What if you could get anything you wanted just by asking for it? It sounds like a fantastical prospect, but this kind of interaction now appears to be the goal of a category of software tools called "bots." Bots have long been used to automate repetitive computing tasks, but are now increasingly used to communicate directly with users. These artificial intelligence programs mimic human speech to answer questions, order products, and complete many other tasks. Several technology companies are working on integrating bots into their own products and competing to add functionality.

DeepMind was established in London by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman in 2011. Major venture capital firms Horizons Ventures and Founders Fund have invested in the company, as well as entrepreneurs Scott Banister and Elon Musk. Jaan Tallinn was an early investor and an advisor to the company. In 2014, DeepMind received the "Company of the Year" award by Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Also on 26 January 2014 Google announced that it had agreed to take over DeepMind Technologies.

A new type of media agency that uses predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to help clients decide where they should be spending their ad dollars launched in the US last week, with the aim of challenging the traditional agency business model in order to pick up big clients. Blackwood Seven was founded in Copenhagen in 2013 but has now entered the US market, thanks to the acquisition of performance marketing agency Two Nil, which has a roster of clients including Dollar Shave Club, Groupon, Wix, Zillow, Blue Apron, and The Honest Company. Speaking to Business Insider, Blackwood Seven's chief analytics officer Dr Michael Green explained that the company doesn't rely on "gut feeling" to make media decisions on behalf of its clients. Instead, Blackwood Seven is a software platform, which charges clients a software fee, rather than taking an agreed commission on total media spend like normal agencies. Nor does the company make bulk ad spend commitments to media owners or buy media slots in advance and sell them back to its clients.

BPM 31510 is just another cancer drug in human development trials, except for one thing. Scientists didn't toil away in labs to come up with it; artificial intelligence did. The cancer drug development process is costly and time-consuming. On average, it takes 24 to 48 months and upwards of 100 million to find a suitable candidate. Add that to the fact that 95% of all potential drugs fail in clinical trials, and the inefficiencies of the whole drug-discovery machine really become apparent.

ConnectX-5 introduces smart offloading engines that enable the highest application performance while maximizing data center return on investment. Furthermore, ConnectX-5 is the first PCI Express 3.0 and 4.0 compatible adapter, enabling greater flexibility and future-proofing for the data center. With the exponential growth of data and the increase in businesses that takes advantage of real-time data processing for high performance computing (HPC), data analytics, machine learning, national security and'Internet of Things' applications, the market needs not only the fastest interconnect available, but also interconnect intelligence that can perform data algorithms as the data moves throughout the data center. The new intelligent ConnectX-5 100G adapter enables the most advanced real-time in-network computing engines to unleash business opportunities and new technological developments. "The new ConnectX-5 100G adapter further enables high performance, data analytics, deep learning, storage, Web 2.0 and more applications to perform data-related algorithms on the network to achieve the highest system performance and utilization," said Gilad Shainer, vice president, marketing at Mellanox Technologies.

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Jun 15, 2016) - Datorama, a global leader in marketing analytics innovation, today announced the company has added an office in Europe. The latest addition to Datorama's global footprint is located in Hamburg, Germany and marks a critical milestone as the company expands into the German, Austrian and Swiss (DACH) region. Datorama's Hamburg office further strengthens a robust EMEA presence, which includes: Amsterdam, Barcelona, London and Paris. Designed for marketers, Datorama's Marketing Integration Engine helps leading enterprises, agencies and publishers centralize all of their marketing data across silos for cross-channel visualization, analysis and data-driven insight generation. By analyzing inputs from unlimited data sources, including online and offline marketing channels, and first- and third-party applications across CRM, billing, call centers, and more, the company's patent-pending artificial intelligence (AI)-based software delivers a single source of truth at the data layer to drive tactical and strategic marketing performance optimization.

Ronny Kohavi is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and the General Manager for Microsoft's Analysis and Experimentation team at Microsoft's Applications and Services Group. He was previously Partner Architect at Bing, part of the Online Services Division at Microsoft. He joined Microsoft in 2005 and founded the Experimentation Platform team in 2006. His papers have over 27,000 citations and three of his papers are in the top 1,000 most-cited papers in Computer Science. In short, Ronny is the big kahuna of experimentation and I am very happy he took time to have this discussion with me.

Every job has its more boring components. In libraries, one of those jobs is scanning the shelves, looking for missing and misplaced books, and taking stock of what's available. For human workers, this is time-consuming, repetitive and boring, all of which can contribute to wandering attention. The autonomous robotic shelf-scanning platform, or AuRoSS, is in development by the Institute for Infocomm Research of Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research. It uses laser mapping to navigate a library, and RFID tags placed on books to scan the collection.

Do you remember JARVIS, the computerized personal assistant who helps Tony Stark manage his complex super hero affairs in the Iron Man movies? With the rise of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) like Google Home or Amazon Echo, or the smartphone-based Viv, Siri, Cortana, etc., similar JARVIS-like services may be available in the not-so-distant future. Yet to date, the impact of conversational technology – and popular discussion about its use – often remain limited to modern conveniences like ordering household supplies or receiving restaurant recommendations, reminders and hands-free directions. While it's helpful for everyday tasks, the technology that underlies these services can be put to more ambitious uses. Indeed, it can amplify existing impacts and overcome significant technical barriers to unlocking commercial, educational and connectivity services for the next four billion emerging mobile users in developing markets – people who will soon access the internet for the first time.

Qloo Inc. closed a 4.5 million Series A round of venture funding to support the growth of its cultural recommendation engine. Investors included: Academy Award-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio; Starwood Hotels founder Barry Sternlicht; Pierre Lagrange of GLG Partners; and Adriaan Ligtenberg's AllMobile Fund, along with other individual angel investors. According to the startup's co-founder and CEO Alex Elias, New York City-based Qloo combs through proprietary and open source data online to learn about consumers' preferences, and how their tastes correlate across eight major categories: music, film, television, dining, nightlife, fashion, books and travel. The cultural correlations can sometimes surprise marketers. Tomorrow, the Cleveland Cavaliers will face off against the Golden State Warriors in game 6 of the NBA Finals in Ohio.