Google's strategic move into selling own branded Mobile phones is another step in the merging of "Software plus Hardware" that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and recently Facebook have realized at the making of the "Internet of Things" Era. This is the critical issue of not just providing the software and operating system but increasing the value in the devices that become the Interface to the Customer: the smart phone, the smart tablet/laptop of Microsoft Surface, the Smart Speaker of Amazon Echo and Alexa, and the Facebook Oculus Rift and Microsoft Hololens that are the new foundations of Natural Language speech recognition services and the VR Virtual Reality and AR Augmented Reality breaking now and into 2017 and onward. Google's long-term market is changing, the advertising revenue from search engines while still strong is now seeing new ways to search via speech or Virtual image recognition and virtual interaction Google has been late to realizing perhaps the shift to software hardware is where the Internet of Things may be shaping the market with the Connected Home, Connected Car and Connected Work through these devices. It's all about "market marking" beyond just the big cloud data centers and big data analytics to how to build out the edge of the cloud network with all these potentially billions of connected sensors and devices. If the Mobile phone is becoming the "remote control to this world" and platforms the "fabric of social networks and connected experiences" then Google like others is rushing to get into this space with stronger software and hardware offerings

Human beings are social animals. As part of our neural wiring, humans assess each other's emotional cues on a subconscious level without realizing it. However, some people, such as individuals with autism, have more trouble interpreting these cues. Some cues are difficult for everyone to read. Other cues are even intentionally misleading.

Microsoft has made no secret of its grand plans for chat bots, and this week it rolled out five new ones for Skype. Surely the most fun is "Spock," a bot that promises to help you "learn the ways of Vulcan logic." Back in April, Microsoft debuted a preview of Skype bots, the artificial intelligence-based helpers it hopes will make it easier for users to get things done. Today, more than 30,000 developers are building bots for Skype, it says. The five new ones introduced this week were all inspired by partners and developers, and they're all now part of the Skype Bot directory in the service's Android, Windows, iOS, Mac, and web apps.

Organizations are moving more and more of their analytics workloads to the cloud in a bid to reduce operating expenses. One of the vendors trying to capitalize on the trend is Microsoft Corp., which last week rolled out a set of major improvements to its managed Hadoop service in an effort to attract more enterprise customers. Arguably the most important addition is support for the new LLAP (Live Long And Process), a method of caching data in memory to speed up database analytics in the Apache Hive data warehouse. It enables analysts to run database queries up to 25 times faster than before. It's joined by a set of security features that make it possible to regulate who accesses what data, monitor activity and use a company's internal cryptographic keys for encryption.

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.

But is that a problem for consumers, the economy, and labor? Traditional economic thought says yes, it's a huge problem, and that seems to be the argument The Atlantic's headline writer is grasping at here. Yet the actual contents of Derek Thompson's piece paint a more muddled picture. People generally love tech giants like Amazon, Apple, and Google, all of which still innovate plenty. Yet people hate borderline monopolistic firms in other industries, such as finance (see: Occupy Wall Street), retail (Walmart), and cable companies (Comcast, Time Warner).

If you are NOT using Model Evaluation Library you may skip this release. CNTK (http://www.cntk.ai/), the Computational Network Toolkit by Microsoft Research, is a unified deep-learning toolkit that describes neural networks as a series of computational steps via a directed graph. In this directed graph, leaf nodes represent input values or network parameters, while other nodes represent matrix operations upon their inputs. This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct.

Google is taking a page from Apple's playbook by making a bigger push to build its own hardware. Rick Osterloh, head of Google's new hardware group, said that in doing so, Google can take full advantage of capabilities it's designing with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Apple has long designed both iPhone hardware and the iOS operating-system software that runs on it. Now, Google is doing the same with the upcoming Pixel phones running Google's Android system. The Pixel is one of several gadgets Google announced Tuesday in San Francisco.

Tech giant Google on Tuesday at a San Francisco news conference presented a new family of its products, featuring the new Pixel smartphone and the launching of the Daydream View virtual reality headset. Pixel was, without a doubt, the star product at the event. Rick Osterloh, the firm's vice president of hardware, praised the design of the new Google devices and explained that - for the first time - they come installed with the Google Assistant function and will work with virtual reality if one incorporates the Daydream headset. In addition, he said that the Pixel's camera is the best ever used in a smartphone - with a DxOMark score of 89, the highest ever awarded - and, among other features, it automatically manages image exposure, including pictures taken in low-light conditions. Also, Osterloh emphasized that these phones, which work with the Android 7.1 Nougat operating system, will have unlimited memory capability and will come with the Duo videocall application - similar to Apple's FaceTime - automatically installed.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Google is taking a page from Apple's playbook by making a bigger push to build its own hardware. Rick Osterloh, head of Google's new hardware group, said that in doing so, Google can take full advantage of capabilities it's designing with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Apple has long designed both iPhone hardware and the iOS operating-system software that runs on it. Now, Google is doing the same with the upcoming Pixel phones running Google's Android system. The Pixel is one of several gadgets Google announced Tuesday in San Francisco.