Sales teams use many systems and applications to run their operations. There are CRM, SFA, order management and billing applications to help capture customer and account information and manage various customer processes. These applications help sales to manage their day-to-day tasks, but are these tools helping them sell more? Why is it that even today, sales teams feel they don't have enough actionable, timely and contextual information to offer the right solution to a prospect and close the deal? Why is it that selling remains more of an art form than a repeatable scientific method?

Streaming analytics, machine learning and advanced analytics were among the most talked-about themes at this year s Strata and Hadoop World conference in New York.

The latest AI project from the MIT Media Lab is demonstrating just how terrifying the prospects of deep learning can go. IBM Watson creates the first AI-made film trailer – and it's incredibly creepy Welcome to the Nightmare Machine: an algorithm that has been trained to generate horrifying images. It is attempting to find the scariest faces and locations possible, and gets humans to tell it which are the worst. The first aspect of the project, Haunted Faces, is truly terrifying. The team behind the project, led by Iyad Rahwan, associate professor at MIT Media Lab, used deep learning to generate new faces, before dropping "a hint of scariness" onto the generated faces in the spirit of Halloween.

There are two types of chatbots, one functions based on a set of rules, and the other more advanced version uses machine learning. Bots are created with a purpose. A store will likely want to create a bot that helps you purchase something, where someone like Comcast might create a bot that can answer customer support questions. You start to interact with a chatbot by sending it a message. Click here to try sending a message to the CNN chatbot on Facebook.

The nascent additive construction industry is slowly starting to take shape as an increasing number of start-ups appear on the scene with techniques for 3D printing large-scale structures. The latest is a London-based company called Ai Build, which aims to make additive construction smarter and more accessible through the use of artificial intelligence and affordable materials. As with many additive construction endeavors, Ai Build's entry into the field begins with a 3D-printed pavilion. As an ornamental building, a pavilion is the perfect large, yet nonfunctional structure for demonstrating the possibilities of 3D-printed architecture, as there is no need to meet critical requirements for a building that might be used by people, as with an office or a home. Unveiled at the GPU Technology Conference in Amsterdam at the end of September, the Daedalus Pavilion is a structure made from 48 different pieces 3Dprinted from Formfutura PLA filament over the course of three weeks.

General Motors and IBM have partnered to bring personalized content to drivers. GM's new OnStar system, which is called OnStar Go, will incorporate IBM's Watson artificial intelligence technology in an attempt to optimize the driver's time in the vehicle. But there's a catch – targeted offers and services. Thanks to IBM, OnStar Go will learn from drivers' behaviors and provide customized offers from GM's partners, which of right now include Exxon Mobil, iHeartRadio, Glympse, Parkopedia, and Mastercard. If your GM vehicle needs fuel, for instance, OnStar Go would point you towards an Exxon Mobil gas station.

Shimon Whiteson says we will all become cyborgs. I really think in the future we are all going to be cyborgs. I think this is something that people really underestimate about AI. They have a tendency to think, there's us and then there's computers. Maybe the computers will be our friends and maybe they'll be our enemies, but we'll be separate from them.

General Motors gm and International Business Machines ibm on Tuesday said they would combine IBM's artificial intelligence software Watson with the carmaker's OnStar system in order to market services to drivers in their vehicles. The feature, called OnStar Go, is set to debut early next year in more than 2 million GM vehicles with 4G service, IBM and GM said in a joint statement. IBM's Watson, which beat two previous winners of the quiz show "Jeopardy!" in 2011, will sift through data in order to recognize a driver's habits, allowing third-party marketers to deliver targeted offers, whether nearby coffee shops, reminders about shopping-list items, or paying for fuel from their dashboards. Carmakers have been adding connected services into their vehicles to duplicate the convenience of smartphones, which can suggest nearby restaurant offers, or point the way to a gas station. Data generated from connected vehicles is valuable to automakers, although some consumers have been wary of privacy and data security issues.

Neural networks designed for sequence predictions have recently gained renewed interested by achieving state-of-the-art performance across areas such as speech recognition, machine translation or language modeling. However, these models are quite computationally demanding, which in turn can limit their application. In the area of language modeling, recent advances have been made leveraging massively large models that could only be trained on a large GPU cluster for weeks at a time. While impressive, these processing-intensive practices favor exploring on large computational infrastructures that are typically too expensive for academic environments and impractical in a production setting, limiting the speed of research, reproducibility, and usability of the results. Recognizing this computational bottleneck, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) designed a novel softmax function approximation tailored for GPUs to efficiently train neural network based language models over very large vocabularies.

One of the most popular ways artificial intelligence has found use on the internet is via its ability to intelligently target visitors based on their behavioral patterns and use the data thus collected to supply them with content recommendations. Rankbrain, the revolutionary new algorithm from Google, makes use of artificial intelligence to process unique search engine queries and supply users with customized results. AdWords, Google's advertisement counterpart, makes heavy use of artificial intelligence to target visitors on the web and supply them with tethered advertisements customized according to their behavioral patterns. Apart from these, several content developers such as Netflix and Amazon Cloud have adapted similar artificial intelligence technologies to target users and provide them with a selective assortment of relevant content based on their browsing history.