WIRE)--The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), the world's leading organization transforming business and society by accelerating the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), today announced the Smart Factory Machine Learning for Predictive Maintenance Testbed. The testbed is led by two companies, Plethora IIoT, a company, designing and developing cutting-edge answers for Industry 4.0, and Xilinx, the leading provider of All Programmable technology. This innovative testbed explores machine-learning techniques and evaluates algorithmic approaches for time-critical predictive maintenance. This knowledge leads to actionable insight enabling companies to move away from traditional preventative maintenance to predictive maintenance, which minimizes unplanned downtime and optimizes system operation. This would ultimately help manufacturers increase availability, improve energy efficiency and extend the lifespan of high-volume CNC manufacturing production systems.

Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has become one of the leaders in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI). Many of the ways the company uses the technology go on behind the scenes for things such as improving search results, better product recommendations, and enhanced forecasting and inventory management. The more public face of Amazon's AI ambitions can be found in its Echo family of smart speakers powered by Alexa, its voice-activated digital assistant, which has become the leader in the burgeoning smart-speaker market. With that much riding on AI, it should come as no surprise that Amazon has announced plans to expand its AI research by building a new R&D center in Barcelona, Spain. Amazon is setting up AI labs around the globe in search of AI talent.

The first genuinely impressive AI assistant may well have a Canadian accent. Facebook announced today that it is tapping into Canada's impressive supply of artificial-intelligence talent and expertise by creating a major AI research center in Montreal. Several big recent advances in AI can be traced back to Canadian research labs, and Facebook is hoping that the new lab may help it take advantage of whatever comes next. The new center will focus, in particular, on an area of AI known as reinforcement learning (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017: Reinforcement Learning"). The center will seek to apply this and other novel approaches to language, with the aim of producing more coherent and useful virtual assistants, says Yann LeCun, director of AI research at Facebook.

In the long run, we expect AI technologies to become very broadly embedded into enterprise software applications and software, much as business intelligence ("BI"), reporting and analytics features have increasingly been directly incorporated into enterprise applications in the last decade. Company related disclosures: Issuer Company Ticker Applicable Disclosures Constellation Software Inc. CSU-T 7, 9 Shopify Inc. SHOP-N 7, 9 OpenText Inc. OTEX-Q 7, 9 Kinaxis Inc. KXS-T 7, 9 Descartes Systems Group Inc. DSGX-Q 7, 9 Absolute Software Inc. ABT-T 7, 9 BSM Technologies Inc. GPS-T 7, 9 Symbility Solutions Inc. SY-V 7, 9 ProntoForms Corp. PFM-V 1, 3, 7, 9 Redline Communications Inc. RDL-T 7, 9 See legend of Disclosures on next page. Definitions "Research Analyst" means any partner, director, officer, employee or agent of iA Securities who is held out to the public as a research analyst or whose responsibilities to iA Securities include the preparation of any written report for distribution to clients or prospective clients of iA Securities which includes a recommendation with respect to a security. Technology Sector Blair Abernethy, CFA August 17, 2017 Page 27 Analyst's Certification Each iA Securities research analyst whose name appears on the front page of this research report hereby certifies that (i) the recommendations and opinions expressed in the research report accurately reflect the research analyst's personal views about the issuer and securities that are the subject of this report and all other companies and securities mentioned in this report that are covered by such research analyst and (ii) no part of the research analyst's compensation was, is, or will be directly or indirectly, related to the specific recommendations or views expressed by such research analyst in this report.

The Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) is described as a standard that will allow developers to move their neural networks from one framework to another, provided both adhere to the ONNX standard. Companies must choose the framework they're going to use for their model before they start developing it, but the framework that offers the best options for testing and tweaking a neural network aren't necessarily the frameworks with the features you want when you bring a product to market. The press release states that Caffe2, PyTorch, and Microsoft's Cognitive Toolkit will all support the ONNX standard when it's released this month. Models trained with one framework will be able to move to another for inference.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a technology spawned from the need for machines to understand and communicate with humans in human language, not formal computer languages. The concept behind NLP is simple: if and when machines can understand and communicate with humans in natural (human) language, it democratizes data science, enabling humans to access, analyze, and leverage data more intelligently and become more efficient as they offload redundant, data-heavy tasks to machines. According to a new report from Tractica, while NLP is most commonly understood as a user interface (UI) technology, it is also a critical technology for extracting insights and analysis from a vast amount of previously unindexed and unstructured data, mining video and audio files, emails, scanned documents, and more. Tractica forecasts that these expanded applications, leveraging newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, will drive growth in the NLP software market from $136 million in 2016 to $5.4 billion by 2025. The market intelligence firm anticipates that NLP software deployments will drive significant additional sales of hardware and professional services, bringing the total NLP software, hardware, and services market opportunity to $22.3 billion by the end of the forecast period.

Facebook announced today that it is using artificial intelligence to make sure that 360-degree photos uploaded to the social network look their best when other people view them. The company laid out a system at its @Scale conference today that uses deep neural networks to try to correct for common orientation errors with the photos that are uploaded. If someone taking a 360 degree photo doesn't hold the camera perfectly in line with the horizon, the resulting image can be tilted, which makes it harder to read and breaks the sense of immersion if the image is being viewed in virtual reality. Facebook's system takes in a photo and outputs a pair of values for the tilt and roll correction needed to bring the horizon of the photo in line. That way, it doesn't feel like users are viewing a crooked image when they look around a scene.

We just announced the raising of $5.3 million in funding to further our drive to bring automation to the back-office finance operations of small and mid-sized enterprises. The funding puts YayPay at a major inflection point in which we can accelerate our momentum by recruiting more great talent, roll out a full suite of intelligent order-to-cash automation software, and increase sales activities. You can read the press release here. Eugene Vyborov and I co-founded YayPay with a vision to help finance teams perform their most valuable work, and we're doing exactly that. We released our first software module in January, have collected over $100 million in receivables, and processed more than 150,000 invoices.

Frost & Sullivan's research, Disruption in Global Financial Services, 2017--Machine Learning is Imperative, provides an overview of ML market dynamics, including technology trends, drivers, and challenges for adoption. Case studies and profiles of some of the key players in the report cover Google, IBM, Orange, Swisscom, Onfido, Darktrace, Klarna, Infosys, SAP, and Rasa.ai. To access more information on this analysis, please visit: https://goo.gl/4CtAwr "The biggest advantage of ML solutions is their ability to learn from every transaction and instance. Today, companies and consumers are more comfortable with hybrid services. However, the fact that machines are evolving at a rapid pace, learning continuously and using this knowledge to improve customer satisfaction and experience is the biggest differentiator," stated Digital Transformation Senior Industry Analyst Deepali Sathe.

Audi laid out its plans for autonomous vehicles and how it intends to use AI to us back in July, and now the automaker is ready to show off what it's been working on. At this year's IAA auto show in Frankfurt, Audi debuted the AIcon and ElAIne (above and below), a pair of cars capable of Level 4 autonomy (conditional, but fully automated driving) that it claims are empathetic to their drivers' needs. "They will be able to continually interact with their surroundings and passengers, and thus adapt themselves in a better way than ever before to the requirements of those on board," Audi wrote in a lengthy press release. The idea is that, through machine learning, the platform will be able to anticipate what you want before you ask. The example Audi gives is one of its cars suggesting a service (think: Indian take-out or maybe a spa day) and booking it for the driver like a personal assistant might.