When it was first announced to a sceptical tech press months after a flop phone, the Echo was dismissed separately as a joke and a privacy nightmare. Now the latter may still prove to be the case - the Echo is always listening, and after it is awakened by saying "Alexa", it logs every sentence spoken to it (although Amazon says privacy is at the heart of the device and that users can delete queries that are stored) - but a joke it is clearly not. In fact many analysts now believe that Amazon has one hand on the future that comes after the smartphone. Alexa is not the only, or even the first, voice-activated virtual assistant – Apple, Google and Microsoft have had their own for years – but it is the first that consumers have truly embraced. While taking out a smartphone in public and speaking to it – as one must with Apple's Siri or Google's Assistant – is awkward, and often slower than simply using a touchscreen, talking to a device in the comfort of one's own home is decidedly less uncomfortable.

Transportation, health, safety and education are among the many sectors that will be impacted by advances in AI. However, AI is likely to completely transform the labour market and indeed society as a whole, and given that the way the general public react to AI will strongly influence the practical outcome, scientists and legislators will need to ensure that the economic and social benefits of artificial intelligence are shared widely, stress the report's authors. At the same time, AI also raises many questions, particularly ethical and social questions, such as the right to privacy. The medical sector will also feel the impact.

Artificial intelligence is not a threat to mankind. This is one of the conclusions of a 27-page report entitled'Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030'. This, the first in a long series of planned reports, provides a summary of one year of research work, the first results from AI100, a project hosted by California-based Stanford University, whose purpose is to study the implications of artificial intelligence. Transportation, health, safety and education are among the many sectors that will be impacted by advances in AI. So what changes can be foreseen on the 2030 horizon?

Spark and pyspark have wonderful support for reliable distribution and parallelization of programs as well as support for many basic algebraic operations and machine learning algorithms. In this post we describe the motivation and means of performing name-by-name matching of two large datasets of company names using Spark. Our goal is to match two large sets of company names. We're looking at two long lists of company names, list A and list B and we aim to match companies from A to companies from B. In this example our goal is to match both GOOGLE INC. and Google, inc (from list A) to Google (from list B); and to match MEDIUM.COM to Medium Inc; and Amazon labs to Amazon, etc… OK, At first we thought we'd try the most simple and trivial solution, to see how well it works, if not for anything else, at the very least in order to establish a baseline for future attempts. The most simple thing to do is just case-insensitive string equation test.

Apple Inc. has acquired Indian machine-learning start-up Tuplejump Software Pvt Ltd as it seeks to expand its expertise in artificial intelligence. The iPhone maker bought the Hyderabad, India-based company in June, according to a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified. Tuplejump's software specializes in processing and analysing big sets of data quickly. The deal was reported earlier by TechCrunch. The purchase price wasn't disclosed.

Apple has just triggered a flurry of speculations as news was confirmed that it had acquired Tuplejump Software Pvt Ltd., a machine learning company operating in Hyderabad, India. The acquisition was reportedly completed last June and it rounded up the series of Apple startup purchases dabbling in artificial intelligence. Previously, the company acquired Turi Inc. for 200 million and it was followed by Emotient for a still unconfirmed amount. This last company is known in the industry for its employment of AI on facial expressions. These purchases are widely believed to be part of Apple's drive to improve its virtual assistant technology amid growing competition with Google.

Tech giant Apple Inc. has acquired Hyderabad-based machine learning startup Tuplejump as part of efforts to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities. The development was first reported by tech news portal TechCrunch. The startup, which had a dozen employees, was launched by three Indian engineers--Rohit Rai, Satyaprakash Buddhavarappu and Deepak Alur--in 2013. The first two co-founders have joined Apple while Alur is now working with US cloud-tech firm Anaplan. Terms of this deal are not clear.

Sales professionals make critical decisions every day, deciding which prospects to reach out to, what product and service offerings to highlight, and which communication channels will work best. Many salespeople make these decisions based on intuition or follow an organizational playbook. NAVIK SalesAI offers a better alternative by making the buyer central to the process, and applying artificial intelligence to the data. It provides weekly guidance identifying the most promising contacts, specifying which products or services each contact is likely to purchase next and suggesting the most effective communication channel to use. Product recommendations outline the likely reasons motivating a purchase, giving the sales person talking points that resonate with their prospect.