If you need an Uber, Amazon Alexa has your back. Unfortunately if what you need is a conversation buddy, the personal assistant isn't quite up to the task. In an effort to bolster Alexa's social intelligence, Amazon is putting 2.5 million into a new university competition to design and build "socialbots" for the platform. Engineers will use the Alexa Skills Kit to build the artificial socialites. As part of the competition, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, will also be making its corpus available to participants as a tool to train the bots.

Following up on CEO Satya Nadella's big talk about artificial intelligence, Microsoft today announced the creation of the AI and Research Group, gathering more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers. The group will include the engineering teams for the Cortana personal assistant and Bing search engine. To lead the group, Microsoft has chosen 20-year company veteran Harry Shum, whose previous experience includes Bing and Microsoft Research. The AI and Research Group will work on products, but it will also conduct basic research. AI was a major point in Nadella's keynote this week at Microsoft Ignite, the company's annual IT conference.

NVIDIA is the inventor of the GPU, the computer device that creates interactive graphics on laptops, workstations, mobile devices, notebooks, and personal computers. It is Tesla's supplier of choice for the components that power its 17? touchscreen in the Model S. NVIDIA is a global company with interests in many emerging computer technologies, one of which is autonomous driving systems. A team of NVIDIA engineers working out of a former Bell Labs office in New Jersey decided to use deep learning to teach an automobile how to drive. As it happens, Bell Labs is where the earliest research into deep learning -- sometimes called artificial intelligence or AI -- took place. The project was called DAVE2, in honor of DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE) program.

You can think of Lucy as the fastest marketing researcher on the planet. Minneapolis-based digital marketing and technology agency GoKart Labs "hired" Lucy in May and was quickly amazed. "When I asked a question of Lucy--it was a specific question about a client's competitors--it found that information," says Rob Rosen, GoKart's director of digital marketing and analytics. "Even Google didn't find that information in a clear way." Lucy can scour the internet and rapidly present marketing data and insights that Google can't provide.

This specialised field demands multiple skills not easy to obtain through conventional curricula. So, be part of the data revolution by attending this workshop to learn the fundamentals of data science and machine learning and leave armed with practical skills to extract value from data. With the knowledge and skills gained from this workshop, you will be able to tackle complicated big data and machine learning challenges. Attend the workshop and develop the foundation level competence in data science and finding, manipulating, managing, interpreting and visualizing data.

I wrote just the other day of Elastic's acquisition of machine-learning company Prelert and how Elastic believed the deal would see it take market share from Splunk, the publicly listed granddaddy in the space (assuming, of course, you can have a granddaddy in a space that is only a decade or so old). Anyway, Splunk heard the claim, and didn't like it. The company had a machine learning announcement Tuesday and is trying to articulate just how much it offers beyond what Prelert (and other vendors) can offer. The overarching announcement is that of the new version of Splunk's various products -- Splunk Enterprise, Splunk IT Service Intelligence, Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk User Behavior Analytics. All of these individual products have been "souped up" with the latest Splunk take on machine learning in order to leverage machine data within a particular use case.

According to Deloitte: by the "end of 2016 more than 80 of the world's 100 largest enterprise software companies by revenues will have integrated cognitive technologies into their products". Gartner also predicts that 40 percent of the new investment made by enterprises will be in predictive analytics by 2020. AI is moving fast into the Enterprise and AI developments can create value for the Enterprise. This value can be captured/visualized by considering an'Enterprise AI layer'. This AI layer is focussed on solving relatively mundane problems which are domain specific.

Today unveiled "Project DataWorks," an initiative from Watson that is the industry's first cloud-based data and analytics platform to integrate all types of data and enable AI-powered decision-making. Project DataWorks is designed to make it simple for business leaders and data professionals to collect, organize, govern and secure data, so they can gain the insights needed to become a cognitive business. We are at an inflection point in the big data era," said Bob Picciano, senior vice president, IBM Analytics. "We know that users spend up to 80 percent of their time on data preparation, no matter the task, even when they are applying the most sophisticated AI. Project DataWorks helps transform this challenge by bringing together all data sources on one common platform, enabling users to get the data ready for insight and action, faster than ever before." Businesses today understand the competitive advantage of gaining insights from data. However, obtaining those insights can be ...

Silicon Valley is diving into artificial intelligence technology, with start-ups sprouting up and Google and Facebook pouring vast sums into projects that would teach machines how to learn and make decisions. Now Toyota wants a piece of the action. Toyota, the Japanese auto giant, on Friday announced a five-year, 1 billion research and development effort headquartered here. As planned, the compound would be one of the largest research laboratories in Silicon Valley. Conceived as a research facility bridging basic science and commercial engineering, it will be organized as a new company to be named Toyota Research Institute.

Worried the robot overlords are coming for your job? Some of the best minds at the top tech companies are working on the issue. Five tech titans -- Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft -- are forming a group to create a standard of ethics concerning artificial intelligence (AI), according to the New York Times. Researchers from each company have been meeting to discuss issues surrounding AI, everything from jobs to transportation and to warfare. The group doesn't yet have a name or a specific mission, but it is intent on guiding AI research toward benefitting humans, according to four sources involved with the partnership who spoke with the Times on the condition of anonymity.