Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff is practically a folk hero in the global tech community. He has earned his reputation innovating new technology, questioning the status quo and lobbying for societal change. This week, his company's user conference, Dreamforce, is forecasted to bring as many as 170,000 of his followers to town. Benioff will, in turn, deliver first time experiences to many attendees. Many of the public restrooms at the conference, for example, are gender neutral.

Most small businesses are focused on the nuts and bolts of the IT needed to run their companies, including networks, cloud services and PCs. However, there are many emerging technologies that will likely have large impacts on how businesses are run in the years ahead. The consultancy PwC recently released a report highlighting what it calls eight tech "megatrends" that it thinks will have a large impact on businesses in the next three to seven years. The trends include artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain technology, drones, Internet of Things, robotics, virtual reality and 3D printing. Some of them, like IoT, have been around for years and are already widely used, while others, like virtual reality or the use of blockchain for ledgers and transactions, are rapidly maturing.

However, it is developing economies where AI is likely to have the more significant impact. We have already entered a period in which enormous technology-driven change is helping to address a number of challenges in developing economics. AI technology, in particular, has extremely strong developmental implications. There are still a number of challenges towards implementation of such technology. The infrastructure, for one, is not necessarily capable of integrating all AI technologies, so it is not a case of inventing something new and then dropping it into a developing economy.

Now, you will receive a carefully curated selection of news and opinions within the AI/ML space, with a particular focus on trends that show these technologies in actual use at businesses today. We hope that this collection provides a better view into how machine intelligence is being leveraged and understood in practical ways. If you have feedback or would like to see more around a certain topic, give us a shout on Twitter. Grok enables IT homeostasis by using breakthrough AI and using automation by connecting to the operations toolchain. In just a few minutes, Grok can analyze cloud metric data for anomalies using breakthrough AI algorithms to detect IT incidents before they cause critical downtime or service disruption.

Rumors about the upcoming Galaxy S8 have been swirling for months, but the latest teaser comes from Samsung themselves. The South Korean electronics company just announced the acquisition of Viv, an artificial intelligence platform from the creators of Siri. Google recently debuted its new Pixel phone with Google Assistant. Artificial intelligence that can help users with daily tasks and more. The new iPhone 7 has a smarter more advanced Siri too. Samsung is lacking in this area, but is poised to make a big entrance potentially starting with the Galaxy S8.

For better or worse, airlines have treated social media as a critical customer service tool, catering to cranky travelers who tweet their gripes. That willingness has led to a deluge of issues for customer service to address -- and created the need to automate it. In a typical week, KLM has to respond to 15,000 social conversations in a dozen different languages. There is no programmatic solution here: KLM has a 235-person social media team. But KLM is exploring ways to combine artificial intelligence and humans in providing customer service that's somewhat automated but still has a personal touch.

Base isn't the biggest player in a crowded CRM market by any means, but it's not shying away from a fight with industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This week it introduced Apollo, a stand-alone artificial intelligence piece its CEO claims is well ahead of its well-heeled competitors -- and it chose to announce this new product in the middle of Dreamforce, Salesforce's enormous customer conference. Artificial intelligence is the watchword of the day in CRM with both Salesforce and Oracle announcing AI products/features in the same week a couple of weeks ago. The bigger companies are adding smarts to more than just CRM, but Base CEO Uzi Shmilovici thinks his company's singular focus on CRM may be an advantage. Shmilovici claims for instance that his company's predictive scoring is much better than Salesforce's because he has more data.

Healthcare professionals …. please help fuel the research. I know you have a lot to share about these new developments (artificial intelligence) and hence will request your comments. A few years back, I served as a board member of a newly formed accountable care entity. This multi-hospital, multi-county accountable care entity spent significant time and effort to develop a risk stratification and care coordination model. The goal was that the model will not only provide efficient and effective care but will also be based upon evidence based medicine.

In this article, we give an overview of the answer set programming paradigm, explain its strengths, and illustrate its main features in terms of examples and an application problem. In this article, we give an overview of the answer set programming paradigm, explain its strengths, and illustrate its main features in terms of examples and an application problem.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) was held at the beginning of the conference, February 12-13, 2016. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus -- providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. To foster interaction and exchange of ideas, the workshops were kept small, with 25-65 participants. Attendance was sometimes limited to active participants only, but most workshops also allowed general registration by other interested individuals.