Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce expo kicks off this week, bringing with it a bevy of product announcements and updates across the CRM giant's portfolio. This year, the Dreamforce centerpiece is Einstein, an artificial intelligence platform that Salesforce has been hyping up for weeks. Salesforce says Einstein "will act as everyone's very own data scientist" by infusing AI throughout the entire Salesforce Platform. In other words, it's pitched as a way to ease the data scientist talent shortage in business and provide enterprises with tools that are otherwise difficult to develop. In a sales context, Einstein can predict customer behaviors, recommend steps to close a deal and automate certain tasks.

In this blog post, we welcome ex-NGDATA collaborator and now university professor Willem Waegeman who reports on a scientific research project he worked on part-time while working with us. NGDATA takes pride in supporting research to advance the field of machine learning. If you want to learn more about our offerings in this area, take a look at our Lab and do not hesitate to contact us. While 2012 has been the year of Big Data technologies, 2013 is becoming the year of Big Data analytics. Gathering and maintaining large collections of data is one thing, but extracting useful information from these collections is even more challenging.

Remember that endangered anteater-esque ball of scales from Favreau's recent film, The Jungle Book? Over one million pangolins have likely been poached and illegally traded in the last decade, especially because of their importance in Chinese medicine and food. And the internet hasn't exactly helped its plight. As wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC reports, their researchers investigated 39 Chinese e-commerce websites over June and July 2016; a single survey in the first month alone detected 153 ads for pangolin scales and meat and live specimen from 94 traders across six sites. Virtual wildlife trafficking poses a serious threat to not just the pangolin.

Five major technology companies said Wednesday that they had created an organization to set the ground rules for protecting humans -- and their jobs -- in the face of rapid advances in artificial intelligence. The Partnership on AI, unites Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in an effort to ease public fears of machines that are learning to think for themselves and perhaps ease corporate anxiety over the prospect of government regulation of this new technology. The organization has been created at a time of significant public debate about artificial intelligence technologies that are built into a variety of robots and other intelligent systems, including self-driving cars and workplace automation. The industry group introduced a set of basic ethical standards for engineering development and scientific research that its five members have agreed upon. In a conference call on Wednesday, five artificial intelligence researchers representing the companies said they thought the technology would be a major force in the world for social and economic benefits, but they acknowledged the potential for misuse in a wide variety of ways.

Put on your QUIZ hats, cyborgs, robots, and natural humans!! This episode we're rejoined by futurist Alexandra Whittington, to quiz us on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and BlockChain (most commonly known as the technology underlying BITCOIN). Play along while you listen, see if you are up on these exciting new technologies. Oh, and also we complain about old people, selfies and Facebook too… c'mon along for some futurist-y goodness.

A Japanese inventor is hoping a robot that still needs humans will win over Asia's largest tech fair, offering a counterpoint to major technology firms pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI). Katsumori Sakakibara was showing off his little droid called Caiba at the Cutting-Edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition (CEATEC), which kicked off on Tuesday near Tokyo. Waist-high Caiba – whose name means hippocampus, a key area of the brain, in Japanese – is controlled by a human wearing a virtual reality handset and mechanical arms. If the person waves their arms, the little robot follows suit. But whatever Caiba does, it depends on a human to control it.

The Spain-headquartered startup, which today is announcing 6 million in Series A funding, is using deep learning to help startups and larger companies recruit developers. Specifically, its AI tech is analysing the code of millions of developers via their open source contributions in order to match them to appropriate job openings. "We use this analysis to understand how good they are at any given language and framework and match them with companies looking for developers," is how Source{d} co-founder and COO Jorge Schnura explains it. He also says it isn't just about identifying code quality or a developer's ability, but also coding style and other nuances that differentiates one developer from another. "We can [find] people who are similar to your team," adds Schnura. "This is all unsupervised learning since we don't tell our algorithms which features to look for, it defines them itself".

Japan s Murata Manufacturing Co. Ltd s latest concept robots, the Murata Cheerleaders, demonstrate how they balance on balls and synchronise as a team by utilising sensing and communication technology, at CEATEC JAPAN 2016 at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan. CHIBA, JAPAN: A Japanese inventor is hoping a robot that still needs humans will win over Asia's largest tech fair, offering a counterpoint to major technology firms pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI). Katsumori Sakakibara was showing off his little droid called Caiba at the Cutting-Edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition (CEATEC), which kicked off Tuesday near Tokyo. Waist-high Caiba -- whose name means hippocampus, a key area of the brain, in Japanese -- is controlled by a human wearing a virtual reality handset and mechanical arms. If the person waves their arms, the little robot follows suit.

In its quest to maintain a United States military advantage, the Pentagon is aggressively turning to Silicon Valley's hottest technology -- artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter made his fourth trip to the tech industry's heartland since being named to his post last year. Before that, it had been 20 years since a defense secretary had visited the area, he noted in a speech at a Defense Department research facility near Google's headquarters. The Pentagon's intense interest in A.I. -- and by connection the Silicon Valley companies specializing in that technology -- has grown out of the "Third Offset" strategy articulated by Mr. Carter last fall. Concerned about the re-emergence of China and Russia as military competitors, he stated that computer-based, high-tech weapons would give the American military an edge in the future. Third Offset is a reference to two earlier eras when Pentagon planners turned to technology to compensate for a smaller military.

Talking to computers was once for the likes of Captain Kirk, but a new product due to be announced by Google on Tuesday demonstrates that it believes devices that can speak to humans are ready for the living room. The search engine giant is expected to launch its Google Home "personal assistant" speaker system – a squat cylinder that will be able to process search requests and other everyday tasks when instructed to by the sound of a human voice. For many, conversations with computers consist of frustrating attempts to provide credit card numbers to a bank or talking to a bemused mobile phone, but Amazon has transformed the market, with the help of Alexa, its digital assistant, which lives inside its multimillion-selling Echo. A week ago Amazon said it would start selling the Echo in the UK at 149.99, two years after its introduction in the US, where it had become a sleeper hit. Despite a low-key launch the Echo sold 3.5m units in the time it took Amazon to adapt the device to recognise the full gamut of British English accents and voices.