Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella and president Brad Smith embarked on a four-day European tour to meet with business and government leaders, and promote the company's cloud computing services in Europe. Microsoft, which has invested over 3 billion in Europe to date, announced that it has more than doubled its cloud capacity in Europe in the past year, and intends to deliver Microsoft Cloud to European customers from data centers in France, starting in 2017. "We continue to invest heavily in cloud infrastructure to meet the growing demand from European customers and partners," said Nadella. "Building a global, trusted, intelligent cloud platform is core to our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. There's never been a better time for organizations across Europe to seize new growth and opportunity with the Microsoft Cloud."

Dynamics 365, a new cloud service from Microsoft that combines components of its CRM and ERP offerings, will become available on Nov. 1, the company announced Tuesday. First unveiled in July, Dynamics 365 is a set of apps for seven CRM and ERP functions: financials, operations, marketing, sales, customer service, project service automation and field service management. Organizations can purchase each Dynamics 365 app separately, adding more as their needs change. They also have the option to purchase a set of apps as a subscription bundle. Microsoft announced one such app on Tuesday called "Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights."

Results of preclinical studies by investigators at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) reported in the August 2016 issue of Arthritis & Rheumatology demonstrate for the first time that including novel biomarkers in lupus nephritis (LN) prognostic models significantly increases their power to predict therapeutic efficacy. Identifying biomarker models with sufficient predictive power is a critical step toward developing clinical decision-making tools that can rapidly identify patients who require a change in therapy and potentially reduce onset of renal fibrosis during induction therapy. Approximately half of all patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) develop LN, an immune complex-mediated glomerulonephritis. Lupus nephritis, in turn, leads to renal failure in up to 50% of patients within five years. American College of Rheumatology guidelines recommend changing LN treatment after six months of induction therapy if response to therapy is not achieved.

Free app Duolingo is a great way to learn the basics of a new language, with small daily lessons that gradually increase your skills, with rewards for progressing. Now the service has added a new feature that's a little different from the back-and-forth translation -- text-based chatbots. These are aimed at helping you improve your conversational skills and skills you might use in real life, such as ordering food, visiting a tourist attraction, shopping for clothing or catching a cab. A variety of scenarios will see you learning how to follow a set of directions, or talk with a doctor. According to the Duolingo chatbot Web page, these bots are programmed to react to thousands of different responses.

All you hear these days is how machine learning and artificial intelligence are the next big things. Your fellow executives, managers, vice presidents and directors are all talking about the need to think about an AI strategy to build business intelligence and create a competitive advantage. Unless you are among a handful of sophisticated technology companies, machine learning and artificial intelligence are way beyond the level of your core competence. You don't have a neural network and wouldn't know what to do with one even if you did. Your IT department just finished (finally) setting up your cloud platform and migrating all of the old company resources to a fancy new public/private hybrid cloud that the executive team spent three years talking about. The new DevOps team is finally in place … and may be obsolete before it even starts work.

Nearly 140 private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have been acquired since 2011, with over 40 acquisitions taking place in 2016 alone (as of 10/7/2016). Corporate giants like Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple and Salesforce, are competing in the race to acquire private AI companies, with Samsung emerging as a new entrant this month with its acquisition of startup Viv Labs, which is developing a Siri-like AI assistant. Google has been the most prominent global player, with 11 acquisitions in the category under its belt (follow all of Google's M&A activity here through our real-time Google acquisitions tracker). In 2013, the corporate giant picked up deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto. This acquisition reportedly helped Google make major upgrades to its image search feature.

Automatically identifying that an image is not suitable/safe for work (NSFW), including offensive and adult images, is an important problem which researchers have been trying to tackle for decades. Since images and user-generated content dominate the Internet today, filtering NSFW images becomes an essential component of Web and mobile applications. With the evolution of computer vision, improved training data, and deep learning algorithms, computers are now able to automatically classify NSFW image content with greater precision. Defining NSFW material is subjective and the task of identifying these images is non-trivial. Moreover, what may be objectionable in one context can be suitable in another.

President Barack Obama has set a goal of sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and getting them safely home again. In a commentary appearing on CNN.com, Obama set an ultimate goal of setting up a habitat on Mars so astronauts can live there for an extended time. "When our Apollo astronauts looked back from space, they realized that while their mission was to explore the moon, they had'in fact discovered the Earth,' " Obama wrote. "If we make our leadership in space even stronger in this century than it was in the last, we won't just benefit from related advances in energy, medicine, agriculture and artificial intelligence, we'll benefit from a better understanding of our environment and ourselves." Talking about his "sense of wonder" about the U.S. space program, Obama wrote about the country's next chapter in space exploration – Mars.

When Microsoft bought Mojang, the makers of the insanely popular Minecraft, in a surprise 2.5 billion deal in September 2014, nobody knew what to think. The game seemed an odd fit for Microsoft, whose biggest moneymakers are its productivity software and Windows PC operating system. Minecraft's millions of players fretted that the game was destined to be ruined under its new corporate parent, or that Microsoft would restrict the game to its own Xbox and Windows platforms. Two years later, Minecraft is more popular and widely available than ever. Since the beginning of this year, Mojang says, people have bought 53,000 copies of Minecraft every single day.

Guest blog post by Christopher Dole and other contributors, originally posted here. Deep Learning is one of the most revolutionary and disruptive technologies ever developed in Data Science. Essentially, this is a class of algorithms inspired by how the human brain works, and it has the ability to automate and replace most of the world's jobs. This is what enables self-driving cars to function and what allows Spotify to create very customized playlists and recommendations. This is how YouTube is able to identify faces and animals in videos and how Siri can understand and process free speech in milliseconds.