As we've reported previously, the Internet of Things is changing data science, and a visiting executive from analytics company SAS went into further detail into how IoT along with artificial intelligence is reshaping the industry. Oliver Schabenberger is the executive VP of SAS's research and development division and recently appointed CTO, and was recently in Sydney to discuss updates to the new SAS Viya analytics platform and to share his thoughts on the future of the analytics industry. He said that IoT has led to the increasing importance of edge analytics, with data now being observed on a continuum, requiring differing techniques to be deployed depending on observation point, accuracy and speed of data movement. "We can no longer just think about processing data in the cloud; we also have to think about event stream processing," he added. He also said that analytics software is quickly transitioning into the cognitive space, where sensing, listening and gesturing will become common forms of input, and reading and writing of human-like responses will become common forms of output.

The modern day shopping experience is flush with personalized options, concierge services, same day shipping and of course, endless options. While shopping online allows consumers to order products from virtually anywhere in the world, it can be challenging to sift through the unwanted items and find the desired ones. As stated in a study by Forrester Research, U.S. consumers will spend 327 billion online by the end of 2016. With more opportunities than ever to capitalize on online spending, online retailers are realizing they must make an impression on consumers. How do they do that?

Microsoft Corp. MSFT, 0.70% said Thursday it is expanding its artificial intelligence effort with the creation of a new unit called Microsoft AI and Research. The group will be led by Microsoft veteran Harry Shum and will be joined by more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers, the company said in a statement. The move is expected to accelerate the company's effort to deliver new AI capabilities. Shares were flat in early trade, but are up 4.5% in the year to date, while the S&P 500 SPX, 0.43% has gained 6%.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to be a revolution on how we interact with the world around us as part of a connected environment. As part of the series of guest posts named Thoughts Leaders' Corner, here is a very interesting article from Aric Dromi, Chief Futurologist at Volvo Car Group and cofounder of TEMPUS.MOTU. I hope you will enjoy it and if you are interested to the legal issues of the Internet of Things that are part of this digital revolution, check my blog post here! We are living in an experience based interaction simulation. A place that is governed by transparent intelligence technologies.

SEB will be the first bank to use IPsoft's cognitive technology for customer-facing operations in the Swedish language. The artificial intelligence (AI) solution, known as Amelia, will be integrated into the front-office set-up at SEB by the end of this year. The project follows on from a successful deployment of Amelia for SEB's internal service desk, supporting 15,000 staff. In the customer-facing role, Amelia will be dealing with one million clients of SEB. "Customer service is a key differentiator. By making Amelia available to respond to queries, we enhance our customers' flexibility of receiving individualised support at a time that suits them and without any delays in response," states Rasmus Järborg, chief strategy officer at SEB.

Samsung Electronics said Thursday it will buy Viv Labs, founded by the creators of Apple's Siri service

Summary: If Deep Learning is powered by 2nd generation neural nets. What new capabilities does that imply and when will it get here? By far the fastest expanding frontier of data science is AI and specifically the rapid advances in Deep Learning. Advances in Deep Learning have been dependent on artificial neural nets and especially Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs). In fact our use of the word "deep" in Deep Learning refers to the fact that CNNs have large numbers of hidden layers. Microsoft recently won the annual ImageNet competition with a CNN comprised of 152 layers.

On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last month, Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun announced that the online education company would be building its own autonomous car as part of its self-driving car nanodegree program. To get there, Udacity has created a series of challenges to leverage the power of community to build the safest car possible -- meaning anyone and everyone is welcome to become a part of the open-sourced project. Challenge one was all about building a 3D model for a camera mount, but challenge two has brought deep learning into the mix. In the latest challenge, participants have been tasked with using driving data to predict steering angles. Initially, Udacity released 40GB of data to help at-home tinkerers build competitive models without access to the type of driving data that Tesla of Google would have.

Sometimes, it's the little changes to language that give away a company's ambition. At the unveiling of Google's new Pixel phones yesterday, CEO Sundar Pichai started the event not by talking about what users can get from Google, but what they can get from their Google. Using artificial intelligence and its new digital assistant, said Pichai, Google's computing power will be available in every facet of users' lives. It'll be seamless and pervasive. "Our goal," he said, "is to build a personal Google for each and every user."

Almost a quarter century ago, a book was written about how organizations would focus on share of customer as opposed to share of market, building a personalized collaboration driven by big data. With advanced analytics, banking may finally getting close to realizing this vision. In 1993, a then revolutionary book, "The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time" was published, proposing the idea that as technology makes it affordable to track individual customers, marketing shifts from finding customers for products to finding products for customers. According to the authors, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., a company could use technology to gather information about, and to communicate directly with, individuals to form a commercial bond. The book became a bestseller, and was on every marketer's bookshelf … almost a quarter century ago.