly segmented into image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, gesture control & others. Among these categories, image recognition dominated global artificial intelligence market in 2016, and the segment is expected to maintain its dominance over the next five years as well. These machines are also capable of taking decisions by self-learning from the nearby environment. Global artificial intelligence market is expected to grow at a robust pace over the next five years, owing to its widespread implementation in numerous industries, such as automobile, finance, healthcare, consumer electronics, etc.