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2018 Food Trends #6: 'Technofoodology'

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For all 10 trends, watch the full video here. 'Technofoodology,' and artificial intelligence in particular, are some of the best things to ever happen to a grocery store. Our smartphones and our home-based assistants are ushering in a new way to buy our foods. Sure, we can replenish our foods by asking Alexa to order from Amazon, and just last week one of my favorite c-stores, Sheetz, announced that their made-to-order foods from all their 564 stores can be ordered on Alexa. By 2020, there will be 55 million smart devices in our homes--making that the biggest supermarket chain on the planet.


Amazon.com: Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach eBook: Julia Silge, David Robinson: Kindle Store

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If you work in analytics or data science, like we do, you are familiar with the fact that data is being generated all the time at ever faster rates. Analysts are often trained to handle tabular or rectangular data that is mostly numeric, but much of the data proliferating today is unstructured and text-heavy. Many of us who work in analytical fields are not trained in even simple interpretation of natural language. We developed the tidytext (Silge and Robinson 2016) R package because we were familiar with many methods for data wrangling and visualization, but couldn't easily apply these same methods to text. We found that using tidy data principles can make many text mining tasks easier, more effective, and consistent with tools already in wide use.


Why you should see your employees as mini-CEOs, according to a big Spanish CEO

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This interview is part of our series of . We interviewed the founders and CEOs of 20 of the fastest growing startups in Europe. We asked them about their companies, their companies' culture, and their lives, trying to understand how these three factors played a role in the achievement of such impressive growth. If you want to know where to launch your next business venture, keep reading -- Spanish startup can help you out. Founded in 2015, the company is already leading the field of location intelligence.


Ocado to wheel out C3PO-style robot to lend a hand at warehouses

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Ocado is to test a humanoid maintenance assistant in its warehouses, in the online grocery specialist's latest move to reduce reliance on human workers. Artificial Intelligence has various definitions, but in general it means a program that uses data to build a model of some aspect of the world. This model is then used to make informed decisions and predictions about future events. The technology is used widely, to provide speech and face recognition, language translation, and personal recommendations on music, film and shopping sites. In the future, it could deliver driverless cars, smart personal assistants, and intelligent energy grids.


Self-Driving Vehicles are Scrubbing Supermarket Floors

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Walmart has confirmed its testing of self-driving floor scrubbers. According to a LinkedIn article, the floor care robot that the company is trying out was developed by Brain Corp, a San Diego-based company. For more videos, subscribe to Mashable News: http://on.mash.to/SubscribeNews Give us a follow: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mashable/


39 million Americans now own a smart speaker, report claims

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One in six Americans now own a smart speaker, according to new research out this week from NPR and Edison Research โ€“ a figure that's up 128 percent from January, 2017. Amazon's Echo speakers are still in the lead, the report says, as 11 percent now own an Amazon Alexa device compared with 4 percent who own a Google Home product. Today, 16 percent of Americans own a smart speaker, or around 39 million people. The holiday shopping season also seemed to have played a role in the increased adoption of smart devices in the U.S., with 7 percent of Americans reporting they acquired at least one smart speaker between Black Friday and the end of December, and 4 percent saying they acquired their first smart speaker during the holidays. Both Amazon and Google used the holiday shopping season to their advantage in terms of acquiring market share for their respective devices by slashing prices to encourage more impulse buys, and by heavily promoting the items across their storefronts.


Human Intuition in the Omnichannel Era

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When you look back at some of the iconic films and TV series from the 60s to the 80s like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek and Back to the Future, it's surprising how many'futuristic' inventions that seemed fantastical are now a reality, or close to being so. We haven't achieved a time machine or teleporter yet, but flying cars, wearable computers and fully automated factories are here to stay. And, if Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are successful in their new ventures, we'll soon have human brain/computer interfaces. This kind of innovation isn't just happening in the world of technology, it's also being applied to the field of data science. With major advances in computing power and self-correcting algorithms, it is now possible for retailers to use predictive analytics to fine-tune their forecasting, replenishment and price/promotions decisions to improve efficiency and increase margins and revenue.


Saks president on artificial intelligence: 'We don't need A.I. in our stores. We have I'

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Saks Fifth Avenue isn't intimidated by the emergence of artificial intelligence and consumer preferences shifting to online retail, the luxury department store's president told CNBC on Friday. "When you think about the online versus the offline experience, we don't need AI in our stores. We have'I,'" said Marc Metrick, president of Saks. "We have living, breathing, 4,500 style advisors in our stores." "The focus for Saks in the luxury space is really kind of convergence between tech and this living, breathing, selling associate," Metrick said in an interview on "Squawk Box." Metrick spoke as e-commerce giant Amazon has been aggressive in expanding its retail muscle, including through partnerships and acquisitions.


Boeing wants to take on Amazon's drone delivery service

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Boeing unveiled a prototype for a massive remote-controlled drone Wednesday, meant to deliver cargo up to 500 pounds. Eventually, it wants the drone to fly itself. Such ambitions put the plane maker in direct competition with Amazon, which in December 2013 said it was developing Prime Air drone delivery service. Both companies say their drones are intended to be able to deliver goods within at least a 10-mile radius. Amazon's drones, however, are only intended to carry packages up to five pounds--a payload that the retailer says encompasses nearly 90% of its sales.


Please Do Not Assault the Towering Robot That Roams Walmart

WIRED

If you think shopping is tedious, try juggling 200,000 products in a Walmart. Not literally, of course, but somehow keeping the shelves stocked over an area of tens of thousands of square feet. For that you need a worker with a barcode scanner and an enviable amount of patience. Or you could unleash a hard-working robot from a company called Bossa Nova. That makes it one of the first truly intelligent robots to work alongside humans in complex ways outside of a factory.