SYS-CON Events announced today that TechTarget has been named "Media Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. TechTarget storage websites are the best online information resource for news, tips and expert advice for the storage, backup and disaster recovery markets. By creating abundant, high-quality editorial content across more than 140 highly targeted technology-specific websites, TechTarget attracts and nurtures communities of technology buyers researching their companies' information technology needs. By understanding these buyers' content consumption behaviors, TechTarget creates the purchase intent insights that fuel efficient and effective marketing and sales activities for clients around the world. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020.

It was one of those amazing "we're living in the future" moments. In an October 2013 press release, IBM declared that MD Anderson, the cancer center that is part of the University of Texas, "is using the IBM Watson cognitive computing system for its mission to eradicate cancer." Well, now that future is past. The partnership between IBM and one of the world's top cancer research institutions is falling apart. The project is on hold, MD Anderson confirms, and has been since late last year.

BARCELONA, Spain--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, global skincare brand Olay celebrated its Mobile World Congress debut with the global launch of Olay Skin Advisor, a new platform designed to help women better understand their skin and find the products best-suited to their personal skincare needs. Rooted in a suite of artificial intelligence technologies, Olay Skin Advisor marks the first application of deep learning in the beauty industry, arming women with the knowledge they need to care for their skin and better navigate the often-confusing beauty aisle. "Shopping for skincare has never been more overwhelming, as women are faced with thousands of products and promises," said Dr. Frauke Neuser, Principal Scientist for Olay. "Olay's research shows that browsing the shelf is the #1 purchase influencer for women, yet 1/3 of women do not find what they are looking for. We saw an opportunity to help women understand their skin better than ever, before they even step foot in the store. Our solution is Olay Skin Advisor, which uses artificial intelligence to deliver a smart skin analysis and personalized product recommendation, taking the mystery out of shopping for skincare products."

Massive Entertainment, the Ubisoft studio behind the popular post-apocalyptic shooter The Division, is developing a video game set in the Avatar universe. Get ready to loot Unobtanium, people. The game announcement comes eight years after the launch of the groundbreaking film, and just one day after news that Avatar 2 will begin filming in August. According to the press release, "Four sequels to Avatar are currently in development, and Lightstorm, Fox Interactive and Massive are working together to create a game that will continue to expand and deepen in the Avatar universe in exciting and innovative ways along with the films." "James Cameron and Lightstorm Entertainment changed the way we think about immersive storytelling with the first Avatar, and the ambition that they have for the forthcoming films and this game is really inspiring," said David Polfeldt, Managing Director at Massive in a statement.

This article was contributed by Mark Edmondson and Peter Meyer, both from IIH Nordic, specialists in online marketing and web communication headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Many analytics specialists agree that Machine Learning is going to revolutionise the digital analytics industry in the future, as all the major vendors battle to provide Machine Learning APIs that offer to surface interesting features of your data. These APIs offer cloud solutions that you can use to both scale up your own models, or take advantage of pre-trained models. Following our presentation at Superweek Hungary 2017, we wanted to show how you could start using these services today to enhance your own digital analytics capabilities. Among all Machine Learning techniques, we chose Sentiment Analysis since it is a common use case, but the same code with small modifications could be used for any of the machine learning APIs offered by the services we chose, Algorithmia and Google Natural Language API.

Zoho today unveiled Zia, the new Zoho CRM intelligent sales assistant, powered by AI, that detects anomalies, suggests workflows and macros, and advises salespeople the best time to contact a prospect. Zoho also launched Blueprint, a Zoho CRM tool for building and implementing business processes. In addition, the company has included a host of new features in its award-winning customer relationship management software, Zoho CRM, such as scoring rules and the SalesSignals platform, to help boost sales productivity. "Salespeople put work into their CRM. But does the CRM work in return to make it easy for salespeople?"

HELSINKI, Finland -- February 23, 2017 -- Comptel Corporation (OMX Helsinki: CTL1V) announced today that it's Fastermind has gained significant momentum since its launch at Nexterday North in November 2016. Fastermind provides artificial intelligence capabilities to digital service providers, enabling them to recommend, predict and automate real-time decisions, particularly supporting customer engagement automation. According to new research conducted by Comptel, today's mobile customers want to be treated as individuals by their service provider. Surveying 2,000 mobile data users in the US and the UK, the research found that while more than half of mobile data customers (55 percent) are eager to receive more proactive, personalised messages and services, fewer than one in seven (13 percent) have ever actually received this kind of communication from their carrier. Operators can respond to this demand for personalisation by using Fastermind to reach their customers at the right time, with the right messages, through automated marketing offers and service notifications.

China set a record high in terms of venture capital (VC) investments in 2016, despite a global slowdown. The strong performance is expected to continue with artificial intelligence (AI) an additional focus for investors, finds latest KPMG analysis. Investment by VCs in China increased 19 percent year on year to USD31 billion in 2016, although deal volumes declined 42 percent to 300 from 513 a year earlier, according to Venture Pulse, KPMG's quarterly global report on VC trends. The strong performance is attributed to a number of mega-deals recorded early in the year. The report highlights that artificial intelligence and cognitive learning are poised to transform almost every aspect of people's lives.

Google announced today that Google Assistant will start rolling out to devices running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and 7.0 (Nougat) later this week. Previously, the Assistant was only available on Google's Pixel phones, Home personal assistant, Allo messaging app and Android wear devices. Google is at the forefront of machine and deep-learning based natural language processing which they have used to power their vaunted speech recognition system. Google Assistant leverages this research to enable two-way, context-sensitive, conversational interactions between the user and the device. The Assistant syncs across devices and apps like Allo and Google Calendar and it allows voice-control of enabled smart-home devices.

Reaching a new milestone in its quest to achieve speed and scalability in indexing and exploiting vast amounts of video, IDENTV announced today the beta release of Neural Upscaling, its proprietary solution for dramatically enhancing image quality, allowing for significantly greater accuracy in object and facial recognition. "This capability automates the process of enhancing quality of a degraded image and amplifies the original with 400% more detail thus enabling rapid detection and matching of objects and faces that was previously not possible at speed and scale," explained Mohamad Shihadah, founder and CEO of IDENTV. Neural Upscaling is an integral part of IDENTV's pioneering Intelligent Video-fingerprinting Platform (IVP), a technology that combines artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision in a highly integrated fashion to deliver high-speed visual content recognition and indexing. Neural Upscaling has broad applications across commercial and national security applications and solves a critical limitation on video, faces, or objects that are degraded. IDENTV was recently selected as one of the Top 5 Artificial Intelligence companies in the DC area.