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Adding Smarts to Vending Machines Drives Convenience, Efficiency

Communications of the ACM

Vending machines, which allow people to easily purchase items without interacting with a human worker, have been around since the 1st century, when a Greek engineer and mathematician named Hero Alexandria created a machine that accepted a coin before dispensing holy water at a temple, to prevent people from taking more than their share of holy water. Two millennia later, a far greater number and variety of products can be purchased from vending machines, thanks in part to the advent of new technologies including always-on, Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity, advanced physical and digital controls that allow these machines to be placed in a wide variety of settings, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms that can capture and analyze customer insights, improve stocking efficiency, and deliver greater levels of personalization to customers. The global installed base of connected vending machines reached an estimated 2.4 million units in 2019, according to Berg Insight, a research firm that tracks the installed base of connected vending machines. Connected vending machines are equipped with an always-on Internet connection, which allows data to be sent between machines in the field and management software, enabling real-time payments, monitoring, and remote management of the machines. Advanced feature sets and functionality are projected to drive the market to nearly nine million units by 2024, according to Berg Insight, helped along by the desire of organizations to better serve customers without needing to attract and retain relatively costly human workers.


Machine Learning For Absolute Beginners: A Plain English Introduction (AI, Data Science, Python & Statistics for Beginners): Theobald, Oliver: 9781549617218: Amazon.com: Books

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Machine Learning For Absolute Beginners: A Plain English Introduction (AI, Data Science, Python & Statistics for Beginners) [Theobald, Oliver] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Machine Learning For Absolute Beginners: A Plain English Introduction (AI, Data Science, Python & Statistics for Beginners)


Automated Extraction of Fine-Grained Standardized Product Information from Unstructured Multilingual Web Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Extracting structured information from unstructured data is one of the key challenges in modern information retrieval applications, including e-commerce. Here, we demonstrate how recent advances in machine learning, combined with a recently published multilingual data set with standardized fine-grained product category information, enable robust product attribute extraction in challenging transfer learning settings. Our models can reliably predict product attributes across online shops, languages, or both. Furthermore, we show that our models can be used to match product taxonomies between online retailers.


Fine-tune text-to-image Stable Diffusion models with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart

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In November 2022, we announced that AWS customers can generate images from text with Stable Diffusion models in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. Stable Diffusion is a deep learning model that allows you to generate realistic, high-quality images and stunning art in just a few seconds. Although creating impressive images can find use in industries ranging from art to NFTs and beyond, today we also expect AI to be personalizable. Today, we announce that you can personalize the image generation model to your use case by fine-tuning it on your custom dataset in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. This can be useful when creating art, logos, custom designs, NFTs, and so on, or fun stuff such as generating custom AI images of your pets or avatars of yourself. In this post, we provide an overview of how to fine-tune the Stable Diffusion model in two ways: programmatically through JumpStart APIs available in the SageMaker Python SDK, and JumpStart's user interface (UI) in Amazon SageMaker Studio. We also discuss how to make design choices including dataset quality, size of training dataset, choice of hyperparameter values, and applicability to multiple datasets.


Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook For Business Leaders: Yao, Mariya, Zhou, Adelyn, Jia, Marlene: 9780998289021: Amazon.com: Books

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How do I distinguish true value from AI hype? How do I distinguish true value from AI hype? What are the best business use cases for AI established so far? What are the best business use cases for AI established so far? How do I identify the best business case for AI adoption and evaluate opportunities?


Council Post: Luxury Fashion Meets Immersive Commerce: Luxury In The Metaverse Era

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Dedrick Boyd is an international e-commerce strategist and the founder of TechSparq. In 2022, brands like Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Gucci and Nike showed that they were determined to be early adopters of the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is already pushing the concept with its Horizon Worlds, and Made.com has focused further on its online presence by allowing customers to visualize furniture in their homes with their smartphone cameras. Overall, we can look to the video game industry, which is light years ahead of other industries when it comes to selling digital upgrades. Using real and in-game currency, players can buy exclusive items to enhance their look, vehicle, housing or any other part of the experience.


Top 5 AI Trends in Retail For 2023

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a major impact on the retail industry. AI technology is being used to improve many aspects of retail shopping, from product recommendation engines to personalized customer service. For example, many retailers are using AI-powered chatbots to provide instant customer service, and AI algorithms to recommend products to customers based on their previous purchases and browsing history. AI is also being used to improve supply chain management and warehouse operations, helping retailers to better manage inventory and reduce costs. Overall, the use of AI in retail is helping to make the shopping experience more efficient, personalized, and convenient for customers. The world of retail shopping is constantly changing and evolving, and one of the biggest trends in recent years has been the rise of hybrid online and offline shopping.


AI innovations in retail demand effective data strategies

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Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. AI's transformative powers are being realized across industries. From self-driving cars to robots in manufacturing, AI is slowly capturing market share. Retail is among the industries being transformed by this technology and by 2027, the market for AI in retail is expected to reach a staggering $23.2 billion. Every business that adopts AI tools needs to be aware of the different data-powered innovations within their industry and the types of data needed to bolster efficiency and decision-making.


Very teams with Constructor to transform product discovery experience with AI and machine learning -- Retail Technology Innovation Hub

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The first phase will see Very implement new search, browse and autosuggest tools across its website and app. Using artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing, machine learning and data, these tools learn from anonymous individual interactions and collaborative behaviours, with the aim of optimising the product discovery experience and providing customers with faster, more personalised results. By answering a series of questions related to their preferences, interests and goals, customers will be able to use quizzes to discover the right items for them across all product categories. The Very Group has drawn up a multi-year technology investment roadmap, coupled with new ways of working. It says that this will enable it to deliver customer experience improvements faster and more frequently than ever before.


Measure the Business Impact of Amazon Personalize Recommendations

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We're excited to announce that Amazon Personalize now lets you measure how your personalized recommendations can help you achieve your business goals. After specifying the metrics that you want to track, you can identify which campaigns and recommenders are most impactful and understand the impact of recommendations on your business metrics. All customers want to track the metric that is most important for their business. For example, an online shopping application may want to track two metrics: the click-through rate (CTR) for recommendations and the total number of purchases. A video-on-demand platform that has carousels with different recommenders providing recommendations may wish to compare the CTR or watch duration.