SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2017 New York. The 19th Cloud Expo and 6th @ThingsExpo will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. "The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it," stated Roger Strukhoff. "More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Internet to enable us all to improve the state of the world and lives of people. Roger Strukhoff is Conference Chair of Cloud Expo @ThingsExpo, and Editor of SYS-CON Media's CloudComputing BigData IoT Journals. He also serves as Director of Research for Altoros, Executive Director of the Tau Institute, and Co-Chair of DCD Converged.

Coffee giant Starbucks will join the growing wave of companies using artificial intelligence and chatbots to supplement human employees, planning to unveil today what it calls an "innovative conversational ordering system" for its mobile app called "My Starbucks Barista." The company announced the new technology at its annual investor conference today, where executives including current Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and future CEO Kevin Johnson outlined the company's five-year growth plan. Starbucks teased ahead to the announcement in a news release about the event. "Today, Starbucks will unveil an innovative conversational ordering system, My Starbucks Barista, powered by groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Starbucks Mobile App. Starbucks Mobile App customers will be able to place their orders via voice command or messaging interface, delivering unparalleled speed and convenience, enhancing customer loyalty and engagement and further extending the accessibility of the Starbucks app. The My Starbucks Barista feature will roll out first on iOS in limited beta in early 2017 and be made available to more iOS and Android users in subsequent releases."

In recent years, advanced machine learning techniques have enabled computers to recognize objects in images, understand commands from spoken sentences, and translate written language. But while consumer products like Apple's Siri and Google Translate might operate in real time, actually building the complex mathematical models these tools rely on can take traditional computers large amounts of time, energy, and processing power. As a result, chipmakers like Intel, graphics powerhouse Nvidia, mobile computing kingpin Qualcomm, and a number of startups are racing to develop specialized hardware to make modern deep learning significantly cheaper and faster. The importance of such chips for developing and training new AI algorithms quickly cannot be understated, according to some AI researchers. "Instead of months, it could be days," Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in a November earnings call, discussing the time required to train a computer to do a new task.

DEDHAM, MA--(Marketwired - Dec 7, 2016) - RAGE Frameworks, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) for the Enterprise, today announced that a leading diversified investment and financial services company has deployed RAGE LiveSpread to automate the extraction, interpretation and processing of financial statements and other documents needed for credit analysis. RAGE LiveSpread is a contextual, traceable machine learning solution built on the RAGE-AI platform. Dealing with variations in form (electronic files, pdfs, and paper statements), format, language, accounting standards across countries, and data delivery methods makes financial statement automation a major challenge. Currently, this is a manual, error-prone, and non-scalable process at every major bank around the world. At this leading investment and financial services company, RAGE's solution completely automates the ingestion, extraction, interpretation of investment reports, bank statements and Income Tax returns.

Etiya's'Serdoo' uses AI to automate customer service management SINGAPORE, 6th December 2016 -- Etiya, the leading independent software vendor providing telco CRM, catalog-driven BSS/OSS, social CRM and big data analytics, announced the launch of a customer service management and application called Serdoo that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate, understand and analyse information from any interaction - such as via text and social media - with a telco's customers. Serdoo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based application that is powered by natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies. The application can be integrated with any digital channel and interprets and deciphers mail, webchats, SMS, and social media postings. The system is making its debut at TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore and is the product of 12 months' R&D at Etiya's Silicon Valley location. A number of communication service providers have already trialed Serdoo, with some initial reports showing a reduction in response times by as much as 50%.

CAMBRIDGE, MA - 10 Nov 2016: IBM Watson Health (NYSE: IBM) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard today announced a research initiative aimed at discovering the basis of cancer drug resistance. The five year, $50 million project will study thousands of drug resistant tumors and draw on Watson's computational and machine learning methods to help researchers understand how cancers become resistant to therapies. The anonymized data will be made available to the scientific community to catalyze research worldwide. IBM Watson Health and the Broad Institute bring the data prowess of Watson to study cancer drug resistance in a $50M research collaboration. The goal is to identify patterns that could reveal clues into one of the greatest medical mysteries of cancer.

The 7th Internet of @ThingsExpo will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Chris Matthieu is the co-founder and CTO of Octoblu, a revolutionary real-time IoT platform recently acquired by Citrix. Octoblu connects things, systems, people and clouds to a global mesh network allowing users to automate and control design flows, processes and sensor data, and analyze/react to real-time events and messages as well as big data trends and anomalies. Prior to co-founding Octoblu, Chris was the founder of Nodester, an open-source Node.JS PaaS which was acquired by AppFog and the founder of Teleku, a communications-as-a-service cloud platform which was acquired by Voxeo. Earlier Chris served as the Tech Chair of SYS-CON's WebRTC Summit.

IBM Watson's AI is trying to find new cancer treatments IBM continued Watson's evolution on Thursday when the computing company announced it will use the artificial intelligence system to seek out new treatments for cancer patients. The plan also includes a partnership with drug-maker Pfizer, and for good reason: It will be one of the first companies to use Watson for drug research and the first to customize the A.I. for its own purposes. Pfizer will use Watson to "support the identification of new drug targets, combination therapies for study, and patient selection strategies in immuno-oncology." This collaboration is part of IBM's efforts to use Watson as a medical tool. The company said that the A.I. has "ingested" more than 1 million articles from medical journals, 4 million patents, and 25 million abstracts from Medline, a medical supplies manufacturer and distributor.

The new platform uses artificial intelligence to help drive the transition from traditional marketing creative to digital-first, mobile video marketing for businesses of all sizes. Magisto for Marketers introduces Intelligent Marketing creative into Magisto's patented artificial intelligence engine – Emotional Sense Technology . This gives marketing professionals the ability to easily create marketing videos for a variety of disciplines including content marketing, product marketing, brand marketing and performance marketing. Magisto's new offering allows marketers to create multiple variations of optimized videos by use case, platform, audience, message, product and ROI performance. The AI technology incorporates easy-to-use editing styles designed for businesses, the ability to add custom branding to clone videos and to direct Magisto's AI to refine messaging and produce multiple A/B test creatives.

Uber is coming closer to its self-driving cars goal. The ride-sharing company announced Monday it launched Uber AI Labs, a new department based in San Francisco which will focus on research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Uber also revealed it has acquired the AI research startup Geometric Intelligence. The 15 members of the startup will form the primary core of the AI Labs team. With the company's new moves, Uber is betting that artificial intelligence could improve its services.