Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at left, with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. (Photo: Brian Smale) Microsoft and GE are joining forces for new cloud technologies that will bring improved use of big data to production. GE will bring its Predix industrial data-gathering operating system to Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, the two companies announced Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. The deal is the first in a planned strategic partnership between GE and Microsoft. "Every industry and every company around the world is being transformed by digital technology," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement announcing the partnership. "Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business -- from the factory floor to smart buildings."

WIRE)--International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a 2016 IDC Innovators report recognizing pioneering players in the machine learning-based text analytics market. IDC Innovators are companies with under 50M in revenue that offer an inventive technology and/or groundbreaking new business model. Kira Systems, Loop AI Labs, NetBase, and Taste Analytics were all named as IDC Innovators in the machine learning-based text analytics market for 2016. "Organizations are continually looking to improve their handling of data, especially unstructured data, given the explosion of information that is available via the Internet today," said David Schubmehl, Research Director, IDC's Content Analytics, Discovery and Cognitive Systems research. "Understanding and utilizing this human-generated data is a significant challenge for most organizations and the use of machine learning based text analytics is rapidly becoming the best approach to dealing with this type of data."

During his company's first-quarter earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said delivering artificial intelligence and machine learning as cloud services to enterprise customers "is going be a huge source of differentiation for us." "We are at an exceptionally interesting tipping point where these technologies are really taking off," Pichai told financially grounded Wall Street investors. Google, Mountain View, Calif., is engineering solutions that can enable services partners to help customers use machine learning to understand their data, he said. A couple of weeks later, at Google's I/O developers' conference, Pichai revealed a new custom chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, that will power machine-learning workloads. One notable customer, Snapchat, already is using Google's platform to learn more about its users by studying the content of the photos they post on the social media site. And in March, Google enjoyed its own board game coup.

According to TechSci Research report, "United States Artificial Intelligence Market, By Application, By Region, By End User Competition Forecast & Opportunities, 2011-2021", the artificial intelligence market in the US is projected to grow at a CAGR of 75% during 2016 - 2021 on account of growing artificial intelligence technology adoption in consumer electronic devices, research and developmental activities in healthcare industry, unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous cars, etc. Moreover, venture capital investments in this sector, are in full swing, especially in the US. The country is witnessing numerous start-ups sprouting every year, backed by various angel investors and venture capitalists. Major venture capitalist active in the United States artificial intelligence market include Accel, General Catalyst Partners, GV, Work-Bench, Promus Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Samsung Electronics, Wipro Technologies, Samsung Global Innovation Centre, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Formation 8, among others. In 2015, western region of the United States dominated the artificial intelligence market of the country, on account of presence of major end users such as cyber security solution providers, healthcare institutes, government headquarters, etc., in the region.

For more information about embedded vision, please visit: http://www.embedded-vision.com Bill Jenkins, Senior Product Specialist for High Level Design Tools at Intel, presents the "Accelerating Deep Learning Using Altera FPGAs" tutorial at the May 2016 Embedded Vision Summit. While large strides have recently been made in the development of high-performance systems for neural networks based on multi-core technology, significant challenges in power, cost and, performance scaling remain. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are a natural choice for implementing neural networks because they can combine computing, logic, and memory resources in a single device. Intel's Programmable Solutions Group has developed a scalable convolutional neural network reference design for deep learning systems using the OpenCL programming language built with our SDK for OpenCL.

Christopher Crosbie is a Healthcare and Life Science Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services. This post is co-authored by Gopal Wunnava, a Senior Consultant with AWS Professional Services. SparkR is an R package that allows you to integrate complex statistical analysis with large datasets. In this blog post, we introduce you running R with the Apache SparkR project on Amazon EMR. The diagram of SparkR below is provided as a reference, but this video provides an overview of what is depicted.

Deftr, legal tech company, and Y Combinator Fellowship recipient, today announced the launch of the first AI-powered tool that helps professionals diagram intricate corporate structures. The new product reads text as it is typed in real time, then automatically turns that text into a shareable, interactive graphic illustrating a corporate structure or transaction. Named for the dynamic tax ledger used by the Ottoman Empire, Deftr helps legal and professional service firms focus on high-level, strategic work by leveraging artificial intelligence to automate manual work. From tax law and IRS guidance to corporate structuring and financial regulations, we enable users to navigate legal complexity and understand its practical consequences intuitively, simply, and cheaply. For hundreds of years the Swiss watch had been considered to be the most accurate, trust-worthy and well-designed way of telling the time – the best way to convey that crucial information to a wearer.

In an effort to apply data-driven insights to one of the most fundamental aspects of running a health care system, UPMC announced today that it has formed Pensiamo, an independent company that aims to help hospitals improve supply chain performance through a comprehensive source-to-pay offering, including cognitive analytics with IBM Watson Health technologies. IBM (NYSE:IBM) is a minority owner of Pensiamo. Supply chain costs are the second-largest and fastest-growing expense behind labor costs for health care providers [1]. The Institute of Medicine estimates that nearly one-third of health care spending is waste [2]. In today's dynamic environment, providers face mounting pressure to improve the effectiveness of patient care while controlling costs.

In an effort to apply data-driven insights to one of the most fundamental aspects of running a health care system, UPMC announced today that it has formed Pensiamo, an independent company that aims to help hospitals improve supply chain performance through a comprehensive source-to-pay offering, including cognitive analytics with IBM Watson Health technologies. IBM is a minority owner of Pensiamo. Supply chain costs are the second-largest and fastest-growing expense behind labor costs for health care providers. The Institute of Medicine estimates that nearly one-third of health care spending is waste. In today's dynamic environment, providers face mounting pressure to improve the effectiveness of patient care while controlling costs.

Seattle-based machine learning startup Dato, which originally launched as GraphLab, announced today that it has changed its name again. Now, the company is known as Turi, an ode to computer science legend Alan Turing. This past September, Turi -- then Dato -- found itself in a trademark infringement argument with fellow tech startup Datto after Dato changed its name from GraphLab in January 2015. Datto, which has been offering data backup and recovery services from its Connecticut headquarters since 2007, first complained about Dato's new name just weeks after the company finished its rebranding from GraphLab. Datto argued that Dato's new name would cause confusion.