Japanese convenience stores are testing out robots to stock store shelves in hopes of combating the country's labor shortage and allowing human workers to socially distance during a pandemic. FamilyMart, Japan's second largest convenience store chain, has partnered with robotics company Telexistence on an android stock boy named Model-T, after Henry Ford's famous car. Rather than use AI, Model-T is connected to a human operator who manipulates the robot's movements remotely using virtual reality (VR). The seven-foot tall robot has a wide range of motion, necessary for lifting and moving products, with a lag time of only 50 milliseconds between operator and automaton. This week Model-T was rolled out at Lawson, another convenience store that is a subsidiary of Mitsubishi.

This week was jam-packed with new product announcements but we also got a couple of good deals, too. Apple's AirPods Pro remain at their lowest price ever -- only $199 -- and the latest MacBook Air is $100 off. Those in need of a new smartphone can grab the latest from Samsung for $200 less and the solid Beats Solo Pro headphones are down to $199. Here are the best deals from this week that you can still buy today. You can get AirPods Pro for their lowest price ever, only $199, on Amazon, Walmart or Staples.

What if you could receive the same personalization and experience you get from online shopping, but in brick and mortar stores? Loop Insights is doing just that. Brick and mortar retail isn't going anywhere, but it does need to adapt to offer better in-store customer experiences. Loop Insights solves a significant problem for traditional retailers - big and small - who are losing customers to e-commerce retail. All e-commerce sites have easy access to company-wide connectivity, real-time insights, and personalized marketing.

The retailers then apparently decided to do what they do on Black Friday: Open up earlier than expected and let the mayhem commence. Geoff Keighley, the former journalist who now runs The Game Awards, shared breaking news about retailers opening preorder sites early Wednesday night. Sure enough, within the hour, Walmart's site opened up for preorders, which were gone within minutes. Other retailers like Best Buy, Target and GameStop followed suit.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most talked-about technologies of the 21st century. Helping to automate and simplify time-intensive or complicated tasks that have traditionally been taken care of by workers, it's often considered to still be in its infancy. What the average layman doesn't realise, however, is how widespread this type of technology already is. While many envisage it as futuristic and expensive, it's actually used by a huge number of businesses across an array of industries. These include not only multibillion-dollar enterprises like Amazon and Google, but a number of smaller concerns too, from fitness apps through to marketing agencies and retail outlets. One of the ways these companies are utilizing AI is through the medium of chatbots.

With 67% of consumers worldwide using chatbots regularly, organizations are flocking to these unique solutions to customer service challenges. However, with the bot market getting flooded, the quality of an organization's chatbot is increasing in importance. The emerging trend is that consumers want to feel like they're speaking to a real person. But how do you ensure that human touch whilst maintaining the advantages of the chatbot? Here are a few tips to bear in mind.

Competitions play an invaluable role in the field of forecasting, as exemplified through the recent M4 competition. The competition received attention from both academics and practitioners and sparked discussions around the representativeness of the data for business forecasting. Several competitions featuring real-life business forecasting tasks on the Kaggle platform has, however, been largely ignored by the academic community. We believe the learnings from these competitions have much to offer to the forecasting community and provide a review of the results from six Kaggle competitions. We find that most of the Kaggle datasets are characterized by higher intermittence and entropy than the M-competitions and that global ensemble models tend to outperform local single models. Furthermore, we find the strong performance of gradient boosted decision trees, increasing success of neural networks for forecasting, and a variety of techniques for adapting machine learning models to the forecasting task.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Amazon SageMaker removes the heavy lifting from each step of the ML process to make it easier to develop high-quality models. As datasets continue to increase in size, additional compute is required to reduce the amount of time it takes to train. One method to scale horizontally and add these additional resources on Amazon SageMaker is through the use of Horovod and Apache MXNet. In this post, we show how you can reduce training time with MXNet and Horovod on Amazon SageMaker.

Every day, in our web blog page, I've been stating that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are gaining important traction within the business, with companies increasingly using these modern technologies to enhance business operations and better tailor customer preferences. Today, I would like to provide you some use cases of AI by giving major 15 brands as examples that adopted AI to improve their business operations and growth. Before that, let's look into the below AI statistics to know how beneficial brands can be in pleasing their customers. Undoubtedly, Amazon is the big brand that has adopted AI at first and highly benefited from this trending technology. Let me explain one of the best use cases of Artificial intelligence.

Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan will be the first Indian celebrity to lend his voice to Amazon's Alexa digital assistant starting next year, as the Silicon Valley giant expands its presence in the significant market. The 77-year-old actor has been a household name in India for nearly half a century, and his deep baritone is instantly recognisable to listeners in the country of 1.3 billion. Foreign firms such as Amazon have spent tens of billions of dollars in India in recent years as they fight for a piece of the Asian giant's burgeoning digital economy. In a blog post on Monday, Amazon India said Bachchan's "voice experience" feature will become available for purchase on Alexa next year. "It will include popular offerings like jokes, weather, shayaris (poetry), motivational quotes, advice and more," the firm said.