In a world where the term "big data" is being thrown around like the next coming, many business leaders still struggle to understand how more information is going to help them make better decisions that drive their businesses forward. But the real challenge goes well beyond merely accessing more data. The key is accessing data in the right way, at the right time, and in the right format to generate beneficial insights. This process is no small feat. It requires both technology and human analysis in order to identify these critical insights for business leaders.

Large tech companies are snatching up artificial intelligence startups left and right. Turns out, it's a very familiar name. Google has acquired 11 AI startups over the last five years, leading the pack of corporations hungry for artificial intelligence, according to CB Insights. There have been roughly 140 acquisitions of artificial intelligence startups since 2011, including 40 this past year alone, the venture capital research firm says. That compares with just five acquisitions in 2011.

It's no secret that American law has been building facial recognition databases to aide in its investigations. But a new, comprehensive report on the status of facial recognition as a tool in law enforcement shows the sheer scope and reach of the FBI's database of faces and those of state-level law enforcement agencies: Roughly half of American adults are included in those collections. And that massive assembly of biometric data is accessed with only spotty oversight of its accuracy and how it's used and searched. The 150-page report, released on Tuesday by the Center for Privacy & Technology at the Georgetown University law school, found that law enforcement databases now include the facial recognition information of 117 million Americans, about one in two U.S. adults. It goes on to outline the dangers to privacy, free speech, and protections against unreasonable search and seizure that come from unchecked use of that information.

One of the biggest buzzwords around Google and the overall technology market is machine learning. Google uses it with RankBrain for search and in other ways. We asked Gary Illyes from Google in part two of our interview how Google uses machine learning with search. Illyes said that Google uses it mostly for "coming up with new signals and signal aggregations." So they may look at two or more different existing non-machine-learning signals and see if adding machine learning to the aggregation of them can help improve search rankings and quality.

In August, 2016, Intel is bolstering its artificial intelligence efforts by acquiring Nervana Systems for 400 million, a two-year-old startup considered among the leaders in developing machine learning technology. In a video, Nervana's Naveen Rao discussed deep learning, a form of machine learning loosely inspired by the brain. Naveen explores the benefits of deep learning over other machine-learning techniques, recent advances in the field, the deep learning workflow, challenges in developing and deploying deep learning-based solutions, and the need for standardized tools for building and scaling deep learning solutions. Convolutional Neural Nets are the main model. They are good for vision systems.

Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that recognizes the words in a conversation as well as a person does. In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month. The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task. "We've reached human parity," said Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist.

Yseop is a global enterprise software company with offices in New York, London, Paris, Dallas, and Lyon. Its enterprise customers are mainly in the global Fortune 1000, and on a daily basis, 50,000 end users employ Yseop. Yseop has led the international technology scene and has quickly been recognised by artificial intelligence and business intelligence leaders thanks to its innovative solutions that translate data analysis into written insight. Yseop has a unique, patented system, which is the only self-service software on the market that can reason and clearly express conclusions in multiple languages, in real-time. Yseop's software turns data into narrative in English, French, German, and Spanish, all at the speed of thousands of pages per second.

Well, it seems Apple's virtual assistant will be moving in that direction with the hiring of Apple's first ever director of A.I. research. So who is this new director? And what does Apple hope to accomplish? So who is this famed new director of A.I. research? So why did Apple select him as the director?

This blog post covers 50% of what I'm going to be talking about at this year's Museums Computer Group conference at the Wellcome Trust in London, held on the 19th of October. The follow-up post will go live on the 20th - you can sign up here to be notified. I'll examine each one - it'll be interesting to see what you think. Artificial intelligence, as a concept, has been around for a long time. From Hephaestus building the "fighting machines of the gods" to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, humans have thought about and created stories around our desire to replace the mighty gods with ourselves for several thousand years.

BENGALURU: Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer service software provider, has acquired Chatimity, a social chat platform based on artificial intelligence used for integrating chat within mobile apps. Chatimity is the company's sixth acquisition in the past 12 months. Founded by former Google employees, Tarkeshwar Thakur and Aravind Murthy in 2011, Chatimity platform is a Bengaluru-based startup. "Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service but scaling that infrastructure continues to be a challenge," said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and chief executive of Freshdesk. "With their focus on artificial intelligence and chatbots, the Chatimity team, now part of Freshdesk, has already started to create a scalable customer engagement chat platform that is future ready."