Logitech says it will release a new Alexa skill this week that renders its Harmony Hub-based universal remote controls (e.g., the Harmony Elite or the Harmony Companion) compatible with Amazon's Alexa digital assistant. So if you own an Amazon Echo and one of these Harmony remotes, you'll soon be able to add your entire entertainment center to the list of devices you can control with your voice. This Alexa skill wasn't available for to test at the time of this writing, but Logitech's press release indicated that Harmony Hub users would be able to choose from 270,000 devices to include in voice-activated Harmony Activities, as Logitech refers to its control scripts. In addition to TVs, set-top boxes, and A/V receivers, Logitech's Hub can also control many smart-home devices, such as smart light bulbs, motorized window shades, and even smart entry locks. Harmony Activities are essentially scripts that you define to control the devices you've previously enrolled into the remote's app.

Machine learning and data science are shaking up the scientific and commercial worlds. But can they say anything new about customer analytics? Actually the potential is huge, and most companies are only just beginning to grasp at it. In my role I have been fortunate to see how a wide range of companies are working to incorporate analytics into their decision making. The truth is that many still struggle with the basics: getting data out of silos, getting the right people in with the right skills, knowing what technology to adopt and getting to an evidence led culture.

Should your friends see this too? Would you like to see more like this? Follow @scientistolizer Thailand Developer Day 2016 Machine learning and Data Science: Data Into Intelligent Action (English) by Dr Graham Williams, Director of Data Science, Microsoft Data Scientists live and breathe data. We choose the best tools for that task from a vast array of ever changing tools. We turn data into information, information into discovered knowledge, and through wisdom the discovered knowledge is turned into intelligent action. Our tool suites include many open source software products.

An artificial intelligence algorithm has predicted the outcome of human rights trials with 79 percent accuracy, according to a study published today in PeerJ Computer Science. Developed by researchers from the University College London (UCL), the University of Sheffield, and the University of Pennsylvania, the system is the first of its kind trained solely on case text from a major international court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). "Our motivation was twofold," co-author Vasileios Lampos of UCL Computer Science told Digital Trends. "It first starts with scientific curiosity." In other words, would it even be possible to create such an AI judge?

When was the last time you experienced something unique? Something you've never experienced before? Almost all humans live a routine. We don't do anything exceptionally unique on a day to day basis. I don't mean to make our lives seem mundane or unenthusiastic.

I believe that the answer to that question is hidden behind what Google and Facebook have been showing us recently. It began when Facebook opened their Messenger platform to Chatbots. While huge amount of developers are currently playing with this new toy, it's still very much pre-mature. But it's growing rapidly, as Facebook is clearly taking the "move fast, keep shipping" approach, by continuously iterating and improving the platform. In my previous post, I wrote about my very own experiment and ended up with my wish list, mainly about ways Facebook should enable developers to improve the User Experience, Discovery and Distribution of their Chatbots.

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her. It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone. Such a situation is still science fiction -- but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

Driverless cars are the most pressing AI-related consideration for the insurance industry, with recent advances from the likes of Google, Uber, and Volvo making it likely they will dominate the roads within the next decade. In June, British insurance company Adrian Flux began offering the first policy specifically geared towards autonomous and partly automated vehicles. The policy covers typical car insurance staples such as damage, fire, and theft, as well as accidents specific to AI - loss or damage as a result of malfunctions in the car's driverless systems, interference from hackers who have got into a car's operating system, failure to install vehicle software updates and security patches, satellite failure or outages affecting navigation systems, or failure of the manufacturer's vehicle operating system or other authorised software.

While you likely have at least a vague sense that artificial intelligence is the future of the devices and services around you, you may or may not know much about the specific technologies that enable machines to process data and react intelligently -- such as by recognizing objects or translating speech in real-time. The concept of deep learning, a technology that MIT Technology Review reports "attempts to mimic the activity in layers of neurons in the neocortex, the wrinkly 80 percent of the brain where thinking occurs" -- can be especially difficult to wrap your head around. Curious about deep learning, and what you need to know about it? Here's exactly how the stuff of science fiction films is coming to life. Deep learning software learns to recognize patterns in digital representations of sounds, images, and other data.