NEW YORK - Microsoft Corp. on Thursday said it is combining elements of its video gaming and Azure cloud computing businesses to court game developers, an action designed to use the strength of its XBox gaming franchise to gain ground on cloud services leader Amazon.com. Microsoft said it will start rolling out "Microsoft Game Stack," a group of services that lets game developers do things like host multiplayer games and match players of similar skill levels. The services are designed to work for titles played on any device -- including those with operating systems from Microsoft's onetime rivals like Apple and Google. Microsoft competes against Amazon Web Services division to sell those cloud services. But it has been in the console gaming business with its XBox device since 2001 and had 64 million users for its XBox Live online gaming service.

IKEA will reveal the first of its Sonos connected smart speakers at an exhibit in Milan next month. This isn't the first we've seen or heard of the speaker, and we knew IKEA had plans to start selling it in the US and Europe this August. An unveiling next month seems to follow the original timeline, which is good considering IKEA just delayed the launch of its smart blinds. The "bookshelf speaker" is the first in IKEA and Sonos' SYMFONISK range, and a video released by the company suggests we might also see a wall-mounted version in the future. Speakers in the SYMFONISK line will be compatible with Sonos' existing wireless speakers and with IKEA's Home Smart lights and switches, as well as its connected blinds.

Although we said'in a weekend' we will give you a week to complete starting this weekend It is also associated with a diverse range of people including Golf (Ben Hogan), Shaolin Monks, Benjamin Franklin etc. This means we don't need any installation (it's completely web-based) We will guide you through two end-to-end machine learning problems that can be taken over one weekend. We will introduce you to important machine learning concepts, such as machine learning workflow, defining the problem statement, pre-processing and understanding our data, building baseline and more sophisticated models, and evaluating models. We will also introduce to keep machine learning libraries in python and demonstrate code that can be used on your own problems. We will cover data exploration in pandas, look at how to evaluate performance in numpy, plot our findings in Matplotlib, and build our models in sci-kit learn.

As political parties gear up for the 2019 general elections, Analytics India Magazine walks down the memory lane and takes stock of the times when leaders were quite gracious in praising and educating the mass about the importance of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. After his tumultuous election win, the Janata Dal (Secular) supremo, HD Kumaraswamy has stepped into the shoes of his predecessor with ease in Karnataka. In fact, Kumaraswamy has been quite vocal about the role of AI in shaping the future of the state's economy. On turning the state capital into a global innovation hub: With the government playing a crucial role in bringing various stakeholders from across the country under one roof, state-sponsored Bengaluru Tech Summit has played a vital role in ushering innovation and impact. While addressing a press meet the CM said, "Bengaluru has emerged as one of the global innovation hubs in the league of Tokyo in Japan, Silicon Valley in the US and Tel Aviv in Israel. The summit will provide a platform for knowledge sharing on emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Blockchain," Kumaraswamy said.

As it and other technology giants face questions and fines over their practices when it comes to competition and user privacy, Google is adding a new official option to its popular Chrome browser that allows users to search the web using the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo search engine rather than its own platform. The update to Chromium -- which powers Google Chrome -- axes search engines like AOL and Yahoo!, replacing them with DuckDuckGo (in France, privacy-focused search engine Qwant was also added to the list). More search-savvy users may have already known about the company's DuckDuckGo Chrome extension, which makes DuckDuckGo the default option in the Google browser and protects users from ad-tracking software found on almost every site you visit regularly. The Chrome update means you will no longer need an extension to use DuckDuckGo from your URL bar. If you're unfamiliar, DuckDuckGo is a search engine designed to protect any data generated by your search results and history.

A new immersive video game that lets players experience the humdrum banality of living in a suburban Russian tower block is proving an unexpected hit, despite having no clear plot. Created by game developer Alexander Ignatov and poet Ilia Mazo, It's Winter takes place in a nondescript neighbourhood of an unnamed town and limits players to the type of activities such an environment inspires. A lack of in-game missions mean players can instead choose how they want to pass their time – from making a meal of eggs and potatoes, to taking out the bins. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

IKEA is delaying the launch of its smart blinds until later in 2019 in order to work on a firmware update. The Verge reports that the Swedish furniture maker pushed back the release date for the smart blinds, which were expected in Europe last month and in the US in April, because it found an opportunity for "improved functionality". IKEA said that the belated launch means that the smart blinds will be compatible with Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant right away, instead of in a later firmware update. Both the KADRILJ and FYRTUR smart blinds are attractive due to their low price; the KADRILJ starts at around $113 dollars and the FYRTUR starts at around $136 dollars, based on their European pricing. Some existing smart blind options such as Somfy or Velux start at twice that amount.

Artificial intelligence (AI), following on the heels of its older sibling RPA (robotic process automation), is no longer waiting to be born, but remains more of a toddler on the Federal IT scene–still learning to walk before trying to run, but bulking up from an appetite for serious Federal government tech interest and investment. Factors that stand in the way of rapid growth in use of the technology may be fairly said to include inertia, budget, lack of understanding, scarcity of obvious projects, insufficient compute power (legacy data centers), and a dearth of large data sets necessary to leverage the technology. But a host of Federal IT policy aims and nascent efforts at agencies are providing plenty of push for the AI Age to kick into higher gear, and point to what may become before too long the largest factor in shying away from AI: a lack of imagination. From the military, to the intelligence community, to civilian agencies, the growth in stated demand for AI projects is impossible to ignore. Intelligence agency officials ticked off a partial list of AI projects and priorities they'd like to pursue, and identified important long-term benefits from getting into the game including drastically reducing the amount of time analysts spend on lower-level monitoring work, and creating a workforce culture that is more comfortable with taking chances on new technology.

For the Defense Department, last month's executive order on artificial intelligence was the starting gun, and the department doesn't mean to lose the …

SAN FRANCISCO–March 12, 2019--Inference Solutions, a global provider of Intelligent Virtual Agents for sales and service organizations, today announced general availability of Studio 6.0, which enables service providers to bring a new and more advanced class of service to market. This latest iteration of Inference Studio, which integrates the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) and Conversational AI technologies from Google and IBM, helps businesses eliminate complex IVR menus and elevates the customer experience beyond simple speech-enabled, directed dialog systems. "Adoption by a growing number of businesses is accelerating because the accuracy of core Natural Language Understanding resources has made great strides in the past year," says Dan Miller, lead analyst at Opus Research. "Companies and their customers are becoming more comfortable conversing with Intelligent Virtual Agents." Inference's Virtual Agents are resold by over 35 telecommunications carriers around the world to businesses of all sizes.