Amazon's Alexa already boasts more than 10,000 skills, but has now added medical advice to its repertoire. WebMD announced today that it's launched its own skill for all Alexa-enabled devices (including the Echo, Echo Dot, and Fire TV), which can answer basic health-related queries. Topics include treatments for common ailments ("Alexa, ask WebMD how to treat a sore throat"), definitions of basic diseases ("Alexa, ask WebMD what diabetes is"), and the side effects of certain drugs ("Alexa, ask WebMD to tell me about amoxicillin"). WebMD stresses that, like its website, the new Alexa skill is only meant to offer supplementary information, and adds that the software is a work-in-progress. "We want to be in the place where we believe computing is going," WebMD's vice president of mobile products, Ben Greenberg, tells The Verge.

InMyBag, a new recovery service for mobile professionals that protects mobile devices from loss, theft and damage, has formed a long-term partnership with Featurespace, the leading Adaptive Behavioural Analytics fraud prevention company, to support the service to InMyBag members. The ARIC platform will be integrated into InMyBag's system to identify and block online fraud at both the point of application and claim -- all in real time. InMyBag provides its members with same-day replacement for devices such as laptops and phones, as well as enterprise-grade data recovery. Iain Harper, InMyBag CEO, commented: "We don't really see ourselves as an insurance company. We're a members' service for mobile professionals that protects the things that matter to them most -- their mobile devices."

GRAKN.AI joins the Google Cloud Technology Partner Program GRAKN.AI is pleased to announce that we have recently joined the Google Cloud Technology Partner Program to provide GRAKN.AI Cloud. AI systems need a knowledge base to manage their data because they produce and consume more complex information than average software. GRAKN.AI is a database in the form of a distributed knowledge base with a reasoning query language that allows you to model, verify, scale, query and analyse complex data easily. By providing a query language that uses machine reasoning to uncover knowledge too complex for human cognition to infer, GRAKN.AI allows organisations to grow their competitive advantage, all the while reducing engineering time, cost, and complexity. Google Cloud Platform is a cloud computing service by Google that offers hosting on the same supporting infrastructure that Google uses internally for end-user products like Google Search and YouTube. It is the engine behind many innovative cloud solutions, such as Spotify and Feedly.

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 8, 2017) - NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) with Microsoft today unveiled blueprints for a new hyperscale GPU accelerator to drive AI cloud computing. Providing hyperscale data centers with a fast, flexible path for AI, the new HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator is an open-source design released in conjunction with Microsoft's Project Olympus. HGX-1 does for cloud-based AI workloads what ATX -- Advanced Technology eXtended -- did for PC motherboards when it was introduced more than two decades ago. It establishes an industry standard that can be rapidly and efficiently embraced to help meet surging market demand. The new architecture is designed to meet the exploding demand for AI computing in the cloud -- in fields such as autonomous driving, personalized healthcare, superhuman voice recognition, data and video analytics, and molecular simulations.

International Business Machines Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to mingle their artificial-intelligence technologies in a bid to boost sales of the powerful data-analytics offerings. The companies Monday announced plans to offer integrated AI services that weave the broad humanlike conversation and learning capabilities of IBM's Watson with Salesforce's more sales-oriented Einstein technology. The new offerings, available in the second half of the year, are aimed at helping a wide variety of companies better target products and services at customers. IBM CEO: AI Will Be Man and Machine, Not Man vs. Machine. Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, said that she believes that believes artificial intelligence will help to create jobs and that clients will have a "symbiotic relationship" with AI.

NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn) announced today their plans for HGX-1, a hyperscale GPU accelerator for AI and cloud computing. This open-source design is being released in conjunction with Microsoft's Project Olympus initiative at the OCP (Open Compute Project) conference and is designed to give hyperscale datacenters a high performance and flexible path for the machine learning industry. I see this release part of a larger narrative for NVIDIA, which has truly been seeing incredible momentum in cloud/hyperscale over the past year--their Tesla business tripled (yes, tripled) last year. The compute model is changing, and machine learning training currently favors GPU computing--NVIDIA's bread and butter. HGX-1 is a component of Microsoft's Project Olympus contribution to OCP, which, for those who are unfamiliar, is a consortium that is seeking to speed up the pace of innovation by applying the benefits of open source to hardware, which then opens up the design to the OCP community so it can easily be built and deployed.

Quantiphi, Inc., a Google Cloud Services Partner, announced today that it has received Specialization Status in Machine Learning as part of Google Cloud's new Partner Specialization Program. "We started Quantiphi over three years ago with the belief that artificial intelligence and machine learning will be essential building blocks of digital transformation, and a new breed of expertise will be necessary to help businesses harness the full potential of these technologies," said Asif Hasan, Co-founder, Quantiphi, Inc. "We are committed to bringing the power of Google Cloud Platform's machine learning technologies together with Quantiphi's experience and proven use cases in applied machine learning to customers of any size who want to achieve transformational analytics." Quantiphi has put together a wide array of machine learning models that help businesses build AI products, find and retain high value customers, improve operating efficiencies and reduce risk across several industries including Healthcare, Insurance, Media, Retail, Manufacturing and Consumer Products. About Quantiphi Inc Quantiphi is a category defining Data Science and Machine Learning software and services company focused on helping organizations translate the big promise of big data and machine learning technologies into quantifiable business impact. It is founded on the belief that machine learning and artificial intelligence are transformative technologies that will create the next quantum gain in customer experience and unit economics of businesses.

IBM and Salesforce partnered to integrate IBM's Watson AI capabilities directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform. The overarching goal is to combine deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson's structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail, the vendors said. Both companies already have in place healthcare platforms that stand to benefit from the initiative: IBM Watson for Oncology analyzes a patient's medical information against a vast array of data and expertise to provide evidence-based treatment options while Salesforce's Health Cloud patient management software incorporates Einstein. In addition to tools for application integration and weather insights, the partnership will combine predictive analytics and unstructured Watson data with Salesforce Einstein to enable data-driven decision making, the companies said, which could enable personalized and localized campaigns to patients. "The combination of Einstein and Watson will make businesses smarter and our customers more successful," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement.

Nano, a Nature Research solution, has just been given a boost by artificial intelligence (AI), increasing the information available to users by sourcing data from over 400,000 relevant research papers. Launched in June 2016, Nano offers highly-indexed and structured information on nanotechnology. It first provided over 200,000 summaries of nanomaterials, containing information on properties, synthesis and applications. These were and continue to be drawn from 30 high-impact journals from all publishers and curated by experts from across this multidisciplinary field. The scale-up, announced today, will significantly increase the breadth of data available.

Airbnb wants to mold its hosts into a powerful organizing force, akin to a union, to advocate on its behalf with local governments around the world and to serve as an ideological rebuke to the advances of AI at other tech firms. As part of that effort to increase engagement with hosts, CEO Brian Chesky announced today that he is embarking on a world tour, forming a host advisory board that will provide feedback to the company and sit in on one of its four annual board meetings, and do monthly check-ins with Airbnb users via Facebook Live. "I want to be held accountable to the community," Chesky, who is modifying his title to CEO and head of community, told a group of hosts gathered at Airbnb HQ. "It's incredibly important because when we sit in a room trying to make decisions, we want to make sure we're doing it for the community, not to the community." Chesky will visit London, New York, Cape Town, Delhi, and Beijing to meet with hosts over the next couple of weeks, and hinted that more changes are coming to improve customer service and host experience. Putting hosts front and center is part of Airbnb's business strategy -- after all, the company relies on people to list their homes for rent -- but it also hints at Airbnb's transition into political advocacy.