His research interests are in the area of large scale and online machine learning algorithms. He develops infinitely scalable machine learning algorithms for Amazon SageMaker. Amir Sadoughi is a Senior Software Development Engineer on the AWS AI SageMaker Algorithms team. He is passionate about technologies at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning.

Spanish unions have called on 1,000 Amazon workers to strike in the middle of one of the company's most important days of the year. The workers are being asked to walk-out during Amazon Prime Day, when the site runs a series of deals. The strike is being called after what unions say is a dispute over workers' rights. Activists have also called on other Amazon workers around the world to join in the strike, and for customers not to take part in the Amazon Prime Day sales. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Branding is a vital part of any company's marketing strategy. Until recently, visual presence has been one of the largest, if not the largest, factors in a company's brand -- but Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants are drastically changing the ways consumers encounter products. Graeme Pitkethly, chief financial officer of Unilever (owner of such brands as Dove, Lipton, and Axe) recently told the Wall Street Journal, "Of all the disruptions that are taking place in all the things technology is bringing into our space, voice is among the most disruptive." Companies spend big money on buying up shelf space in the stores of leading retailers, to ensure their products are at the forefront of a consumer's shopping experience. Yet increasingly, customers are no longer putting themselves in front of physical products before purchasing them.

Businesses are now using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the future, foreseeing potential product failures and public relations controversies before they happen or escalate. Of the sectors taking advantage of AI, retail ventures, including traditional bricks-and-mortar stores, are using the rapidly advancing technology to adapt to the 21st century and stay ahead of the disruption that has spurred some observers to paint a gloomy picture of the industry's future. "There is no retail apocalypse; the end of everything isn't happening," said David Ian Gray, principal and founder of the retail-focused consulting firm DIG360. "But there is this huge, cataclysmic kind of change. The ecosystem of retail is in rapid flux right now."

Google LLC has unveiled a new suite of tools for marketers that leverage its latest developments in machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence that mimics the way the human brain works. The idea is to help marketers create and place better optimized and therefore more effective advertisements on its platforms. First up is the new Local Campaigns service, which relies on machine learning to encourage more users to visit brick-and-mortar stores by optimizing ad placement so they show up when they perform a search for nearby locations. The company said Local Campaigns can also be used to gauge how effective these ads are at driving store visits by using autonomous and aggregated data from users who're signed in to Google and have their location history switched on. Google Vice President of Product Management Jerry Dischler wrote in a blog post that Local Campaigns should be useful as the majority of consumers still prefer to buy items in physical stores as opposed to buying online.

AI continues to evolve and pervade business functions and applications across industries. In retail, AI's use has moved well beyond warehouse management and e-commerce algorithms. Companies are now deploying it to help solve far more complex problems and facilitate functions across their businesses. In this report, our second in the Artificial Intelligence in Retail series, we outline some of the key areas in which 30 global retailers are using AI across business functions. We also examine in detail how two of the largest global technology-led retailers, Amazon and Alibaba Group, are using AI in alignment with our proprietary CORE framework.

GUESS?, Inc. ("GUESS") (NYSE: GES) has reached another major milestone in its partnership with Alibaba Group ("Alibaba") (NYSE: BABA) to bring artificial intelligence to the fashion world to provide customers with a more enriching shopping experience that combines online and offline shopping behaviors. Rounding out a comprehensive partnership that began in 2013 with the launch of GUESS in Tmall, this year, GUESS also became a global strategic partner of Alibaba's FashionAI project, an initiative to give shoppers a glimpse of what the future of fashion retail will look like powered by artificial intelligence. With the launch of the interactive concept shop driven by Alibaba AI, GUESS and Alibaba saw the implementation of the O2O (online-to-offline) project come to life, marking the maturity of the unified customer experience concept. On July 4, 2018, Alibaba launched the pilot FashionAI concept shop on the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) campus, pairing GUESS' extensive retail knowledge and latest collections with advanced Alibaba AI and other technologies on the sidelines of the 2018 Fashion and Textile Conference. Besides the FashionAI concept store's futuristic appeal, the project was aimed at providing a better retail experience for shoppers and to help brands better use analytics in ordering and maintaining inventory.

Holiday Extras has launched an application that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to personalise its user experience. The company, which allows consumers to book extra services when they travel, has begun using AI to use customer data to make service or product recommendations that are more likely to meet a particular customer's needs. IT organisations in the UK and across Europe are starting to accelerate the move to the cloud. Read more about the key areas in which senior IT managers are planning to invest in over the next 12 months. You forgot to provide an Email Address.

In February 2018 Alibaba Cloud launched Cloud and AI Solutions in Europe to meet changing needs in digital transformation. The company rolled out an array of products at the Mobile World Congress to meet the surging demand for powerful and reliable cloud computing services as well as advanced AI solutions among European enterprises to support them to capture opportunities in this digital transformation era. Today, the Alibaba Group has announced the launch of their new retail experience powered by Alibaba FashionAI. Strategically partnering up with GUESS on the FashionAI project, Alibaba has come up with a way for customers to experience personalised mix-and-match recommendations from Alibaba's FashionAI. Scheduled to be open to the public on the 5th- 7th July 2018, the concept store will house garments and accessories by GUESS.

Amazon's Prime Day sale launched the evening of Monday, July 16 and will run through July 17, 2018. SAN FRANCISCO – As with all sales, the trick during Amazon's Prime Day is knowing what's really a deal and what's just hype. One market research firm found that only half the items it tracked during the week of the sale were cheaper. Ahead of Amazon's fourth Prime Day on July 16, USA TODAY reviewed pricing analyses from at least four market-tracking firms to determine whether criticism of the 36-hour sales event -- that some sellers use it to clear out undesirable stock before the holidays -- was valid. Or whether shoppers could find deals on items they really wanted.