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.

Germany and Japan, March 8, 2017 --- Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, 'DFKI') and Hitachi, Ltd. (Hitachi) today announced the joint development of AI (artificial intelligence) technology for human activity recongnition of workers using wearable devices. The AI technology performs real-time recognition of workers' activities by integrating technology in eye-tracking glasses*1to recognize gazed objects with technology in armband devices to recognize action. The recognition ability of each activity is achieved by having the AI understand the tools or parts used at the production site as well as anticipated actions through Deep Learning*2. DFKI and Hitachi will use this newly developed AI technology to assist operations and prevent human error, to contribute to enhancing quality and efficiency on the front line of manufacturing. In line with initiatives such as Industry 4.0*3in Germany and Society 5.0*4in Japan, the manufacturing industry is accelerating steps towards innovating production using AI and robotics, and the automation of menial tasks.

Land Rover built an SUV that does double-time as a drone launch and landing pad. The vehicle is meant to help with search-and-rescue operations, and will soon be a part of the Austrian Red Cross. The drone can take off from a moving SUV, send back live footage from the air, and land without the driver having to stop. "The drone will be used in simulations to develop new and innovative techniques for disaster relief and on test-runs for complex natural disaster scenarios, including at night and in dense forests," the company said in a press release on Tuesday. The Austrian Red Cross will start testing out the special Land Rover in June.

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. 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. IBM IBM, 0.23% and Salesforce CRM, 0.34% believe the partnership will work because their AI technologies have different capabilities.

Fujitsu today announced that it has received RIKEN's order for the "Deep learning system," which in terms of operations will be one of the largest-scale supercomputers in Japan specializing in AI research. The RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project will use the new system, scheduled to go online in April 2017, as a platform to accelerate R&D into AI technology. The system's total theoretical processing performance will reach 4 petaflops(1). The system will be comprised of two server architectures, with 24 of NVIDIA DGX-1 servers and 32 FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY RX2530 M2 servers, along with a high-reliability, high-performance storage system. Fujitsu is leveraging the extensive know-how that it and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. have in high-performance computing development and AI research to build and operate one of Japan's most advanced AI research systems.

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing or 3D printing are emerging technologies that have a huge potential in a variety of industries and applications. Despite both technologies being fairly new, particularly 3D printing, procurement market intelligence experts at SpendEdge state that these technologies have several applications in the supply chain for addressing procurement challenges, and will very soon become an integral part due to its improved and sophisticated functionalities. Rapid prototyping is one of the most common uses of additive manufacturing. Since designing a successful product can be very expensive and time-consuming, 3D printed prototyping makes it quite simple at the same time shortens the manufacturing cycle. The impact of AM on supply chain is massive, some of which include increased manufacturing flexibility, reduced material waste, and the ability to employ decentralized manufacturing strategies.

The all- new test vehicle will be used to explore a full range of autonomous driving capabilities. Toyota's work on autonomous vehicles in the United States began in 2005 at its technical center in Ann Arbor, Mich.-- The company secured its first U.S. patents in the field in 2006.-- According to a report last year by the Intellectual Property and Science division of Thomson Reuters, Toyota holds more patents in the field than any other company. "This new advanced safety research vehicle is the first autonomous testing platform developed entirely by TRI, and reflects the rapid progress of our autonomous driving program," said TRI CEO Gill Pratt.

Naver and LINE Corp. unveiled their artificial intelligence (AI)-based assistant platform Clova at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017 in Barcelona, the companies reported Thursday. According to Naver and its mobile service subsidiary, Clova, which stands for "cloud virtual assistant," aims at an AI platform that works based on the five human senses. "Clova is a platform that incorporates various AI technologies including vocal, visual and conversational engines," LINE Corp. CEO Idezawa Takeshi said in his keynote at the MWC 2017, Wednesday. The two companies are jointly developing Clova by improving Naver Labs' voice-recognizing assistant service AMICA. They said it will expand the system to have more cognitive capabilities to make it more humanlike.