"Computing that can think" has been an IT battle cry for the last 30 years, but the price of artificial intelligence has been out of reach for most enterprises. Enter the cloud -- along with its cost efficiency -- and perhaps a revised business case for thinking machines. Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft are all on board, and they each have some kind of practical AI offering. In the context of business, artificial intelligence is called "machine learning" -- that's the best way to explain it in boardrooms. Machine learning can determine patterns, think about how those patterns are emerging, and even get better at predicting patterns before they emerge.

Originally published in the ITS Ghaziabad 2nd CXO Meet Souvenir, "Digital India Mission: Transforming India for Tomorrow." Achievements in machine learning are coming at ever-increasing rapidity over the past several months. You are likely familiar with the recent accomplishments associated with machine learning, especially those of so-called deep learning, or the use of multi-layered artificial neural networks. These specific achievements include the high profile AlphaGo and Deep Dream, along with numerous others in the realms of computer vision and natural language processing. Interestingly, a number of these recent mainstream successes are primarily attributable to Google in one form or another.

Tell me who your followers are and I tell you who you are. You have lots of followers, congrats! But, do you actually know who's following you? If you have thousands of followers, that could be a tricky question to answer. Let's use Machine Learning to try to answer that question.

Nick Pratap, MB, BChir, of Cincinnati Children's Department of Anesthesia and the Heart Institute and Yizhao Ni, PhD, of the Division of Biomedical Informatics have received a 300,000, two-year grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that aims to use electronic health records (EHRs) to identify children likely to suffer last-minute surgery cancellation. Their efforts will contribute to other initiatives across the hospital already aiming to reduce such cancellations. Every year, between two and twenty percent of surgical procedures are cancelled at the last minute in America, wasting thousands of dollars per procedure. In addition, the cancellation of a procedure creates psychological stress and financial hardships for patient and family alike. Already Pratap has led quality improvement efforts at Cincinnati Children's to reduce cancellation by about 16% through use of text-message reminders and clearer pre-operative instructions for families.

Many times when I speak with analytics managers or businesspeople interested in analytics, they tell me that performing some analytics on data is not the primary problem they have. "We have to get the analytics integrated with the process and the systems that support it," they say. This issue, sometimes called "operational analytics," is the most important factor in delivering business value from analytics. It's also critical to delivering value from cognitive technologies – which, in my view, are just an extension of analytics anyway. A quick aside: Someone who anticipated this issue early on was Bill Franks, the Chief Analytics Officer at Teradata. He published a book a couple of years ago called The Analytics Revolution, which is really about operational analytics.

Yup, you read that right. A study released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that algorithms make better hiring decisions than humans do. The study, which was conducted by Mitchell Hoffman, Lisa B. Kahn and Danielle Li, observed over 300,000 hires across 15 companies that employ low-skill workers such as call center operators or data entry employees. The study required the companies to implement hiring assessments created by PeopleMatter that asked candidates a variety of questions about their technical skills, personality, cognitive skills, and fit for the job. In some cases, hiring managers were removed from the process, and hiring decisions were made by an algorithm that based the decision on the test results.

Looking to drum up consumer excitement, the tech company hosted an event San Francisco on Tuesday to unveil a series of products, including two new phones, a virtual reality headset and the Chromecast Ultra. The flagship announcement was the introduction of Pixel, the first Google phone to carry exclusively Google branding. The company called it the "first phone made by Google inside and out." The device is poised to take on the iPhone with a built-in artificially intelligent assistant, 4K video and other bells and whistles. Here's a closer look at everything you need to know: Google (GOOG) announced a new Pixel line of phones -- the 5-inch Pixel ( 649) and 5.5-inch Pixel XL ( 769).

With dozens of public satellites in orbit and many more scheduled over the next decade, the size and complexity of geospatial imagery continues to grow. It has become increasingly difficult to manage this flood of data and use it to gain valuable insights. That's why we're excited to announce that we're bringing two of the most important collections of public, cost-free satellite imagery to Google Cloud: Landsat and Sentinel-2. The Landsat mission, developed under a joint program of the USGS and NASA, is the longest continuous space-based record of Earth's land in existence, dating back to 1972 with the Landsat 1 satellite. Landsat imagery sets the standard for Earth observation data due to the length of the mission and the rich data provided by its multispectral sensors.

Artificial intelligence driven by deep learning often runs on many computer chips working together in parallel. But the deep-learning algorithms, called neural networks, can run only so fast in this parallel computing setup because of the limited speed with which data flows between the different chips. The Japan-based multinational Fujitsu has come up with a novel solution that sidesteps this limitation by enabling larger neural networks to exist on a single chip. The neural networks used in deep learning typically run on graphics processing units (GPUs) that originated as components for generating and displaying images. By creating an efficiency shortcut in the calculations performed by neural networks, Fujitsu researchers reduced the amount of internal GPU memory used by 40 percent.

Google's latest phone is feature-rich, with new AI built-in, more storage and a better HD camera. It can be difficult to tell when you're standing in the midst of a landmark moment in history. Few guessed, for instance, that in 2008 when Google debuted the G1, the first phone to run Android, the mobile software would end up transforming the wireless world. It didn't help that when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went up on stage, they did so wearing roller blades. Page and Brin are probably laughing their inline skates off these days.