As it has more than 12,500 patents, eight Nobel prizes, and a 140-year history of field-testing crazy ideas, it should surprise no one that AT&T would be an important player in artificial intelligence. "AT&T is a backbone of the internet," explains Nadia Morris, head of Innovation at the AT&T Connected Health Foundry. The company manages wireless, landline, and even private secure networks to power connectivity for both individuals and corporations. All these networks generate incredible volumes of data that is ripe for machine analysis. AT&T has built AI and machine learning systems for decades, using algorithms to automate operations such as common call center procedures and the analysis and correction of network outages.

Thank you for subscribing to the monthly THINK Marketing newsletter. Many business-people like you and me probably think of "marketing" as a set of processes that promotes our products and services with a view toward generating revenue and margin. Most consumers (also like you and me, when off-duty) probably think of "marketing" as a blur of information spamming our inboxes, mobile phones and brains. It's an altogether more negative connotation of a concept as ancient as "Adam, can I tempt you with an apple?" With "predictive marketing," businesses can better convert this negative experience into a positive perception of their brands, products and services. Put simply, predictive marketing uses advanced analytics methodologies to understand a customer's past behavioral profile, specifically the unique drivers of the individual's behavior, to predict their future behavior.

With more than 12,500 patents, eight Nobel prizes, and a 140 year history of field-testing crazy ideas, no one should be surprised that AT&T would be an important player in artificial intelligence. "AT&T is a backbone of the internet," explains Nadia Morris, Head of Innovation at the AT&T Connected Health Foundry. The company manages wireless, landline, and even private secure networks to power connectivity for both individuals and corporations. All these networks generate incredible volumes of data ripe for machine analysis. AT&T has built AI and machine learning systems for decades, using algorithms to automate operations such as common call center procedures and the analysis and correction of network outages.

Samsung's Galaxy S8 is finally here, and it's a looker. The South Korean company's phone packs a gorgeous edge-to-edge curved screen, a beefed-up front-facing camera, a top-of-the-line processor, and a new virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence. But like many devices of the Galaxy S8's caliber, not every feature is easy to use -- or find. Luckily, we've spent enough time with the Galaxy S8 to get a handle on a few of its most useful functions. Here's what you need to know. Bixby, Samsung's new AI-powered assistant, is a tap away from every screen.

Comcast is introducing its new wireless service, Xfinity Mobile, later this year. Xfinity Mobile is trying to personalize wireless. How do you feel about Comcast as your wireless carrier? Comcast customers will soon have that option. The cable TV powerhouse spilled the beans on Xfinity Mobile, a new service launching mid-year that leverages Wi-Fi, as well as Verizon's 4G LTE cellular network.

Verizon is working on getting service to you after a crazy storm or other emergencies. This week, the company announced it tested a large drone that could provide service during an emergency using a "flying cell site." The technical test took place at Woodbine Municipal Airport in Woodbine, New Jersey and was made to simulate an environment in which commercial power would be out completely after severe weather or other dangerous events that affect communications services. The drone is owned and piloted by American Aerospace Technologies, Inc. (AATI). The test follows a previous successful run in October in Cape May, New Jersey which delivered 4G LTE network from the drone.

EE is the best mobile operator for 4G coverage in 14 of the most populated areas in the UK, says a new report. The network dominated rival firms O2, Vodafone and Three, according to statistics from RootMetrics. It assessed coverage in Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds and Bradford, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield. EE, which last year announced plans to move its heavily criticised customer services to the UK, delivered at least 90% coverage in 11 of the 14 areas, while Three failed to hit that figure in any of the cities included in the report. O2 and Vodafone, meanwhile, only hit the 90% mark in three areas.

Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S8 phone at a glitzy event in Lincoln Center, New York, Wednesday, with the tech giant eager to draw a line under last year's Note 7 fiasco. DJ Koh, president of Samsung's mobile communications business, kicked off Wednesday's event by explaining that the company has "humbly" learned from its mistakes. "This is how new doors are opened," he added. Koh moved quickly to introduce the new Galaxy S8 and S8 phones, adding that the devices are "inspired by dreams of a world where you are always connected to the people you care about." I took a look at the S8 and S8 after the event.

When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S8 and S8 to the public last Wednesday, it also introduced its new AI assistant, called Bixby. The Siri rival basked in the spotlight as Samsung officials talked about what makes it stand out and different from other smart assistants during the Unpacked event. Bixby is rumored to come to other devices, but it's hard to imagine how it would be implemented in older devices that do not have the dedicated hardware button found on the new flagship phones. Interestingly, some developers have successfully deployed Bixby on older Galaxy smartphones, most especially on the 1-year-old Galaxy S7. On the Android website XDA-Developers, software developers shared that hey got Bixby working on their Android smartphones with the help of Bixby's Android Package Kit (APK) that was shared by user takerhbk.

Providing a broad but in-depth introduction to neural network and machine learning in a statistical framework, this book provides a single, comprehensive resource for study and further research. All the major popular neural network models and statistical learning approaches are covered with examples and exercises in every chapter to develop a practical working understanding of the content. Each of the twenty-five chapters includes state-of-the-art descriptions and important research results on the respective topics. The broad coverage includes the multilayer perceptron, the Hopfield network, associative memory models, clustering models and algorithms, the radial basis function network, recurrent neural networks, principal component analysis, nonnegative matrix factorization, independent component analysis, discriminant analysis, support vector machines, kernel methods, reinforcement learning, probabilistic and Bayesian networks, data fusion and ensemble learning, fuzzy sets and logic, neurofuzzy models, hardware implementations, and some machine learning topics. Applications to biometric/bioinformatics and data mining are also included.