Splunk has traditionally been a tool to ingest, index and enable searching across vast bodies of data from multiple disparate sources. Rick Fitz, vice-president of IT Markets, explains the driving forces behind the introduction of machine learning, announced this week at the 7th annual Splunk conference, .conf Data doesn't live in a vacuum. "The goal of the data is how do I make better business decisions?" Machine learning, Fitz explains, adds context and meaning to all this data that has been gathered through the use of algorithms.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage today at the Oculus Connect developers conference and showed off a taste of the company's mobile VR future. Lone Echo turns you into a robot assistant that can help a mission commander thanks to the use of your hands, made possible by the new Oculus Touch hand sensors. SAN JOSE -- When Oculus Rift first debuted, there were only a few ways to interact with the virtual world inside the headset. You could look at something and then click on a small control stick. This actually happened when I first experienced a VR T-Rex snarling in my face.

AI-powered drones soon will be everywhere, monitoring crowds at major events, checking out traffic patterns on busy roads, surveying disaster sites, and inspecting airplanes. IBM is edging into this airborne safety and maintenance market early, with a deal to bring its Watson internet of things technology to unmanned aircraft systems built by Netherlands-based Aerialtronics. Data captured by high-resolution drone camera lenses will be fed into IBM's visual recognition application programming interfaces (APIs) and services on its Watson cognitive computing and Bluemix cloud-based analytics platforms. The first market for the Aerialtronics drones is expected to be for cell tower maintenance. Instead of sending humans to laboriously climb towers and report back, inspection teams can deploy drones, which quickly gain a 360-degree overview, according to IBM. The visual recognition APIs can then analyze the images captured by the drone to detect problems like damaged cabling or equipment defects.

If there's one thing doctors and patients want from breast cancer diagnoses, it's reliability. Keeping up with the massive flow of research data on breast cancer is a challenge for scientists. And the variety of methods used to analyze that data make reliable predictions difficult to come by. A team from Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) tackled this issue using deep learning, in the 2016 Camelyon Grand Challenge. Hosted by the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, the competition aims to determine how algorithms can help pathologists better identify cancer in lymph node images.

Google, the company that has done more than any other to democratize mobile computing, argues that we are moving away from a mobile-first world. Indeed, at the company's wide-ranging product reveal on Tuesday in San Francisco, it rarely mentioned Android at all. Yet all the products that Google announced at its event introduced either complemented or reacted to the phone. In addition to the Pixel smartphone itself, the first Daydream VR goggles and controller are aggressively priced at 79 in part due to their reliance on Daydream-ready smartphones such as the Pixel (as opposed to PC-based systems from HTC and Oculus). And the Chromecast Ultra seeks to provide more 4K programming options for TV watchers by leveraging the phone as a content source.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Chatbots are being touted as the next platform in which businesses will engage with consumers. Because of this, developers must find methods to measure the success of the nascent technology, according to media and marketing firm Topbot's head of design and engagement Mariya Yao. That's because existing metrics used to measure app engagement, such as daily active users and session length, aren't quite efficient at capturing the unique conversational nature of chatbots.

There's no question that digital tech has dramatically changed our world. In the workplace, however, this technology can either amplify or hinder your productivity. The recruitment space is no exception. In fact, new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are truly revolutionizing this space at a blistering pace. With so much tech out there, it's difficult to find software that actually adds value to your recruitment needs.

When writing the screenplay for 1968's 2001, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were confident that something resembling the sentient, humanlike HAL 9000 computer would be possible by the film's namesake year. That's because the leading AI experts of the time were equally confident. Clarke and Kubrick took the scientific community's predictions to their logical conclusion, that an AI could have not only human charm but human frailty as well: HAL goes mad and starts offing the crew. But HAL was put in an impossible situation, forced to hide critical information from its (his?) coworkers and ordered to complete the mission to Jupiter no matter what. "I'm afraid, Dave," says the robot as it's being dismantled by the surviving astronaut.

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) has become one of the hottest topics in business recently, with developers building the technology into everything from cars to refrigerators. Some have expressed skepticism about AI's potential, but early product offerings have revealed technology that appears to actually enhance the work professionals do rather than replace it. Jamie Domenici, Salesforce's VP of Small Business, is excited about the way A.I. is affecting sales and marketing. I sat down with her at this year's Dreamforce in San Francisco, where attendees got a close up look at the company's new A.I. tool Einstein, which the company is embedding into its products and services. She spoke to me about how A.I. stands to improve efficiency for many salespeople and marketers.

The big bang happened in 2012-2013 when two landmark papers were published, both using GPUs,