Note to the reader: This article assumes some familiarity with data science and analytics concepts. The finance team of a major Australian retailer wanted to know the answer to the question of "How much does the weather affects the weekly sales?" However, nobody in the business has a scientific method of solving it. As pointed above the business value of solving this problem is tremendous, as this could help better understand the impact of certain weather events on the top and bottom line. Not just that, the business can better monitor and report weekly transactional habits of the customer, which are influenced by the weather.

As retail and e-commerce demands continue to intensify, more businesses are considering autonomous vehicles. Since its founding in 2017, the mission of Gatik has been to deliver goods safely and efficiently using self-driving vehicles. The startup said it focuses on business-to-business, short-haul logistics for the retail industry. In this presentation, Apeksha Kumavat, co-founder and chief engineer at Gatik, will discuss how constraining the operational design domain (ODD) has brought middle-mile autonomous delivery to market quickly and effectively. Gatik's fleet of Class 1-6 autonomous vehicles moves goods from micro-fulfillment centers and "dark" stores to pick-up points – retail stores, distribution centers and offices – known as the middle mile.

Intermittency is a common and challenging problem in demand forecasting. We introduce a new, unified framework for building intermittent demand forecasting models, which incorporates and allows to generalize existing methods in several directions. Our framework is based on extensions of well-established model-based methods to discrete-time renewal processes, which can parsimoniously account for patterns such as aging, clustering and quasi-periodicity in demand arrivals. The connection to discrete-time renewal processes allows not only for a principled extension of Croston-type models, but also for an natural inclusion of neural network based models---by replacing exponential smoothing with a recurrent neural network. We also demonstrate that modeling continuous-time demand arrivals, i.e., with a temporal point process, is possible via a trivial extension of our framework. This leads to more flexible modeling in scenarios where data of individual purchase orders are directly available with granular timestamps. Complementing this theoretical advancement, we demonstrate the efficacy of our framework for forecasting practice via an extensive empirical study on standard intermittent demand data sets, in which we report predictive accuracy in a variety of scenarios that compares favorably to the state of the art.

This week brought a handful of good tech deals along with the announcement of Amazon Prime Day 2020. While Amazon's annual shopping event will take place on October 13 and 14, there are still some deals worth considering right now (not to mention, a couple of early Prime Day deals for members). Here are the best deals from this week that you can still get today. Prime members can get two 3rd-generation Echo Dots for $20 each when they use the code DOTPRIME2PK at checkout. This brings the price per Echo Dot down to its lowest ever, making this a great deal if you don't absolutely need the redesigned Echo Dot Amazon announced last week.

Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1488 of our Trek, and our focus on Fridays is the future technological and societal advances, so we call it Futuristic Fridays. My personality is one that has always been very future-oriented.

Founded in 2019, San Francisco-based Synthesis AI has developed technology that generates vast quantities of photorealistic images and pixel-perfect labels to optimize computer vision training. "The world is exploding with cameras," says Synthesis AI CEO Yashar Behzadi. This is great news for AI startups that specialize in computer vision, a field of AI that trains computers to interpret elements from digital images and videos. Up to now, computer vision has relied heavily on supervised learning, in which humans label key attributes in an image and then teach computers to do the same. But to Behzadi, this method has some pretty major setbacks.

Every day there is something new going on in the world of AWS Machine Learning--from launches to new use cases to interactive trainings. Check back at the end of each month for the latest roundup. This month we announced native support for TorchServe in Amazon SageMaker, launched a new NFL Next Gen Stat, and enhanced our language services including Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend. TorchServe is now natively supported in Amazon SageMaker as the default model server for PyTorch inference to help you bring models to production quickly without having to write custom code. Want more news about developments in ML? Check out the following stories: Laura Jones is a product marketing lead for AWS AI/ML where she focuses on sharing the stories of AWS's customers and educating organizations on the impact of machine learning.

In the United States, more than half of all households are expected to have a digital assistant or smart speaker like Google Home or Amazon Echo by 2022, and many people already today use these devices for shopping. In the Nordic region, however, relatively few consumers have purchased or plan to purchase an AI-based digital assistant. Those Nordic residents who do have one primarily use assistants to play music, do research and manage to-do lists. Yet when it comes to online shopping, the purchasing journey is to a high degree driven by convenience. In the next few years, AI solutions that save customers time and energy are expected to become increasingly common.

To date, most retailers who adopted artificial intelligence (AI) have done so purely to boost profits. However, now we are seeing a whole new driver for uptake, as there's a growing realisation that it can be used to help retailers become more sustainable as well. The good news is that these two drivers are not as separate as they might first appear: AI can make decisions that achieve sustainability and profits at the same time. Initiatives designed to drive profit and sustainability have always been linked. In fact, PwC research revealed that using AI to make decisions about environment-related areas, such as agriculture, water, energy and transport could add more than $5 trillion to the global economy over the next decade.

This smart speaker deal is too good to pass up. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. By now, Amazon lovers the world over know that life with a trusty, voice-controlled, Alexa-enabled smart speaker is just easier: These handy little devices help to keep households organized, informed and entertained. If you've been on the fence about snagging one for your own home or waiting for a price drop to add another to your collection, get thee to your virtual Amazon cart for a two-for-one special on the Echo Dot 3rd generation that's sure to knock your socks off. As part of the retailer's early Prime Day 2020 deals (shop our favorites here), Prime members (sign up for a free 30-day trial now, then pay $12.99 per month) can add two Amazon Echo Dot speakers, normally $49.99 and on sale for $39.99, to their cart and enter coupon code DOTPRIME2PK at checkout to get both speakers for just $39.98.