Campaigning is often based on feeling or experience by marketeers, but the speed of digital developments are forcing businesses to rapidly adapt to the new needs of consumers created by digitization. Of course, marketeers can't leave their data out of the equation nowadays, however this remains a struggle as this often calls for allocating expensive resources such as data scientists. Luckily, technology is catching up on the smart brains of data scientists. So what does this mean for the future of campaigning? And how can big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence be used to improve campaigns?

CHIBA – The government and companies started a trial of a drone home delivery service in Chiba Prefecture on Monday, with drones loaded with packages flying between condominiums, commercial facilities and adjacent parks. The joint project involving the central government, the city of Chiba, research institutions and companies including e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc. is the first drone delivery trial in an urban area. The city of Chiba has been designated as a special deregulation zone to conduct the trial. In the next stage of the trial, drones will pick up packages from a warehouse located beside Tokyo Bay and deliver them to Chiba's Mihama Ward, about 10 km away. The city aims to start the drone home delivery service by 2020, when Tokyo will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and plans to ask real estate developers scheduled to construct high-rise condominiums in Mihama to set up landing areas for the craft on each unit's balcony.

Chat applications are becoming a mainstream trend and our preferred way of interacting with colleagues, friends and family. From the early days of SMS to the favorite snaps of our children, real-time online conversations are everywhere and here to stay. The acquisition of WhatAapp by Facebook in 2014 for a hefty 22 Billion price tag made it clear and promising as TechCrunch noticed it one year later. But although TechCrunch saw messaging apps as the future of mobile portal, they remained more or less next to the Internet, without a direct impact, except their increasing audience. The recent surge of interest in Bots and AI is changing the game and we'll be witnessing the second major fragmentation of the Internet.

Engineers, safety advocates and automakers have a safety message for federal regulators eager to get self-driving cars on the road: slow down. Self-driving cars may pave the way for the future, but industry officials cautioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during a meeting on Friday, saying the vehicles aren't up to the demands of real-world driving yet. The federal agency had previously announced it would begin writing guidelines for deploying the automated vehicles in January with the promise that they would be ready by July. Instead of issuing more strictly defined regulations, which can take up to eight years, the agency is writing guidelines instead, arguing that they needed to catch up with cars on the road that already have self-driving features included. FILE - In this May 13, 2014 file photo, a Google self-driving car goes on a test drive near the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Self-driving cars are more likely to be a threat than a boon to public safety because of unresolved technical issues, engineers and safety advocates told the government Friday, countering a push by innovators for expedited government approval.

Employing robots and artificial intelligence in Chinese restaurants has turned out to be not such a smart idea after all, with restaurants in Guangzhou either closing down or firing their mechanical staff. According to Workers' Daily, two restaurants which made use of robotic waiters have closed down and a third which remains open has given all but one of the robots the sack. Their human counterparts at the restaurant were full of complaints about their former colleagues. "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again," said one employee. Another waiter remarked that the robots were only able to perform a small number of tasks.

Instructor: Patrick Winston In this lecture, we explore support vector machines in some mathematical detail. We use Lagrange multipliers to maximize the width of the street given certain constraints. If needed, we transform vectors into another space, using a kernel function.

Over the past several decades, the United States has been an aggressive first mover in a war-fighting regime centered on guided munitions and integrated battle networks. These innovations have allowed U.S. forces to operate relatively uncontested in space, in the air, and on and under the sea, and to dominate conventional force-on-force land combat. For a variety of reasons – the geopolitics of rising powers, the global diffusion of technology and counter-reactions by its adversaries chief among them – the preeminence enjoyed by the United States in this regime is starting to erode. It's an amazing document for which this first sentence barely does justice for what is revealed throughout. So, once again we are given a DARPA press release of sorts that covers a program supposedly in development.

Forget artificial intelligence for board games. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. used artificial intelligence to predict the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV singing competition – and got the winner and finalists all correct. On Friday night, the cloud-computing arm of Alibaba, Aliyun -- or Alibaba Cloud -- used "Ai," its artificial intelligence program, during the four-hour finale of Hunan TV's "I Am a Singer." The program worked to choose winners as the audience of 500 people who served as judges independently deliberated. The Ai predictions were featured live during the finale.

Everyone's excited for self-driving cars that can ferry us from home to work and back again, but the most recent success in autonomous vehicles is a bit more business-based. A squad of a dozen or so self-driving cargo trucks just completed a demonstration in Europe that covered over a thousand miles and crossed several borders, all with minimal human help. The trucks were all part of the European Truck Platooning Challenge, an event sponsored by the Dutch government, and which is aimed at making fleets of smart, self-driving cargo trucks a practical business reality. "Platooning" is essentially just close, connected, fleet-based driving where follower trucks connect to the vehicle ahead of them with Wi-Fi and maintain a very tight driving formation that wouldn't be safe for more fallible human drivers. A number of different companies participated, each using trucks and technology of its own.

Japan will not impose time and place restrictions on autonomous driving tests on public roads, according to draft guidelines released by the National Police Agency last week. Those hoping to experiment using self-driving cars will be allowed to do so without obtaining permission to use public roads as long as they comply with rules such as having a driver and passenger in the car. In some U.S. states, autonomous driving tests require permission. The government regards autonomous driving as a key item in its growth strategy, aiming to put self-driving cars into practical use before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. As the industry is expanding, the NPA has received many inquiries about what permission is needed for self-driving car tests. Clarifying the guidelines is seen as helping more venture companies enter into the autonomous driving business and support the development of related technologies.