Gartner, Inc. today highlighted the top technology trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2017. Analysts presented their findings during the sold-out Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through Thursday. Gartner defines a strategic technology trend as one with substantial disruptive potential that is just beginning to break out of an emerging state into broader impact and use or which are rapidly growing trends with a high degree of volatility reaching tipping points over the next five years. "Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2017 set the stage for the Intelligent Digital Mesh," said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "The first three embrace'Intelligence Everywhere,' how data science technologies and approaches are evolving to include advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence allowing the creation of intelligent physical and software-based systems that are programmed to learn and adapt. The next three trends focus on the digital world and how the physical and digital worlds are becoming more intertwined. The last four trends focus on the mesh of platforms and services needed to deliver the intelligent digital mesh."

Pixar founder George Lucas might have given the world the word "Droid" before he sold the company to Apple's Steve Jobs but now Apple CEO Tim Cook is making no secret of the fact that he wants the company to play its part in bringing Artificial Intelligence to the world. This week he's been spilling at least some of the beans on Apple's plans for AI, although his vision seems more connected to machine learning rather than the AI technologies that would help to bring droids like C3PO and R2D2. "We see AI as being horizontal in nature and running across all our platforms and products," said Cook, following on to say, "we see it being used in ways that most people don't even think about." That sounds grandoise – and, at first sight, it sounds like they have something amazing up their sleeves. So just what kind of unexpected use cases was he talking about?

Sketch a picture of a cat, or a castle, or a crab and most people will get what you're trying to convey -- but unless you have a little talent, the drawing probably doesn't look a lot like the real thing. That's not a problem for this system created by Belgian computer scientists. Their system can recognize toddler-level sketches of 250 categories of objects. This has been done a couple of times before, but one interesting aspect of this approach is that the machine learning system is exposed to the drawing as it's created, seeing it at various fractions of completeness. Turns out that can help identify the object; after all, you ever see anyone draw the chimney on the house first?

Part of the thrill of buying vintage design is in hunting down great finds. That process loses its appeal online, where buyers face an overwhelming quantity of listings, a lack of consistency in how pieces are identified, and, occasionally, outright mislabeling. This week, eBay announced Collective, a new section of the site that uses artificial intelligence along with in-house curation to make it easier for shoppers to sift through the company's 1 billion-plus listings and get their design fix. EBay describes Collective as a "bespoke experience" and features furniture, antiques, contemporary design, and fine art from 21 hand-picked dealers; product collections assembled with an editorial eye; and straightforward Pinterest-like pages of tables, seating, lamps, case goods, and more. But the potential gamechanger is the use of artificial intelligence in a "Get the Look" feature that scans listings to find products that have similar traits to objects in room vignettes.

NEW YORK: In a major breakthrough in the field of speech recognition, Microsoft researchers have created a technology that accurately recognises the words in a conversation like humans do. The team from 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. This is an historic achievement," said Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist in a Microsoft blog post. The milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognise the words in a conversation as well as a person would. In doing so, the team has beat a goal they set less than a year ago - and greatly exceeded everyone else's expectations as well. "Even five years ago, I wouldn't have thought we could have achieved this.

Microsoft's speech-recognition AI could eventually be used to enhance Cortana's accessibility features, say, for deaf people. Microsoft researchers have developed a system that recognizes speech as accurately as a professional human transcriptionist. Researchers and engineers from Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research group have set a new record in speech recognition, achieving a word error rate of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent reported a month ago. The word error rate is the percentage of times in a conversation that a system, in this case a combination of neural networks, mishears different words. Microsoft's system performed as well as humans who were asked to listen to the same conversations.

It's a red-letter day at Microsoft Research: a team working on speech recognition has hit a serious symbolic goal with a system that's as good as you at hearing what people are saying. Specifically, the system has a "word error rate" of 5.9 percent, on par with professional human transcribers. Even they don't hear things perfectly, of course, but 94 percent accuracy is more than good enough for conversation. "This accomplishment is the culmination of over twenty years of effort," said Geoffrey Zweig, one of the researchers, in a Microsoft blog post. Indeed, speech recognition is one of those tasks that's been pursued for decades by pretty much every major tech business and research outfit.

Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, Tesla, and the only guy more Ironman than Rob Downey Jr, worries about smart computers taking over the world. Maybe he's right, but AI (or Artificial Intelligence for those of you acronym fatigued), is already a lot closer to home, says head of strategy at Digital Alchemy, Grant Stewart, in this guest post. I see it every day in my digital marketing life, exposed to machine learning that both scares and comforts me. Here are five ways I see AI racking up big wins in the digital marketing space and why you should be worried if you're on the sidelines: Know what computers do really well? In a world of real time, always on marketing, the ability to constantly learn what content, campaigns, offers, channels, you name it, a customer is engaging with, and conversely not engaging with (read: the Fail Fast bit), means that AI gets smarter and smarter about decisions like what NOT to talk to individual customers about and how NOT to deliver the message.

The most satisfying bots are ones with clear uses, such as the Whole Foods one on Messenger that prompts users for an ingredient then offers recipes, or the Sephora bot on Kik that offers beauty tips based on skin type. One of users' big problems with bots is knowing what they can do. Google Allo solves that with messages that introduce features and capabilities over time. If a query is too much for the bot, it will say the feature isn't available yet, and suggest ones that are. CNN's Messenger bot, which was originally designed to answer general questions about the news, often failed to grasp what users were asking.

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