Amazon.com has long talked about its ambitions for using drones to deliver small parcels to its legions of customers. Now, it appears the e-commerce giant is one step closer to that goal. On Wednesday, the company said that it has made its first autonomous drone delivery -- an order for an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn -- to a shopper in the United Kingdom. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, tweeted Wednesday morning that the box was at the customer's home 13 minutes after the order was placed. First-ever #AmazonPrimeAir customer delivery is in the books. Check out the video: https://t.co/Xl8HiQMA1S

M6 Publicité and M6 Web Select Accenture's New Advertising Offering, Powered by Artificial Intelligence, To Target Ads More Effectively NEW YORK; Dec. 13, 2016 – M6 Publicité and M6 Web, Group M6 subsidiaries, have chosen Accenture's (NYSE: ACN) new Advanced Video Analytics offering that uses artificial intelligence to more accurately predict customer advertising preferences and serve targeted ads more effectively. M6 Group is the second largest private TV Group in France with major traditional TV channels such as M6, W9, and 6ter, as well as 6play, a free digital TV platform. M6 Publicité and M6 Web chose Accenture to implement a powerful data-driven advertising optimization tool run by a team of data scientists, analysts and developers. This data tool integrates several Accenture offerings including artificial intelligence that increases the number of users reached with targeted ads. Processing large amounts of historical user data, artificial intelligence can predict with more precision users' interests, behaviors, and purchasing actions.

The Toronto researchers relied on a pair of neural networks to create the AI. The first network was trained in the art of carolling with a hundred hours of online music. This enabled it to generate a basic 120 BPM melody -- complete with chords and drums -- based on a musical scale and melodic profile. To write the lyrics, a second neural net was shown a picture of a Christmas tree, which served as the song's subject. Put those elements together and you've got yourself a cheerful holiday ditty perfect for listening to while waiting out Robot Santa Claus' annual reign of terror.

Content: A key element for connectivity The proposed USD 85.4 billion AT&T-Time Warner mega-merger highlights the value of content for telco growth, and it could have regulatory and business implications for connectivity in emerging markets. Meanwhile, Hooq's 2017 expansion into Malaysia and Vietnam highlights the power of locally relevant content as Netflix continues to face tough competition in the region. Maybe Netflix's new content strategy will help? And Canada is leading a local content charge of its own. The rapidly growing Chinese Internet giant Tencent's entrance into the global AI race comes as China's top search engine, Baidu recently reaffirmed that AI will be key to its future growth. Meanwhile, a new study finds China to be a close second to the U.S. in terms of the number of AI studies presented at top academic conferences in 2015.

After attending this year's IBM World of Watson event in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I was both stunned and overwhelmed by the advancements in artificial intelligence and cognitive. I have written about IBM and Watson several times over the last few years, but this year seems to be it's coming out party. I remember when Watson was a contestant on the TV game show "Jeopardy." It has grown leap years in the last five years. What we think we know about AI mostly comes from the movies, TV and sci-fi, and it has been with us for quite a while.

The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site. Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company. Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material. It is "an algorithm that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to our policies," he said.

Software developer and cartoonist Andy Herd wondered what would happen if he tasked an AI with writing new episodes of the TV sitcom, Friends. Utilizing Google's open source machine-learning toolbox, TensorFlow, Herd fed the system every script from nine seasons of the show. The results mostly bordered on gibberish but Herd managed to isolate several "scenes" that came close to a sublime form of inanity by placing Chandler "in a muffin" and having Monica randomly yell out, "Chicken Bob!" for some unknown yet oddly perfect reason.

It was penned by an AI developed at the University of Toronto, which builds on deep learning capabilities like those of Google's DeepDream. Instead of turning images into hallucination nightmare dogs, this project took seasonal inputs and kicked out its best approximation of a real human carol. It's called "Neural Karaoke," because good science is unnerving science. To prepare, the AI was given 100 hours of Christmas music, 50 hours of song lyrics, and video feed from the game Just Dance. So the thing can dance too.

In recent blogs, I wrote about using codified narrative as a form of data. I also discussed using attribution models to systematically evaluate codified narrative for ontological constructs: e.g. I provide a brief overview of these topics a bit later in the blog. The third important piece to make use of narrative data involves "attribution profiling" in a process that I call "catching scent." Following the odour of data involves establishing a scent and then searching for it. After attribution models create profiles from the codified narrative, I have the search engine hunt for similar profiles.

A. had a recurring dream. He dreamed it almost every night, but in the morning, when Goodman or one of the instructors woke him and asked if he remembered what he had dreamed, he was always quick to say no. That wasn't because the dream was scary or embarrassing, it was just a stupid dream in which he was standing on the top of a grassy hill beside an easel, painting the pastoral landscape in water colors. The landscape in the dream was breathtaking, and since A. had come to the institution as a baby, the grassy hill was probably an imaginary place he had created or a real place he had seen in a picture or short film in one of his classes. The only thing that kept the dream from being completely pleasant was a huge cow with human eyes that was always grazing right next to A.'s easel. There was something infuriating about that cow: the spittle dripping from its mouth, the sad look it gave A., and the black spots on its back, which looked less like spots and more like a map of the world. Every time A. had that dream, it aroused the same feelings in him--calm that turned into frustration that turned into anger that immediately turned into compassion. He never touched the cow in the dream, never, but he always wanted to.