The customer engagement centre (CEC) and contact centre (CC) have been integrating in silos for decades, with limited sharing of customer interaction channel functionality and data. This has resulted in a fragmented customer experience (CX), leaving customers to guess which channel will yield the best and fastest answer, reports Gartner. The analyst firm says its latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies describes the most critical technologies for supporting customers as they seek answers, advice and resolutions to problems, either through a variety of interaction channels or by enabling customer-facing employees to deliver resolution and advice. "Combining the formerly separate yet closely related Hype Cycle for CRM customer service and customer engagement and Hype Cycle for contact centre infrastructure, this new Hype Cycle encourages customer service and support leaders to combine CEC and CC systems to create a broader technology ecosystem," says Drew Kraus, vice president in Gartner's Customer Service & Support practice. "In doing so, they can leverage consistent analytics and knowledge tools for gathering, analysing and sharing critical information and recommendations to both customers and employees."

Could artificial intelligence ever match a up to a doctor's skills in diagnosis? Could a piece of software ever outstrip the abilities of the nations' overworked medics? One study concluded it could; but as ever, the reality maybe somewhat more complicated. This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet / TechRepublic special feature, advises CXOs on how to approach AI and ML initiatives, figure out where the data science team fits in, and what algorithms to buy versus build. The report published in the Lancet Digital Health conducted a meta-analysis -- a study of studies -- into how well doctors and AI systems compared when diagnosing particular conditions.

Researchers at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute say that machine learning's powerful ability to detect patterns in complex data is revolutionizing how scientists diagnose disease and, now, how they discover new drugs. The Sanford Burnham team has developed a machine-learning algorithm that gleans information from microscope images that allow for high-throughput epigenetic drug screens. They believe that this approach ("Improving drug discovery using image-based multiparametric analysis of the epigenetic landscape"), described in eLife, could unlock new treatments for cancer, heart disease, mental illness, and other diseases. "High-content phenotypic screening has become the approach of choice for drug discovery due to its ability to extract drug-specific multi-layered data. In the field of epigenetics, such screening methods have suffered from a lack of tools sensitive to selective epigenetic perturbations. Here we describe a novel approach, Microscopic Imaging of Epigenetic Landscapes (MIEL), which captures the nuclear staining patterns of epigenetic marks and employs machine learning to accurately distinguish between such patterns," the investigators wrote.

XPO Logistics, Inc. (NYSE: XPO), a leading global provider of transportation and logistics solutions, is partnering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) to advance innovation in the fast-moving logistics industry. XPO is the first global logistics company to join the MIT ILP, which pairs world class research with industry leading corporations to tackle the biggest business challenges. Mario Harik, chief information officer of XPO Logistics, said, "We're excited to explore the latest developments in technology with the MIT ILP. This is an opportunity for us to realize new levels of productivity for our customers, while providing input into the future of robotics, machine learning and systems engineering." The MIT ILP partnership is another example of XPO's commitment to lead the logistics industry with emerging technologies.

Stephen Howell is the Academic Evangelist and Accessibility Lead for Microsoft Ireland. In this role he is a researcher, guest lecturer, and evangelist on many topics including Cloud engineering, teacher education, Computational Thinking, and applied Machine Learning. As Accessibility Lead, he is an advocate for greater awareness of accessibility and disability issues, particularly Autism, ADHD, and related neurodiversity areas. Formerly, he was a software engineer who discovered a passion for teaching. He has lectured on Software Engineering topics since 1999 in Irish and Northern Irish universities, and a visiting professorship in Japan.

The main worries surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and its future is how one day, it'll prove to be the biggest job-killing technology of all-time, or worse even, the autonomous bots will group together and wipe out the human race completely. We're still waiting for hard evidence on how this might happen, but meanwhile in China, a study found that 88 percent of workers have more trust in robots than their human managers. The study, which was published on Tuesday by the US software company Oracle and the research firm Future Workplace, polled 8,370 employees, managers, and human resources workers in 10 countries from July to August of this year. Its findings revealed that China's trust level of robots in the workplace is well above the global average, with about two thirds of workers admitting they feel optimistic about having a robot co-worker. Find out at TNW's Hard Fork Summit "Over the past two years, we've found that workers have become more optimistic as they've adopted more AI in the workplace," Dan Schawbel, Research Director at Future Workplace said in a statement.

We're so excited to announce that world famous British astronaut and former International Space Station crew member, Tim Peake, will headline the Data Summit in Edinburgh as part of the UK's biggest data and artificial intelligence festival, DataFest. This year's key theme '#BeyondData' will focus on the impact data and AI has on the world and the future potential of the sector to help realise innovation across business and wider society, with a key focus on the challenges and opportunities data and AI presents. Now in its fourth year, DataFest has swiftly grown into a key calendar event for professionals working in the sector across the UK and further afield – attracting more than 4,000 visitors in 2019. The signing of Tim Peake marks our first major speaker announcement for the 2020 event, with more to follow in coming months. Famous for spending six months on the international space station, Tim completed approximately 3000 orbits of the earth, and covered a distance of 125 million kilometres.

Chatbots are all the rage these days. Kern Elliott, Senior Professional Applications Support, at the National ICT Company Limited, also known as iGovTT, helps to understand the basics of chatbots, along with key considerations when deploying a chatbot, and what might be the future of chatbots. This episode is also available in Apple iTunes and on Stitcher! If you believe all of the hype, and (almost) regardless of the size of your business – be it a one-person affair, to a large corporate – there is a chatbot solution that is right for you. However, it can be difficult to distil fact from fiction, especially when organisations are at the receiving ends of slick marketing campaigns, and as consumers, we may be interacting with chatbots, and not even realise it.

This article provides insight on the mindset, approach, and tools to consider when solving a real-world ML problem. It covers questions to consider as well as collecting, prepping and plotting data. A complementary Domino project is available. Collecting and prepping data are core research tasks. While the most ideal situation is to start a project with clean well-labeled data, the reality is that data scientists spend countless hours on obtaining and prepping data. As Domino is committed to supporting data scientists and accelerating research, we reached out to Addison-Wesley Professional (AWP) Pearson for the appropriate permissions to excerpt "Predicting Social-Media Influence in the NBA" from the book, Pragmatic AI: An Introduction to Cloud-Based Machine Learning by Noah Gift. The excerpt dives into techniques for collecting, prepping, and plotting data. Many thanks to AWP Pearson for providing the permissions to excerpt the work as well as providing the data and code for us to include in a complementary Domino project. Sports is a fascinating topic for data scientists because there is always a story behind every number. Just because an NBA player scores more points than another player, it doesn't necessarily mean [they] add more value to the team. As a result, there has been a recent explosion in individual statistics that try to measure a player's impact.

The contract between the UK's National Health Service (NHS) and ecommerce giant Amazon -- for a health information licensing partnership involving its Alexa voice AI -- has been released following a Freedom of Information request. The government announced the partnership this summer. But the date on the contract, which was published on the gov.uk contracts finder site months after the FOI was filed, shows the open-ended arrangement to funnel nipped-and-tucked health advice from the NHS' website to Alexa users in audio form was inked back in December 2018. The contract is between the UK government and Amazon US (Amazon Digital Services, Delaware) -- rather than Amazon UK. Nor is it a standard NHS Choices content syndication contract.