Speaking at the third annual Digital Workforce Summit in New York City, Gonzalo Gomez Cid, Global Contact Center Director at Telefónica, discussed his company's journey from IVR-based contact centers to AI-driven operations driven by digital labor. Telefónica is a Spanish multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Madrid. It has a presence in 15 countries across Europe and Latin America. In the telco space, it ranks seventh in revenues, sixth in market capitalization and fifth in number of subscribers. Gomez Cid told DWS attendees that Telefónica describes itself as a "company of platforms," including physical assets, networks and IT, and products and services.

Data preprocessing involves the transformation of the raw dataset into an understandable format. Preprocessing data is a fundamental stage in data mining to improve data efficiency. The data preprocessing methods directly affect the outcomes of any analytic algorithm. Data is raw information, its the representation of both human and machine observation of the world. Dataset entirely depends on what type of problem you want to solve.

Want to be the first to know about our upcoming events? We're excited about creating a future of human-centered smart products, and we believe the first step to doing this is to connect UX and Data Science/Machine Learning folks to get together and learn from each other. We're a mix of data scientists, designers, machine learning scientists, PMs and more - exploring a human centered approach to machine learning. We have been super fortunate to have a fellowship from the Center for Technology, Society & Policy (https://ctsp.berkeley.edu/)and If you are interested in giving back and supporting us and helping enable us to invite other speakers who might not otherwise have access to speaking, please consider supporting us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/mluxsf

We will have Data Analytics experts leading an interactive conversation around Dell's commitment and investment in AI.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming key components of mineral exploration programs as companies set exploration targets. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have the ability to solve two of the mining industry's biggest challenges: rising exploration costs and a lack of new discoveries. After a heavy downturn in the past few years, the mining and mineral exploration sector is finally starting to recover, but deep challenges remain. In an industry that thrives on new discoveries, today's resource companies are finding it harder and more expensive to locate new deposits. Gold provides one of the greatest examples of this dearth of new discoveries in the face of rising exploration costs.

With a shortage of new tuberculosis drugs in the pipeline, a software tool from the University of Michigan can predict how current drugs, including unlikely candidates, can be combined in new ways to create more effective treatments – leading to the design of TB drug regimens. Sriram Chandrasekaran, U-M assistant professor of biomedical engineering, who leads the research, said: "This could replace our traditional trial-and-error system for drug development that is comparatively slow and expensive. Dubbed INDIGO, short for INferring Drug Interactions using chemoGenomics and Orthology, the software tool has shown that the potency of tuberculosis drugs can be amplified when they are teamed with antipsychotics or antimalarials. Shuyi Ma, a research scientist at the University of Washington and a first author of the study, said: "This tool can accurately predict the activity of drug combinations, including synergy, where the activity of the combination is greater than the sum of the individual drugs. "It also accurately predicts antagonism between drugs, where the activity of the combination is lesser. In addition, it also identifies the genes that control these drug responses."

Accenture (NYSE:ACN) has opened a new innovation hub for mining and energy in Perth, Australia. The hub gives mining and energy companies access to "technology innovations including cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, virtual and augmented reality, quantum computing, blockchain and drones". Ann Burns, who leads Accenture's Resources sector in Australia and New Zealand, commented: "With this new innovation hub, we are helping raise the innovation profile of Western Australia and Australia overall. We believe that the Western Australian energy and mining sectors can become world leaders in digitalization. Crucial to this is a focus on what we refer to as'triple zero': ideas, design and technologies that help achieve zero harm to workers and machines, zero loss across the value chain, and zero waste for sustainability."

What does a "journey" mean to you? At IBM, our long standing tradition of journey exploration has led humans to the moon and coined the term machine learning 50 years ago. Now we are helping organizations scale the ladder to AI to reap rewards in growth, productivity and efficiency with IBM Watson. This journey to AI mirrors the history of travel. In this article, I'll explain how IBM Cloud Pak for Data accelerates the journey to AI and delve into the ways AutoAI helps boost the speed of business returns.

The Israelian historian Yuval Noah Harari has achieved international fame for having written a history of Homo Sapiens (humankind), a prophetic prediction of its end, and the beginning of new species called Homo Deus: an immortal cyborg with divine powers. The book that started it all is called: Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind. In her article, Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun – and the consequences cannot be known, Carole Cadwalladr asks Harari: In some ways, I say, it struck me that Sapiens isn't actually a history book – it's a philosophy book that asks the big, philosophical questions and attempts to answer them through history. I think that I see history as a philosophy laboratory. Philosophers come up with all these very interesting questions about the human condition, but the way that most of them – though not all – go about answering them is through thought experiments. When I discovered Harari, I came to think about Stephen Hawking s book: A Brief History of Time. In the book Hawking seems to want to surpass Nietzsche s declaration: God is Dead! In the introduction he presents a variety of philosophical questions, whereafter he says: Traditionally these are questions for philosophy; but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern development in science, particular physics…[See my article: A Critique of Stephen Hawking].

The city of Las Vegas is putting its chips in the middle of the table, betting that artificial intelligence will alleviate its traffic woes. New sensors and cameras at 30 of its street intersections will process data and information that will help the city learn more about traffic patterns and pinpoint congestion areas with more accuracy. It plans to roll out its sensors to 50 more intersections over the next three months. On Business Casual, hosts Geoffrey Short and Taylor Bagley discussed how this might change the future of city design. You can listen to the episode in its entirety here!