While SQL Server 2017 continues to get attention for opening up to Linux, many of Microsoft's database advances revolve around various ways the company is opening up analytics on its flagship database. Trends come and go, but your DB strategy shouldn't be a flavor of the month. Learn why you shouldn't get distracted by new DB technology, how Facebook is using a RDBMS to do the data slicing and dicing they can't in Hadoop, and more. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid.

Anoop Dawar oversees global product management and product marketing at MapR Data Technologies. He comes to MapR with over a decade of experience leading product management and development teams at Aerohive (HIVE) and Cisco (CSCO). His scientific approach to product management and marketing stems from his background in business and technology, as both a practitioner and student. Anoop holds an MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas Austin, and an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Iraj Sadegh Amiri received his B. Sc (Applied Physics) from Public University of Urmia, Iran in 2001 and a gold medalist M. Sc. in optics from University Technology Malaysia (UTM), in 2009. He was awarded a PhD degree in photonics in Jan 2014. He has published well over 350 academic publications since the 2012s in optical soliton communications, laser physics, photonics, optics and nanotechnology engineering. Currently he is a senior lecturer in University of Malaysia (UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. O.A. Akanbi received his B. Sc. (Hons, Information Technology - Software Engineering) from Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan University, Malaysia, M. Sc. in Information Security from University Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), and he is presently a graduate student in Computer Science at Texas Tech University His area of research is in CyberSecurity.

I cannot emphasise how much that last point has contributed to my motivation to keep going. I'm personally not the type of learner inclined to spend months getting to know the basics before i get my hands dirty, so figuring out a small project on which i can start working right away proved to be an immense help in keeping me motivated throughout my learning journey. Let's be clear: you will not know how to do most of the things you want to do; but the simple fact that you WANT to get something done will help provide the motivation to search for more info on how to get it done. That will then lead you to other questions, then other questions, towards something that will soon feel like a bottomless rabbit hole! Keep going though, as many others have also gone into that deep pit and came out safely at the other end!

How soon do you need to prepare for artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is already here – it's no longer a futuristic promise. And it's been here for years. Companies should already be thinking about how they can automate many of their ordinary marketing processes. This is the basic step that every company should take to make themselves more efficient.

In a usual scenario today, a salesperson might receive a draft of a nondisclosure agreement from a potential customer and forward it to a company's in-house lawyers. It could take a couple days for the legal team to review the contract and send it back--or a couple of weeks. As the salesperson waits, he or she loses the ability to move the deal forward. "There are only a few pieces or items that you care about, but there's a labyrinth of clauses, so you don't know what will trip it up," said Andrew (Ondřej) Antos, Klarity's CEO. "We decided to use natural language processing and AI to accelerate review."

There are many different types of sites that provide a wealth of free, freemium and paid data that can help audience developers and journalists with their reporting and storytelling efforts, The team at State of Digital Publishing would like to acknowledge these, as derived from manual searches and recognition from our existing audience. Kaggle's a site that allows users to discover machine learning while writing and sharing cloud-based code. Relying primarily on the enthusiasm of its sizable community, the site hosts dataset competitions for cash prizes and as a result it has massive amounts of data compiled into it. Whether you're looking for historical data from the New York Stock Exchange, an overview of candy production trends in the US, or cutting edge code, this site is chockful of information. It's impossible to be on the Internet for long without running into a Wikipedia article.

When we made episodes of #CoffeeWithAGoogler covering Google's Artificial Intelligence Yourself (AIY) project, we wanted to test the product with a group of high school kids. We were blown away by the results -- come check it out for yourself!

"Ultimately lawyers are like programmers, only difference being, they code/write in legal language, which in most cases is English," says Shashank Bijapur, co-founder of AI driven legaltech startup SpotDraft and a former Wall Street Lawyer. It is this belief which led Shashank, a Harvard Law School graduate, from the echelons of Wall Street to finding a startup in the legaltech space which would be capable of using AI to read through contracts, organise, manage and finally, analyse them. But we are jumping the gun here. Roll back a few years to Shashank's Wall Street days where he saw day in and day out what lawyers did. I have seen upfront what lawyers do and how they work. I realised that the process is too time consuming and riddled with inefficiencies.

At #WebSummit 2017, I was part of a panel on what the future will bring in 2030 with John Vickers from Blue Abyss, Jacques Van den Broek from Randstad and Stewart Rogers from Venture Beat. John talked about how technology will allow humans to explore amazing new places. Jacques demonstrated how humans were more complex than our most sophisticated AI and thus would be an integral part of any advances. And I focused on how the current technological changes would look amplified over a 10–12 year period. After all, 2030 isn't that far off, so we have already invented all the tech, but it isn't widespread yet and we're only guessing what changes will come about with the network effects. As William Gibson said, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."