"It's encouraging to hear how many people are confident that automation and self-service will dominate customer engagement," said Houlne. "We at Humach still believe that humans will be needed to guide and tune these smart machines. Machine learning and artificial intelligence still have a lot left to learn." "2020 Customer" serves as a guide for customer care professionals looking to be proactive in their customer experience strategy. As well as providing interviews and data, it also provides a six-step roadmap for engaging with the customers of the future.

Cotton ball spider webs and peeled grape-eyeballs, begone! Because this year, the hottest new Halloween decoration is set to be the "Trumpkin," or a pumpkin carved in striking resemblance to none other than Donald Trump. Is the life of a fashion editor all front-row seats and Instagram perfection? Well, yes and no, as Marie Claire U.S.'s editor-in-chief Anne Fulenwider told us. Yes, it's glamorous, but it also means "putting your hair back in a ponytail, rolling up your sleeves, editing stories, and meeting with … Flipping posts, videos, images and more into Flipboard Magazines allows bloggers to show off passions that reach far beyond what's covered on their blog's niche. He showed us that just because music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual."

US computer company HP Inc has said it expects to cut 3,000 to 4,000 jobs over the next three years. The hardware business of the former Hewlett-Packard announced the plans as part of a larger restructuring effort. It is hoped the cuts will generate some 200m ( 163m) to 300m in annual savings for the firm, but they are expected to cost up to 500m in charges. HP also issued a lower-than-expected earnings guidance for next year. The company said it expected adjusted profit for the fiscal year 2017 to be between 1.55 and 1.65 per share.

Earlier this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that as his "personal challenge" side project for 2016, he was programming an artificial intelligence to run his home -- a basic AI that could control the lights and temperature, play music on command, unlock the door for recognized friends, and so on. He compared it to J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark's constant computerized companion in Marvel's Iron Man films. Today, Zuckerberg posted on Facebook, "It's time to give my AI Jarvis a voice. Who should I ask to do it?" The crowdsourced responses started immediately, with users recommending Paul Bettany (the actor who voiced J.A.R.V.I.S. in the MCU films), The Dalai Lama, the late Robin Williams, Donald Trump, and a lot more.

Carl Vondrick is a doctoral candidate and researcher at MIT, where he studies computer vision and machine learning. His research focuses include leveraging large-scale data with minimal annotation and its applications to predictive vision and scene understanding. Recently his work has received a lot of media attention, including features in Forbes, Wired, CNN and PopSci, and other media outlets worldwide. As part of his work with MIT CSAIL, Carl built a deep learning vision system for AI to learn and understand human behaviour and interactions, using popular TV shows like The Office, Desperate Housewives, and YouTube videos. The resulting algorithm analyzes videos, then uses what it learns to predict how humans will behave.

Elon Musk famously called it "our greatest existential threat". Physicist Stephen Hawking said that, limited by slow biological evolution, humans wouldn't be able to compete and would be superseded. But the technology that sparked those fears - artificial intelligence - is also being touted as the biggest potential advance in our history. A recent international study found that 50 per cent of experts questioned believe that artificial intelligence - or AI - will be smarter than humans within the next 24 years. And 90 per cent of those surveyed believed that milestone would be reached within 60 years.

A year or so ago a new type of drone hit the (preorder) market. It was the self-flying camera drone – a device that promised to combine camera and AI technology to create a drone that you could essentially throw in the air to follow you around and take photos and videos. Some of these drones include Snap, Lily, Staaker and Hover. Most of these companies have raised tens of millions of dollars in either equity or preorders, but have taken a while to actually ship a product. But today Hover is announcing that its first camera drone – named Passport – is going on sale today for 549 – a 50 discount on its eventual retail price of 599.

Looking to drum up consumer excitement, the tech company hosted an event in San Francisco on Tuesday to unveil a series of products, including two new phones, a virtual reality headset and the Chromecast Ultra. The flagship announcement was the introduction of Pixel, the first Google phone to carry exclusively Google branding. The company called it the "first phone made by Google inside and out." The device is poised to take on the iPhone with a built-in artificially intelligent assistant, 4K video and other bells and whistles. Here's a closer look at everything you need to know: Google (GOOG) announced a new Pixel line of phones -- the 5-inch Pixel ( 649) and 5.5-inch Pixel XL ( 769).

Fisher plays a recently divorced mother of two teens and out-of-work art critic determined to cook a traditional festive dinner with all the trimmings in her sunny Southern California home for her smartphone-addicted friends and extended family. But taming the turkey proves to be the least of her challenges when her neighborhood's cell reception suddenly goes dead, which proceeds to bring out the worst in some already less than exemplary behavior from her preoccupied houseguests. Unfortunately many viewers will have experienced their own connectivity issues long before those characters do. Although there's a genuinely cozy rapport between Fisher and Stevens, the other cast members, including Daphne Zuniga, Nick Court, Natasha Gregson Wagner and Michael Muhney, have a tougher time trying to make all the overwritten, self-consciously quirky dialogue believably their own. Filmmaker Russell Brown clearly had something pertinent he wished to say about our plugged-in, tuned-out obsession with the Internet and was obviously going for a Luis Buñuel-Robert Altman style of social commentary here.

At Data By The Bay in May, we saw a great talk by Netflix's Justin Basilico: Recommendations for Building Machine Learning Software. Justin describes some principles for effectively developing machine learning algorithms and integrating them into software products. We found ourselves nodding violently in agreement, and we wanted to recapitulate a few of his points that resonated most strongly with us, based on our experience working with data science teams in other organizations. Justin emphasizes that "developing models is iterative" and experimentation is important. He also suggests "avoiding dual implementations" so it's easy to use a model in production once it's been built, without a re-implementation step.