Augmented/Virtual Reality Tools – Startups that leverage augmented or virtual reality to aid retailers in layout of stores and the design of promotional displays. InContext Solutions, which has worked with clients like Walmart, Nestle, and Kellogg's, lets brands visualize marketing concepts and test new designs on shoppers in virtual reality to gauge their efficacy before launch. Augment aims to help brands, such as General Mills, L'Oreal, and Coca-Cola, pitch their vending machines, kiosks, or merchandise displays to retailers by showing how they would look in augmented/virtual reality. Beacon-Based Analytics and Marketing – Companies that provide hardware and software to help stores track visitors. Many focus on data collection for internal analytics, such as merchandise tracking, adjusting staffing levels, monitoring promotions, etc. Euclid Analytics, for example, tracks visitors to monitor the impact of promotions on driving store visits and to better understand when people visit stores and specific aisles.

I just got back from Atlanta, the host of the Microsoft Machine Learning and Data Science Summit. This was the first year for this new conference, and it was a blast: the energy from the 1,000 attendees was palpable. I covered Joseph Sirosh's keynote presentation yesterday, but today I wanted to highlight a few other talks from the program now that the recordings are available to stream. But for me personally, the highlight of the event was the keynote presentation by Dr Edward Tufte on the Future of Data Analysis. I had the distinct honour of introducing Dr Tufte to the stage, who has long been a hero of mine. Please enjoy his presentation, embedded below.

Amazon has launched a 2.5 million competition for teams of students to create an artificial intelligence charming enough that people can chat to it about celebrity gossip and sports. The'Alexa Prize' is named after the service that powers Amazon's voice-activated smart speaker, the Amazon Echo. The goal of the inaugural competition is to build a'socialbot' for Alexa that will converse with people about popular topics and news events. The team with the highest-performing socialbot will win a 500,000 prize, while there's a 1 million for the team's university if their socialbot can chat "coherently and engagingly" with humans for 20 minutes. Up to ten teams of students will also win a 100,000 award, Alexa-powered devices, free AWS services, and support from the Alexa team.

Smart transportation uses information technology and artificial intelligence to efficiently manage and coordinate transportation systems. The application of smart transportation network allows the travelling population to have better knowledge of the traffic for better coordination. In addition, the use of smart transportation also ensures safety for the drivers. The market is experiencing growth due to their increasing demand across all geographic locations. The rising need for safe and secured transportation and planning of smart cities by governments have propelled the growth of the global smart transportation market. However, the high initial investment and lack of data might restrain the market's growth during the forecast period.

A jump in the fluency of Google's language software will help efforts to make chatbots less lame. Google's latest advance in machine learning could make the world a little smaller. The company is reëngineering its translation service after Google researchers invented a system that is significantly more accurate. In a competition that pitted the new software against human translators, it came close to matching the fluency of humans for some languages, such as when translating from English to Spanish. Google has already begun rolling out the new system for translations from Chinese to English (see examples showing the improvement).

Microsoft has decided it needs more real brains working on artificial intelligence. The company said Thursday it is combining the team working on bots like Cortana with its longstanding Microsoft Research lab into a single 5,000-person unit. "Microsoft has been working in artificial intelligence since the beginning of Microsoft Research, and yet we've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible," Shum said in a statement. The move comes amid the departure of Qi Lu for health reasons, as first reported by Recode. Shum will take over the search efforts that Lu had been responsible for, while Rajesh Jha will take over responsibility for all of Office and get a promotion to executive vice president.

IBM Research and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have joined forces to further develop the scientific field of machine vision – a core aspect of artificial intelligence. Big Blue and MIT will build the IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension, or BM3C, in Cambridge, Mass. Together they plan to develop cognitive computing systems that mimic the human ability to understand and integrate input from multiple sources for use in a variety of computer applications in industries such as healthcare, education, and entertainment. MIT researchers will collaborate with IBM scientists and engineers who will provide technology expertise and advances from the IBM Watson platform. The BM3C will address technical challenges around both pattern recognition and prediction methods in the field of machine vision that are currently impossible for machines alone to accomplish.

Today, right now, is a transformative moment. You are as likely to read this on your phone or tablet as you are on a laptop or in print. Every company wants to remodel itself as a lean, mean digital disruptor. Hotel companies look in awe at Airbnb, whose digital model propelled them from nowhere to a 30-billion valuation. A hotel giant that owns no rooms – groundbreaking.

Some of the biggest names in tech are collaborating on artificial intelligence. The Partnership on AI (inventive name, it is not) has brought together Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, and others to debate best practices and host A.I.-related events. The Partnership on AI isn't the first high-profile collaboration among tech luminaries to tackle the heavy questions surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning. Earlier this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk joined with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and others to launch OpenAI, a non-profit "artificial intelligence research company" devoted to developing A.I. that's friendly to humanity. While both OpenAI and the Partnership on AI are focused on promoting ethical A.I. research, as well as advancing public understanding of the potential (and pitfalls) of machine learning, OpenAI has pushed ahead in offering materials and toolkits for researchers.

An artificial intelligence agent developed by two Carnegie Mellon University computer science students has proven to be the game's ultimate survivor --, outplaying both the game's built-in AI agents and human players. The students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, used deep-learning techniques to train the AI agent to negotiate the game's 3-D environment, still challenging after more than two decades because players must act based only on the portion of the game visible on the screen. Their work follows the groundbreaking work of Google's DeepMind, which used deep-learning methods to master two-dimensional Atari 2600 videogames and, earlier this year, defeat a world-class professional player in the board game Go. In contrast to the limited information provided in Doom, both Atari and Go give players a view of the entire playing field. "The fact that their bot could actually compete with average human beings is impressive," said Ruslan Salakhutdinov, an associate professor of machine learning who was not involved in the student project.