Though not as glamorous and fame-filled as your favorite singer, marketing professionals can transform themselves into marketing rock stars, finding and playing the latest and greatest harmonies to push your brand to the top of the billboard charts. How can you find the next guitar riff or sound that will enhance your rockstar capabilities? First, ask yourself: Are you currently planning your marketing campaigns for the next period? Even if you are not, you should step back and reflect if you are able measure the impact on your brand and on your customer experience. Often, external agencies have had to track the brand visibility of television content, which has been a time-consuming manual business.

It may have been the first bit of fake news in the history of the Internet: in 1984, someone posted on Usenet that the Soviet Union was joining the network. It was a harmless April's Fools Day prank, a far cry from today's weaponized disinformation campaigns and unscrupulous fabrications designed to turn a quick profit. In 2017, misleading and maliciously false online content is so prolific that we humans have little hope of digging ourselves out of the mire. Instead, it looks increasingly likely that the machines will have to save us. One algorithm meant to shine a light in the darkness is AdVerif.ai,

Today, Microsoft announced a series of artificial intelligence-driven features for its Bing search engine to make it more conversational and nuanced. The news, unveiled at an event in San Francisco, means that Bing will make better use of object recognition, so-called machine reading (for parsing text and extracting meaning), and other techniques tuned and improved using AI training methods. Search results will now show both multiple perspectives and multiple sources, culled from a list of pre-approved news sources, to show Bing users different sides of issues ranging from the benefits and downsides of kale to the pros and cons of contentious political issues. This builds on an earlier feature, announced back in September, in which Bing added fact checks to search results in an effort to cut down on misinformation, fake news, and other distorted stories from manipulative information sources. In a new partnership with social news site Reddit, Bing will also surface information from subreddits right in search results by using algorithms to read and analyze the user-generated text across Reddit's many communities. The integration includes AMA questions and answers populated within the search card for popular celebrities, AskReddit-sourced answers to broad service questions, and top threads for specific subreddits that will show up in search results just by searching the name of the community.

Medical devices that monitor and respond to changes in our health. Robotic assistants that know what we want before we do. Kitchens that help us with our shopping and plan our meals. Every day, we hear about how artificial intelligence is going to change the world. Amid all this focus on the future, it's easy to ignore an unavoidable truth: AI is already changing the world in significant ways.

New research can predict how plots, images, and music affect your emotions while watching a movie. Every time I think AI can't surprise me anymore, new research arrives to prove me wrong. Yesterday, scientists at the MIT Media Lab announced that they've taught a machine how to manipulate our emotions–a technology that they believe can help filmmakers create more engrossing movies and TV. In a blog post published in collaboration with strategic consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the researchers said that they used a deep neural network to watch thousands of small slices of video--movies, TV, and short online features. For each slice, the neural network guessed which were the different elements that made a moment emotionally special, constructing an emotional arc. To test their accuracy, the team got human volunteers to watch the same clips, tagging their reaction and labeling which elements--from the music to the dialogue to the type of imagery shown on screen–had a stronger weight in their emotional response.

Microsoft has revealed a major overhaul of its Bing search engine using AI to try and take on Google. The firm hopes the new features will make it far more trustworthy than it's arch rival. New features include the ability to summarize the two opposing sides of contentious questions, and another that measures how many reputable sources are behind a given answer. Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research, speaks at a Microsoft event in San Francisco, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2017. Microsoft rolled out new features on its Bing search engine powered by artificial intelligence, including one that summarizes the two opposing sides of contentious questions, and another that measures how many reputable sources are behind a given answer.

Microsoft's Bing search engine and Cortana digital assistant might not change that much from day to day, but behind the scenes they're getting smarter--integrating factual insights from more sources, including the opinions of Reddit users. At an AI-focused event in San Francisco, Microsoft showed off a number of improvements, all geared towards increasing the "intelligence" of Bing, Cortana, and Microsoft Office. Why this matters: Calling out some of these behind-the-scenes upgrades helps Microsoft demonstrate its unique attributes, and thus relevance, among the competing AI-based platforms of Amazon, Apple, and Google. Bing already lets you comparison shop for similar items across the web. Now you can isolate an object in a photo and shop for it.

Our client, a leading online retailer, that's won numerous awards for their ecommerce platform, are looking for a Machine Learning / Data Science Engineer.

By now, we've become accustomed to smart speakers shaped vaguely like cans. The original Google Home, the upcoming Apple HomePod, the Amazon Echo and Echo Plus, the UE Blast, the Harmon Kardon Invoke, and a whole pile of others all opt for life as a cylinder. The Google Home Max, however, looks like a traditional speaker, and that leaves lots of room inside for sonic power. The $400 Google Home Max does everything you'd expect a typical Google Home device to do, like tell you the weather, play trivia games, control smart home devices, and of course, sync up to music services like Spotify and Pandora. The Max is roughly the size of a large bread--not the wimpy Wonder Bread from the super market, but a hearty loaf from the farmer's market.

Microsoft has pledged USD 50 million towards expanding the AI for Earth project over the period of next five years. The company had made the announcement earlier this week at the two-year anniversary of the Paris climate accord. AI for Earth is a project with which Microsoft aims to provide solutions to some of the grave environmental problems which the world is facing today by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence. Microsoft had launched the project way back in July and had initially committed USD 2 million towards the project thereby making the recent announcement the second tranche of investment that the company is making towards the project. Through the AI for Earth project, Microsoft will provide access to its cloud services and AI computing resources to researchers and organisations who are working towards solving issues relating to water, agriculture and biodiversity.