Artificial intelligence (AI) is surging in ad/mar tech land. Or resurging, depending on how good your memory is. IBM continues to push Watson, and, in the run-up to their respective conferences, Salesforce and Oracle talked up their own AI initiatives. Also, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon banded together to create best practices around AI technologies. And startups like Adgorithms, Boomtrain, Cognitiv, Kenshoo, Lattice Engines, Rocket Fuel and numerous others continue to extol the virtues of their AI-powered applications.

Google has snapped up Eyefluence, a startup focused on developing eye-tracking technology. As first spotted by Mattermark, Eyefluence quietly announced the purchase on Monday. On the Milpitas, CA-based firm's blog, Eyefluence thanked its partners, investors and advisors for getting the company this far on its town, but since becoming established in 2013, the firm has caught Google's eye. Eyefluence develops applications for use in the virtual and augmented reality fields with a particular bent towards eye-tracking software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, neither were any details relating to how the company will now operate or whether employees will be merged with Google's own research teams.

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.

Microsoft may have missed out on mobile but CEO Satya Nadella says his company won't make the same mistake with augmented reality and virtual reality. Speaking Monday at the opening dinner for the Wall Street Street Journal's WSJD Live conference, Microsoft's top executive said there was "no question" the company had missed its opportunity when it come to mobile. SEE ALSO: Microsoft made speech recognition software that's as accurate as humans "We clearly missed the mobile phone, there's no question," Nadella said. "Our goal now is to make sure we grow new categories." Chief among those new categories are augmented and virtual reality, both of which the CEO says he sees as big opportunities for future growth.

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.