Amazon's gone to a lot of effort to make its services as convenient as possible -- free delivery, lightning fast delivery, delivery from the sky (well, soon, probably) -- now it's eliminating the need for you to even be at home to receive your packages (or to have a designated safe place), because its couriers can now simply let themselves into your property. It's not as sinister as it sounds, of course. The Prime members-only service, called Amazon Key, uses a smart lock and connected camera. When a delivery is made the courier scans the package's barcode which sends an access request to Amazon's cloud. When it grants permission, the camera starts recording, the courier swipes a prompt on their app and then your door unlocks.

This is a guest post by Roland Schemers, CTO of Astro Technology, Inc. Astro, in their own words, "creates modern email apps for Mac, iOS and Android, powered by artificial intelligence, built for people and teams. With Astrobot Voice, an in-app email voice assistant, you can now read, manage, and reply to emails without leaving Astro's apps." Recently, Astro launched Astrobot Voice, the first in-app email voice assistant. This means you can now read, manage, and reply to emails without leaving Astro's iOS or Android apps. After Astro launched an Amazon Alexa skill in June, we were eager to enable more people to manage email with voice.

Professor Bernhard Schölkopf, a director at the Max Planck Institute and leading mind in machine learning, is now also an "Amazon Scholar." Between its online shopping algorithms, online web services and the rise of Alexa, artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly important part of Amazon's business model. Now, the online mega-retailer is investing in the technology's future with plans for a new Amazon Research Center near the campus of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany. Amazon plans to staff the new facility with 100 employees in the field of machine learning, and will pour 1.25 million euros (almost $1.5 million) into new research groups. Research in areas critical to AI, including robotics, machine learning and machine vision, are already underway in the area.

Walmart.com is bigger than you might think. The site has 60 million items for sale, Walmart CTO Jeremy King said at the VB Summit in Berkeley, California today. That's up from 700,000 items when he joined Walmart in 2011, and it doesn't include Jet.com, the ecommerce site Walmart acquired last year. Online sales have also made notable gains: The company reported a 67 percent year-over-year increase in quarterly online sales for the three months ending in June of this year. The secret to the expansion in inventory, said King, is artificial intelligence.

By now you've heard of machine-learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), but understanding these technologies can be overwhelming. Today's infographic explores what ML and AI can do for marketers and why these technologies are more than just buzzwords. The infographic shows how various industries are achieving results with ML and AI, including a statistic that the technologies have helped retail companies report a 30% increase in online sales with dynamic pricing and personalization. Also, retailers are seeing two million fewer product returns thanks to more accurate demand forecasting. In a B2B sense, companies expect higher content ROI because they can quickly and accurately surface the best-performing content, the infographic explains.

"Innovation," Jeff Bezos once said, "happens by gently lifting a grandfather and asking him for six different ideas." It's the work of Botnik, a new AI-assisted humor application that scours various types of human-created, word-crowded content--from season-three Seinfeld scripts to Yelp reviews to Bezos' shareholder letters--in order to build predictive, idiom-specific keyboards. Those keyboards, many of which are available on Botnik.org, The best Botnik creations, like this PBS-derived set of otter facts, retain the structure and wordplay of their source material, while adding a goofy, appropriately robotic sense of stiltedness. They all represent a new form of comedy, a human-computer collaboration, one that "gathers all these evocative phrases from a genre, and then builds them together in an absurd collage," says Botnik cofounder Jamie Brew. Botnik began in earnest last year, when Brew--then a writer for The Onion's site Clickhole--began talking with Bob Mankoff, the artist and former New Yorker cartoon editor who, in 2005, launched that magazine's popular caption-writing contest.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Amazon.com will open an artificial intelligence research center in the German university city of Tuebingen, creating 100 jobs over the next five years. It joins BMW, Bosch, Daimler, Facebook and Porsche in backing a German initiative launched last year and focused on areas such as robotics, machine learning and computer vision. The research center will be located adjacent to the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and draw on the expertise of two of its experts, Prof. Bernhard Schoelkopf and Prof. Michael J. Black. Schoelkopf is co-inventor of technology that enables computers to understand causality. "It's at the heart of every decision taken by machine learning," said Ralf Herbrich, Amazon's director of machine learning.

A growing number of software providers now claim that their systems use artificial intelligence (AI). That means machines carry out tasks in smart ways. You could argue that a calculator uses AI because it solves mathematical equations. But authentic AI requires dynamic adaptation to novelty. In other words, true AI can think and act for itself.

For many, the term AI still conjures up images of robot butlers and malicious computer programs. In truth, however, artificial intelligence is already being used all around us, although its potential may not be fully understood by all marketers just yet. Now we can get back to looking at how artificial intelligence is changing marketing. We're just beginning to realise the possibilities artificial intelligence offers to marketers. But we do already know that there's almost infinite potential to what AI can bring to the table.

Although I am an experienced Data Scientist who knows well Python's stack for Data Science (scikit-learn, pandas, statsmodels, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, IPython), this book captured my attention and I have read a half of it during the first two days after getting the book. This book is easy to read for novices and experts alike (it does not contain a lot of math and wherever there are formulas they are not difficult to grasp), though some familiarity with Python packages comprising the Data Science stack will greatly facilitate material understanding. The writing style authors chose is excellent as it teaches readers in a very logical and pedagogically appealing way: the way of data pre-processing and analysis occur in projects that data scientists and engineers often encounter when aiming to solve the real-worlds tasks. The books begins with a description of how to install Python and various packages needed to run the code. The purpose of these packages is also explained.