Amazon said that a review of its entire U.S. staff found that women's compensation in 2015 was 99.9% of men's in equivalent jobs. Further, minorities make 100.1% of what white workers earn. SAN FRANCISCO -- Hear an echo? Amazon's first quarter results are likely to recall the themes of previous quarters, including the march of Prime and its cloud services business. Last year was an excellent one for the Seattle-based retailer.

When we were born, the idea of such a small, powerful computer was a sci-fi dream, and now these smart-devices are everywhere, transforming personal health, relationships and business transactions so completely that life without these seems impossible. We're entering a new era of technology that's bound to reshape the lives of our children predominantly. Yes, this is the era of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is one of the most talked subjects these days, and recent advances in technology have made AI even closer to reality than most of us can imagine. What was once just a figment of the imagination of some our most famous science fiction writers, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking root in our everyday lives. Binge-watching television shows and online shopping carts full of suggested add-ons are commonplace, even though most consumers aren't aware of what's powering the recommendations.

The findings of a recent survey from Nuance Communications into consumer preferences and expectations around customer self-service reveals that a significant number of consumers (89%) prefer, and even expect, to have conversational interaction. For 87%, a positive interaction with a company determines whether or not they will continue their relationship. With chat bots to the front of mind following Facebook's recent announcement, it is interesting to note from Nuance's survey that 89% of consumers "want to engage with virtual assistants to quickly find information instead of searching through Web pages or a mobile phone app on their own". The same need is reflected in consumers' desire to engage with automated phone systems that allow them to speak naturally. Nuance recently announced that one of the leading financial institutes in Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is now using Nuance Nina, and intelligent virtual assistant that delivers "a human-like, conversational customer service experience" to assist customers to quickly and easily access information.

If you think that it's hard to remember where all your favorite products are in the local grocery store, well … it's not just you. In the case of large supermarkets carrying thousands of goods, even employees can have trouble remembering where everything is. That's why Toronto's 4D Retail Technology Corp. developed the stock-taking, store-mapping 4D Space Genius robot. In less than an hour, the self-guiding Segway-based Space Genius can reportedly move along every aisle of an average-sized (43,000 sq ft/3,995 sq m) supermarket or other large store, scanning all of the products and barcodes on display in HD and 3D as it does so. First and foremost, this allows it to create an interactive 3D map of the store, in which the location of every item is indicated.

Over the last several weeks, we've reached peak AI/Bot mania. Most of the conversation has centered around Chatbots and the potential emergence of a new platform/distribution layer. If you've been mostly ignoring the press, some good reads are: Tl;dr – the major takeaways are as follows: given that consumers don't really download apps anymore, brands & retailers have a new access point to end consumers, sitting on top of existing messaging platforms and leveraging chatbots to ensure mass scale. The truth is that the chatbot platform conversation is really just an extension of the one we had about a year ago during the emergence of Magic/Operator and SMS as the new platform, which we discussed in Are We Already Rebundling Mobile. An important extension given that such bots have been democratized and can now be spun up not just by tech companies, but by traditional retailers (on their own or within Messenger) or even by individuals such as you and me.

The use of robots on the retail sales floor is the same sort of double-edged sword as when used for the warehouse. Some see them as capable of handling arduous processes to allow employees to focus on customer service. Others see robots as pure replacements, threatening to cut out the need for real live human staff. The latest robot to make an appearance at the front of the store is, if it catches on, likely to generate the same sort of controversy. A company called 4D Retail Technology Corp. has created a robot capable of automating the inventory process by rolling through the aisles and imaging every product and every barcode in a store.

A data scientist is one of the most in-demand, high-profile careers in IT today, but Tom Walsh and Alex Krowitz have been working behind the scenes in the field for years. Walsh, a research engineer and Krowitz, a senior research engineer at cloud workforce management solutions company Kronos, sift through the influx of proprietary and customer data to identify patterns and gain insights based on that data. There are generally two kinds of projects we regularly handle; mining patterns within data to improve our own products is one and the other is taking on specific sets of customer data to gather and deliver insights from that," says Walsh. What companies are looking for is ultimately the capability to make predictions based on that data, says Krowitz. Companies use those predictions to help drive everything from marketing strategy to resource allocation, personnel levels and staffing, or to predict retail sales, he says. "We have products that use machine learning algorithms to help customers with these predictions.

We introduce sparse random projection, an important dimension-reduction tool from machine learning, for the estimation of discrete-choice models with high-dimensional choice sets. Initially, high-dimensional data are compressed into a lower-dimensional Euclidean space using random projections. Subsequently, estimation proceeds using cyclic monotonicity moment inequalities implied by the multinomial choice model; the estimation procedure is semi-parametric and does not require explicit distributional assumptions to be made regarding the random utility errors. The random projection procedure is justified via the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma -- the pairwise distances between data points are preserved during data compression, which we exploit to show convergence of our estimator. The estimator works well in simulations and in an application to a supermarket scanner dataset.

Humans have always had a complicated relationship with new "technologies." From awe to fear, centuries ago, Plato even worried that writing would adversely affect people's memories. Modernity has had a particular curiosity regarding artificial intelligence (AI). From Terminator-style killer robots to emotive humanoids, the mention of AI brings to mind the many silver screen renderings of some future civilization. More likely than any of these, however, is the reality that AI will probably turn out to be another commonplace technology that, while novel at first, will end up integrated into our everyday lives.

ReplyYes has seen success with its automated messaging system. Chatbots already have a little bit of a bad name. Early reviews for the ones on Facebook Messenger have been rough due to apparent malfunctions, and Microsoft's Tay has been an utter disaster, at least on a couple of occasions. But a startup called ReplyYes, which offers a text-to-buy system for retailers, provides a glimpse into the potential of automated messaging. Interestingly, the company has a pair of e-commerce ventures: One sells vinyl records, the other graphic novels.