PROS, a provider of AI-powered solutions that optimize selling in the digital economy, today announced it has acquired Travelaer SAS, a digital innovator for the travel industry, for approximately $12 million. With Travelaer, PROS further extends its comprehensive portfolio to enable airlines to transform the traveler's digital experience across all retail channels: airline.com, "We are thrilled to welcome Travelaer to the PROS family," said President and Chief Executive Officer Andres Reiner, at PROS. "With Travelaer, PROS is uniquely positioned to provide an end-to-end solution that transforms the digital selling experience for airlines, from revenue management, through offer personalization and optimization, to supporting excellence in retail channels. This acquisition accelerates our ability to deliver airlines flexible, configurable retail capabilities yielding an optimal customer experience every time. Our combined teams will drive even greater innovation, accelerating the digital transformation our airline customers need today."

The explosion of digital technologies is an essential ingredient to boost innovation, accelerating the creative process to develop new solutions for a world that is increasingly data-driven, connected, immersive and reliant on autonomous systems. Thales has an important role to play in accelerating the digital transformation of its partners around the world. Working with CENTECH, Thales will support projects created by start-ups in the field of artificial intelligence, which is one of Thales' four key digital technologies, alongside connectivity, big data and cybersecurity. CENTECH has been recognised by the University Business Network (UBI) as one of the most effective accelerators in the world. Through the AI@CENTECH programme, actively supported by the Thales Digital Factory, Thales plans to accelerate the development of more than 10 start-ups a year, providing business advice, technology expertise and infrastructure services, as well as access to the Group's five core markets in the aerospace, space, transport, defence and security sectors to promote the use of artificial intelligence in critical decision support.

At the Intercon conference, Dr. GP gave a motivational keynote speech on Deep Reinforcement Learning and the landscape of machine learning and artificial intelligence that inspired the audience. He noted that the MIT Technology Review has downloaded 16,625 research papers from arxiv that are publicly available under the computer science and artificial intelligence section through November 2018. Through natural language processing techniques on the abstracts, the words "constraint," "theory," "rule," "logic," "program," "learning," "network," "data," "task," and "performance" have been evaluated to find the reinforcement learning boom in recent times. Dr. GP said trends have shown the rise of traditional neural networks in the 1950s and 1960s, symbolic approaches in the 1970s, knowledge-based and rule-based systems in 1980s, support vector machines in 1990s, and the reign of neural networks in the 2010s with the advent of heavy implementation of deep neural networks. Deep Traffic is a reinforcement learning simulation based on the 24,000 entries received on MIT's Deep Traffic competition on self-driving cars that drive on a multi-lane freeway with a model-free off-policy reinforcement learning process that inspires a number of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts to evaluate the Deep-Q-Learning reinforcement learning network variants and hyperparameter configurations with episodic iterations training of 96.6 years of RL simulations, 572.2 million crowdsourced and optimized DQN hyperparameters to train the agents successfully.

The companies said that by combining their respective technologies and know-how, Toyota and PFN would develop service robots capable of learning in typical living environments and executing a variety of tasks. Toyota's robotic development has for 15 years included a variety of different applications besides automotive manufacturing, including social, medical and rehabilitation. Its Human Support Robot, first developed in 2012, is intended to support independent living, including for the elderly and disabled. Toyota is working to improve robotic capabilities in tasks such as picking up and carrying objects, to potential uses in applications such as health management. According to the company, HSRs continue to undergo trials at elderly-care facilities; it has also been used by research and development at 49 organizations in 13 countries.

Robotic process automation and artificial intelligence are changing the way digital business transformation vendors across the Americas are delivering services to their enterprise clients, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm. The ISG Provider Lens Digital Business Transformation Report for Pan America finds enterprise clients looking for digital business transformation providers to help them automate IT functions. Many vendors are providing a high degree of automation while also delivering specialized services, including efficiency prioritization, dynamic response and provisioning, and security, based on a customer's needs, the report said. Many digital business transformation providers are developing intellectual property, including tools and as-a-service offerings, using analytics, automation, AI and cognitive computing, the report adds. These new services are disrupting providers that previously relied on offering low prices for labor-intensive services to remain competitive.

"DEWA supports the directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, who instructed Dubai Government to deliver services that are 10 years ahead of other cities, and to work under the leadership of HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF), and HH Sheikh Maktoum bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai. These directives have guided DEWA's strategy to shape the future and enhance its role in serving the community to become a globally leading sustainable innovative corporation. DEWA has achieved considerable progress in this and one of its most prominent achievements is the launch of Digital DEWA, the digital arm of DEWA, to redefine the concept of utilities and create a new digital future for Dubai, to become the premier digital organisation in the world; with autonomous systems for renewable energy and storage and the expansion of artificial intelligence and digital services," said Al Tayer. Al Tayer noted that Digital DEWA has a four-point strategy. The first is launching advanced solar power technologies in Dubai.

Lucidea, provider of ArchivEra, CuadraSTAR SKCA and Eloquent Archives, will participate in the Archives & Records Association (ARA) annual conference on 28th and 30th August in Leeds. Visit Lucidea at Stand #5 in the Queens Hotel to see how easily their archival collections management solutions enable researchers and the public to connect with the historic materials archivists work hard to preserve. Lucidea's archives specialists will demonstrate the powerful and versatile capabilities of ArchivEra, CuadraSTAR SKCA, and Eloquent Archives that make them a valued technology partner in the archives community. ARA attendees will be first in the UK to see Lucidea's exciting new AI prototype for archives. With Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration now available in ArchivEra, Lucidea's clients will enjoy powerful automatic categorization functionality.

Amazon uses forecasting to make sure that the right product is in the right place at the right time by predicting demand for hundreds of millions of products every day. Amazon Forecast uses this same technology to build precise forecasts for virtually any business condition, including product demand and sales, infrastructure requirements, energy needs, and staffing levels – with predictions that are up to 50% more accurate than traditional methods. Amazon Forecast is easy to use and requires no machine learning experience. The service automatically provisions the necessary infrastructure, processes data, and builds custom, private machine learning models that are hosted on AWS and ready to make predictions. To get started with Amazon Forecast, visit https://aws.amazon.com/forecast/.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--O'Reilly, the premier source for insight-driven learning on technology and business, today announced the lineup of speakers presenting at the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, presented with Intel. The event will take place from September 9-12 in San Jose, Calif. at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Through detailed case studies, technical sessions and trainings, the AI Conference will offer a unique opportunity to tap into the leading minds in AI and network with thousands of innovative researchers, data scientists, engineers, senior developers and executives across industries. Together, Conference Chairs Ben Lorica (O'Reilly), Julie Shin Choi (Intel) and Roger Chen (Computable Labs), along with Honorary Co-Chairs Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly) and Peter Norvig (Google), have created a conference program designed to help organizations successfully apply AI from both a business and technical perspective, covering emerging AI techniques and technologies. In advance of the conference, O'Reilly will release a report, "How Organizations are Sharpening their Skills to Better Understand and Use AI," that explores the data- and AI-related topics technology experts are most interested in.

In 2021, artificial intelligence (AI) augmentation will create $2.9 trillion of business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner defines augmented intelligence as a human-centered partnership model of people and AI working together to enhance cognitive performance. This includes learning, decision making and new experiences. "Augmented intelligence is all about people taking advantage of AI," said Svetlana Sicular, research vice president at Gartner. "As AI technology evolves, the combined human and AI capabilities that augmented intelligence allows will deliver the greatest benefits to enterprises." Gartner's AI business value forecast highlights decision support/augmentation as the largest type of AI by business value-add with the fewest early barriers to adoption (see Figure 1).