By simply waving one's hand in front of a scanner, customers may soon be able to cash out at the health-centric grocery chain, Whole Foods, as soon as next year. Amazon, which purchased Whole Foods in 2017 for more than $13 billion, is reportedly developing computer vision technology that can judge the shape and size of customers' hands to create a unique handprint, according to sources cited by the New York Post. That data would then be linked to patrons' bank information, meaning customers would be able to waive their hands in front of scanner and complete the transaction in under a second. Whole Food will reportedly begin testing a technology that reads customers hand size and shape to make payments. Patrons will be able to wave their hands in front of a sensors and complete the transaction in under a second.

We're excited to announce an end-to-end solution that leverages natural language processing to analyze and visualize unstructured text in your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain with Amazon Comprehend in the AWS Cloud. You can deploy this solution in minutes with an AWS CloudFormation template and visualize your data in a Kibana dashboard. Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) is a fully managed service that delivers Elasticsearch's easy-to-use APIs and real-time capabilities along with the availability, scalability, and security required by production workloads. Amazon Comprehend is a fully managed natural language processing (NLP) service that enables text analytics to extract insights from the content of documents. Customers can now leverage Amazon ES and Amazon Comprehend to index and analyze unstructured text, and deploy a pre-configured Kibana dashboard to visualize extracted entities, key phrases, syntax, and sentiment from their documents.

Amazon's latest payment method uses flesh and blood. The e-tailing giant's engineers are quietly testing scanners that can identify an individual human hand as a way to ring up a store purchase, with the goal of rolling them out at its Whole Foods supermarket chain in the coming months, The Post has learned. Employees at Amazon's New York offices are serving as guinea pigs for the biometric technology, using it at a handful of vending machines to buy such items as sodas, chips, granola bars and phone chargers, according to sources briefed on the plans. The high-tech sensors are different from fingerprint scanners found on devices like the iPhone and don't require users to physically touch their hands to the scanning surface. Instead, they use computer vision and depth geometry to process and identify the shape and size of each hand they scan before charging a credit card on file.

Machine learning is impacting countless industries, from the recent discovery of a black hole to improving healthcare, we are just scratching the surface. The retail industry is a prime example. Retailers and manufacturers are racing to figure out how they can employ machine learning to target specific consumers, monitor trends, and discover new pricing models. While retailers and manufacturers are doubling down on new ways to target and sell to consumers, Jia Rui Ong, a two-time Nanodegree program graduate, and his team are employing machine learning to help you, the consumer, find the best price for the clothing you desire. We recently had a chance to sit down with Jia Rui Ong and his team at Yux to discuss their product, as well as, our newly updated Machine Learning Nanodegree program.

This article is part of CMO.com's Industry Spotlight 2019 collection. Digital technology is advancing at breakneck speed--and it's putting pressure on businesses to produce new apps, tools, and technologies as they seek to compete in the digital economy. Not surprisingly, emerging technologies are at the center of this revolution. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are unleashing enormous changes. Ditto for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), chatbots, image and voice recognition, advanced GPS, and analytics.

This current year has already ushered in a tidal wave of tech innovations, from the rise of social robots and personal assistants to Amazon Prime's one-day delivery gamble and the proliferation of voice search. The latter alone became a $1.8B retail segment in the US in 2017, and is predicted to rise to around $40B by 2022. Amazon Prime's ability to prioritize Prime subscribers in their supply chain and get them their packages within 24 hours has rocked the world of online retail. Chatbots have been heavily deployed this year too, and are generally well-received by customers who would otherwise have to call or submit forms. But we're more than halfway through 2019, so it's time to ask: What big tech changes are going to affect the way we live and work in 2020?

The Indian AI startups space is booming and now encompasses various avenues such as computer vision, self-driving, retail, audio production and innovating e-commerce platforms, among others. This year we have come with a list of yet another 10 awesome startups that are revolutionising the field of artificial intelligence with their impressive technologies. These startups are about two to three years old and are already beginning to show some remarkable developments in the field of AI. Please note that this is not a ranking and the startups are listed in alphabetical order. Here is our last year's list.

So, after importing and transforming the data into a readable format, we'll move to the next crucial step in Data Processing, which is Data Cleaning.

Symphony RetailAI's space planning solutions are enhanced through the advanced VR technology of InContext Solutions' ShopperMX platform, enabling retailers to streamline the space planning process and drive more effective use of physical store real estate. The resulting outcome is 5-10% improvement in category performance. "Historically, retailers have found investment in store-layout optimization to be prohibitively expensive," said Pallab Chatterjee, Symphony RetailAI CEO. "However, by virtualizing the process of category- and store-planogram design and testing, Symphony RetailAI and InContext Solutions are able to help retailers create agile store layouts that keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions. In addition to saving time and money building new store environments, retailers see instant and measurable impact through improved category growth and customer outcomes, visualized by easy-to-use overlay analytics on performance." Through this partnership, optimized planograms developed using Symphony RetailAI Store Planning and Optimization are integrated with InContext Solutions' ShopperMX 3D Content & Curation platform to make multi-user virtual reality testing possible.

In fact, in some instances, ML has made it possible to predict what you will be purchasing today, way before even you make up your mind. Today, customers are knowledgeable; almost every customer conducts independent research before entering the store to buy anything. Most of the time they prefer online shopping keeping in mind the offers provided and of course, timely delivery. These technologies have made personalized shopping experience possible in such a short span of time.