Holden Karau is transgender Canadian, and anactive open source contributor. When not in San Francisco working as asoftware development engineer at IBM's Spark Technology Center, Holdentalks internationally on Spark and holds office hours at coffee shops athome and abroad. She makes frequent contributions to Spark, specializing inPySpark and Machine Learning. Prior to IBM she worked on a variety ofdistributed, search, and classification problems at Alpine, Databricks,Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University ofWaterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science.

Most people don't buy a jar of relish every week. But when they decide to buy one from Ocado--the world's largest online-only grocery retailer--they don't have to scrabble at the back of the store. Instead, they call on robots and artificial intelligence to have it delivered to their door. Ocado claims that its 350,000-square-foot warehouse in Dordon, near the U.K.'s second city of Birmingham, is more heavily automated than Amazon's warehouse facilities. The company's task is certainly more challenging in many respects: most of the 48,000 lines of goods that it sells are perishable, and many must be chilled or frozen.

Retailers have to refocus their marketing from driving traffic to stores to closing sales and managing loyalty, according to insiders at the National Retail Federation's 2017 Big Show, earlier this week in New York City. "We're only as good as the last transaction," said Greg Foran, CEO of Walmart U.S. E-commerce is now setting the bar for the in-store experience, and that, in turn, is changing expectations for the customer experience and technology deployed in stores, speakers said. Retail fundamentals will always be required, but merchants also need to master technological skills, said Bill Brand, president of direct retailer HSNi. "Technology is changing the way we shop [and] the way we enjoy products. Even the definition of what a store is changing " said Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel.

David VanderWaal, vice president of marketing for LG Electronics USA, left, and Michael George, vice president of Alexa, Echo, and Appstore at Amazon.com Inc., speak about the Amazon Alexa partnership with the LG InstaView Door-In-Door smart refrigerator during the company's press conference at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. LG is seeking automotive alliances to accelerate autonomous driving, as well as acquiring artificial intelligence and robotics acquisitions to speed up its global expansion. Amazon ($AMZN) is scheduled to release earnings after Thursday's close (Feb 2, 2017). The social media giant hit a record high of $847.21 in 2016 and is currently trading near $835. The stock is prone to big moves after reporting earnings and can easily gap up if they report strong numbers. Conversely, if they miss, the stock can easily gap down like it did last quarter.

Apple Inc. is set to join the Partnership on AI, an artificial intelligence research group that includes Amazon.com Apple's admission into the group could be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the situation. Representatives at Apple and the Partnership on AI declined to comment. When the nonprofit organization was announced in September, it anticipated gaining additional members. Apple, Twitter Inc., Intel Corp. and China's Baidu Inc. were among noticeable absentees at the time.

Apple is reportedly planning to join the Partnership on AI, which Bloomberg describes as "an artificial intelligence research group that includes Amazon.com More broadly, "While the introduction of the Siri virtual assistant in 2011 gave Apple an early presence in AI for consumers, it has since lost ground to rivals such as Google and Amazon," Bloomberg writes.

This week at the National Retail Federation's (NRF) annual Big Show in New York City, Microsoft is unveiling the latest digital innovations that are transforming the shopping experience for customers – at every step of their journey, across every channel. While personalization, omnichannel and customer-centricity are not new themes, retailers are more aware than ever that competing in today's world requires emphasis on the entire customer journey. Technology and culture change will be required at all levels of a retail organization to provide the experiences customers expect. We call this digital transformation, and many of our retail customers are already embracing this shift with help from technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Power BI and Dynamics 365, as well as solutions from our global network of partners. The hardware and software on display in our booth at NRF this week from these customers and partners are impressive -- including store-scanning robots, mobile apps, intelligent vending machines and smart shelves. Here are some of the solutions Microsoft customers and partners are implementing that use technology in new ways, from the warehouse to checkout.

In the near future, artificial intelligence (AI) would be in major demand by the consumers to make interactions as seamless as possible. Many of us as an end user are unaware of the fact that Google uses AI to improve their search. It provides us with the correct results most of the times. Behind the scenes of any AI-powered systems, there is a long and complex computational process involved with the trained data set for the algorithm to perform so that the user gets an overwhelming experience. This experience is so fast and seamless that the user thinks everything is happening magically.

A semi-autonomous drone modified with an umbrella canopy promises to shield users from the rain by automatically tracking their movements, but it's a hell of a lot pricier than a regular brolly. Drone retailer DronesDirect lists the creatively named Umbrella Drone, a specially adapted DJI Phantom 4 quadcopter, at a staggering £1,299, down from £1,499. The retailer, meanwhile, is selling the standard Phantom 4 for £997. However, a call to DronesDirect established that the Umbrella Drone is currently still in testing, and isn't available to buy just yet. The designers say the light-hearted creation came about because of the UK's notoriously unpredictable weather, and will be able to cope with even "the most adverse" conditions.