WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump's choice for labor secretary is CEO of a fast food empire that is outsourcing jobs, a stark contrast with Trump's scathing attacks on companies that send jobs overseas. A filing with the Department of Labor and Trump's criticism of outsourcing could be raised at Andrew Puzder's confirmation hearing, with Democrats questioning how well he can advocate for workers. Puzder's company, CKE Restaurants Inc., notified the government in August of 2010 that it was outsourcing its restaurant information technology division to the Philippines. Doing so, the agency found, "contributed importantly" to the layoffs of both CKE employees and those of an outside staffing firm at an Anaheim, California, facility. The agency's finding made workers eligible for federally funded benefits meant to dampen the impact of globalization on employees. "By outsourcing the function to a firm that employs hundreds of Help Desk specialists, CKE was able to improve the quality of service levels to their restaurants," the company said in a statement Wednesday to The Associated Press.

Announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, BelleFox (www.bellefox.ai) is poised to revolutionize how families interact in this constantly connected world. The BelleFox Wi-Fi router is a unique technology that delivers not only reliability and fast speeds, but a host of features to help parents see and understand their children's online behavior -- and even to learn more about who their children are as individuals. The system uses Big Data and AI (artificial intelligence) to deliver its powerful, useful insights. "Children today are online natives, which can be extremely stressful for parents," stated Lily Li, co-founder of BelleFox. "Until now, family Wi-Fi systems simply offered ways to limit children's time and access to specific sites.

MyPolly is the world's first product that introduces continuous conversation via natural language understanding. MyPolly, which is currently in closed beta testing for developers and bot builders, enables virtual assistants and bots to interpret a human's input, making MyPolly "smarter" over time. Jack Crawford, Founder and CEO of datalog.ai and Malaikannan Sankarasubbu, Founder and CTO, started the company last year to equip bots and virtual assistants to intelligently remember associations between words and things. For example, you might say to your virtual assistant, "My dog's name is Sebastian." Later in the dialogue, MyPolly would recall your dog's name.

Raspberry Pi will probably getting a taste of some advanced artificial intelligence tools from Google as Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that the search giant is planning to make its "range of smart tools" available for the maker community this year. The machine learning technology from Google will enable makers from the Raspberry Pi community to make even more powerful projects than before, the company said in its official blog. Google has even asked makers to share ideas through a survey so that the company can meet smart tools for the makers. Thank you for taking the time to take our survey. We at Google are interested in creating smart tools for makers, and want to hear from you about what would be most helpful.

Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services, today announced that it has been awarded in the'Best in Show' category by TM Forum Live! Asia". TM Forum is a leading global industry association for digital business. The award was given for the'Cognitive Digital Agent' - a project championed by Globe Telecom, Philippines along with Infosys, Amdocs and Huawei. The project demonstrated the feasibility of using cognitive computing technologies aligned to telecom business processes to enhance customer experience in a more intuitive and natural fashion. To address changing consumer needs and demands in today's digital economy, Infosys, along with Huawei and Amdocs, established the Cognitive Digital Agent - a five-month project, led by Globe Telecom. This was aimed at creating the next generation of customer care services, leveraging artificial intelligence technologies. The core solution is driven by Infosys' expertise in natural language processing, machine learning and cognitive computing. The Cognitive Digital Agent has the capability to address complex queries and answer questions through omni-channel access including interactive voice responses (IVR), portals and wearables. The Cognitive Digital Agent creates a difference in situations where, if a call center is contacted, the responses are generated using natural language processing - making them more consumer friendly, or on social media platforms and in smart watches where the machine agent responds to queries 24x7. TM Forum recognized the project for some of these exceptional demonstrations of business outcomes across channels, and the inventive use of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). "Our goal has been to explore the use of cognitive computing and artificial intelligence technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning to create the next generation of customer care services, which, in turn, enabled us to create this compelling project that can significantly improve customer satisfaction.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be understood as a science, engineering and deployment of machines, which perform tasks with intelligence as similar to humans. Since its inception 60 years ago, AI has observed significant growth in recent years. Initially, AI was considered as topic for academicians, though in recent years with development of various technologies, AI has turned into reality and is influencing many lives and businesses. Additionally, evolution of various other supplementary technologies such as cloud computing, machine learning and cognitive computing are collectively paving the growth of the market for AI. Many IT giants and start-ups are investing heavily in development of AI software solutions and hardware products. Some the prominent players in AI market in the recent times are Intel Corporation (U.S.), Google Inc. (U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (U.S.), Amazon.com,

This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com A philanthropic organization set up by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan has signed a deal to acquire Toronto tech company Meta. Financial terms of the deal, announced by venture capital firm iGan Partners, an early Meta backer, were not immediately available. Zuckerberg and Chan set up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015. Meta uses artificial intelligence to help researchers keep on top of the latest scientific papers.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kinetica, provider of the fastest, in-memory database accelerated by GPUs, today announced the availability of in-database analytics via user-defined functions (UDFs). This industry-first capability makes the parallel processing power of the GPU accessible to custom analytics functions deployed within Kinetica. This opens the opportunity for machine learning/artificial intelligence libraries such as TensorFlow, BIDMach, Caffe, and Torch to run in-database alongside, and converged with, BI workloads. Kinetica also introduced its extensible and flexible'Reveal' visualization framework for interactive, real-time data exploration. Kinetica's advanced in-database analytics make it possible for organizations to affordably converge Artificial Intelligence, Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, natural language processing, and other data analytics into one powerful platform.

This will present what is Apache SystemML. It includes demonstration of how Data Scientist can use Apache SystemML through Jupyter notebook (or Data Science Experience Jupyter notebook) to do Machine Learning pipeline. It will have very high level information about how Apache SystemML achieves performance gain through its optimization and runtime techniques. As well it will explain how user can get Apache SystemML software and use it for doing machine learning similar to how it is demonstrated in the session. For more information about the Spark Technology Center: http://www.spark.tc/ Follow us: @apachespark_tc Location: San Francisco, CA Apache, Apache Spark, and Spark are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries.

The Arterys Cardio DLTM application is vendor agnostic and was developed using data from several thousand cardiac cases. The software produces editable automated contours, providing precise and consistent ventricular function in seconds. The trained deep learning algorithm was validated as producing results within an expected error range comparable to that of an experienced clinical annotator. This clearance enables Arterys to make use of its unique clinical annotation platform, which collects ground-truth data every time a user views a study on Arterys.com. In the future, the deep learning model can be optimized as new data is collected from all global users.