What are the practical applications of AI in healthcare? Dr Christoph Zindel, member of the Managing Board at Siemens Healthineers, responsible for the Imaging and Advanced Therapies business segments, has a clear vision. Healthcare IT News (HITN): Dr Zindel, you joined the Managing Board of Siemens Healthineers at the beginning of October. One of your stated goals is to champion digitisation and the use of AI in healthcare. From buzzword to applied technology?

At the Spark AI Summit, Europe, Enterprise Times sat with Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder, Databricks to talk AI and big data. Ghodsi started as an AI researcher and took that knowledge and experience into Databricks when it was founded. It gives him an interesting perspective on the state of the, often overhyped, AI market. For example, Ghodsi says that one of the reasons for founding Databricks was to: "democratise artificial intelligence and bring it to the masses." One of the problems that AI faces is that it is not a new discipline, it's been around for literally decades.

ANALYTICS EXPERIENCE -- SAS, the leader in analytics, is enhancing its easy-to-use artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to help organizations improve efficiency and quickly realize value with automation. The updated SAS Platform delivers new functionality including automated data management, automated machine learning and cutting-edge interpretability features, underscoring SAS' commitment to making AI more transparent and accessible for all. Available in the fourth quarter of 2019, the newest release of SAS Viya on the SAS Platform offers the latest AI and advanced analytics techniques, accessible to both data scientists and business users. The enhancements provide an intelligent process to automate many of the manual and complex steps required for data transformations and to build machine learning models. SAS automates the analytics life cycle – from data wrangling to feature engineering and algorithm selection – in a single click.

Call for 2019 Speakers: please send your submission on the IDEAS 2019 SoCal Conference Website.

When The Wall Street Journal first had the audacity to create a magazine and event series called The Future of Everything, I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. But then my curiosity got the best of me and I started reading about everything from the problems with fully autonomous vehicles to the new jobs being created as the era of artificial intelligence shows up in the next generation of software. All of this got me thinking about the future of marketing. Having been in the digital marketing industry for the past 24 years, I've witnessed the utter chaos that has plagued the industry (and some would argue it still does). When I first started my career in 1994, all the industry pundits were advocating that television was dead and that broadcast media would soon be replaced with on-demand programming.

Lionel Messi needs no introduction. Even folks who don't follow football have heard about the brilliance of one of the greatest players to have graced the sport. We have text, tons of hyperlinks, and even an audio clip. The possibilities of putting this into a use case are endless. However, there is a slight problem. This is not an ideal source of data to feed to our machines. Can we find a way to make this text data readable for machines?

Scientists have developed an artificial skin that allows devices such as smartphones and computers to ''feel'' the user''s grasp, pressure and location, and can even detect interactions such as tickling, caressing, twisting and pinching. The Skin-On interface, developed by researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK in partnership with Telecomm ParisTech and Sorbonne University in France, mimics human skin in appearance as well as sensing resolution. The researchers adopted a bio-driven approach to developing a multi-layer, silicone membrane that mimics the layers present in human skin. This is made up of a surface textured layer, an electrode layer of conductive threads and a hypodermis layer, the researchers said. Not only is the interface more natural than a rigid casing, it can also detect a plethora of gestures made by the end-users, they said.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), digital marketing and design thinking are the top skills that organisations will need to focus on to drive future growth, according to a new study. Despite the increased awareness around upskilling, the survey by ed-tech company Great Learning found that 47 per cent of the companies surveyed have still not assigned budgets for upskilling their workforce. "The technology skill gap among employees is one of the biggest challenges that organisations in India are beset with," Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-founder, Great Learning, said in a statement. "Skilled employees will continue to be the biggest asset for any organization going ahead and while options like lateral hiring and outsourcing may help in the short term, from a cost and effectiveness point of view, upskilling is the best way to stay competitive in the long run," Nair said. As per the survey, that involved more than 300 companies ranging from small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) to large organisations, 25 per cent of all companies believe AI and ML are the most crucial skills needed to ensure an organisation"s future growth.

Ninety per cent of architects will lose their jobs as artificial intelligence takes over the design process, according to designer Sebastian Errazuriz. The New York-based designer made the controversial claim in a series of movies posted on his Instagram account. "I think it's important that architects are warned as soon as possible that 90 per cent of their jobs are at risk," he said. "It's almost impossible for you to compete" with algorithms he said, adding: "The thing is you're not that special." Born in Chile and raised in London, the artist and designer has courted controversy before, most recently by proposing to turn the fire-damaged Notre Dame cathedral in Paris into a rocket launchpad.

With over 35,000 cooperative societies under its umbrella, the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Ltd (IFFCO) is generating massive amount of data that needs to be analysed, parsed and used for predictive maintenance at its plants and enhance the productivity of nearly five crore farmers. At the forefront of technology adoption in the Indian agriculture space, IFFCO along with cloud major Oracle is trying to take the benefits of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to farmers bet it voice-enabled chatbot, user-friendly portals or Oracle Autonomous Database for analysing data. "Oracle is a big innovator of technology and we are with them for the last 25 years. We are looking at their Autonomous Data Warehouse to utilize our data of last 30-35 years in the most efficient way. My mission is to move along with Oracle to lift and shift the entire database from on-premises to the Cloud," AK Gupta, Head-IT, IFFCO, told IANS in an interaction.