I had the opportunity to co-present with Su Doyle from Checkpoint Systems at the NRF Big Show last week. It was a fun an effective collaboration that helped us highlight the benefits of capturing in-store and supply chain data using the RFID capabilities from Checkpoint and combining it with a variety of public, purchased and proprietary data to build Advanced Analytics models using Azure Machine Learning. It's not enough to just capture the data; it's also important to understand what business questions the data will be used to answer. After data is captured and processed, machine learning techniques can be applied to the data to better understand patterns, correlations and to answer business questions.

Object recognition is one of the most exciting areas in machine learning right now. Computers have been able to recognize objects like faces or cats reliably for quite a while, but recognizing arbitrary objects within a larger image has been the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence. Maybe the real surprise is that human brains recognize objects so well. We effortlessly convert photons bouncing off objects at slightly different frequencies into a spectacularly rich set of information about the world around us. Machine learning still struggles with these simple tasks, but in the past few years, it's gotten much better.

When you see or hear something happen, you can instantly describe it: "a girl in a blue shirt caught a ball thrown by a baseball player," or "a dog runs along the beach." It's a simple task for us, but an immensely hard one for computers -- fortunately, IBM and MIT are partnering up to see what they can do about making it a little easier. The new IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension -- we'll just call it BM3C -- is a multi-year collaboration between the two organizations that will be looking specifically at the problem of computer vision and audition. Note: This article previously stated that "no money is changing hands," but this is not quite the case. While IBM declined to provide specific financial details, these academic partnerships do involve varying amounts of funding and sharing access to resources and personnel on both sides.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Denon put wireless speaker leader Sonos in its crosshairs when it launched its HEOS wireless audio platform in 2014. This past month, Denon showed a major commitment to HEOS by integrating the multi-room audio technology into its new receiver models. Denon upped the ante again yesterday, announcing it will integrate Amazon's Alexa digital assistant into HEOS products. We should see Alexa-powered HEOS speakers and components sometime in the first quarter of 2017. With digital assistants gaining greater integration in smart devices, computers, and gaming consoles, audio is the next logical battleground.

How could health care be more like Uber? What could it learn from Airbnb? Sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, Medicine X would hardly be complete without a panel mentioning such companies. Luckily, Jonathan Bush's Saturday morning keynote embraced the questions and discussed bringing "the network effect" to health care, with a rollicking sense of humor to boot.Bush, founder and CEO of athenahealth, extolled the network as the principle by which supply and demand can be re-calibrated in real time, just like Uber does with auto transport and Airbnb does with temporary housing. Who is looking for what?

Google's decision to disable end-to-end encryption by default in its new #Allo chat app is dangerous, and makes it unsafe.

Let the Great Messaging War of 2017 begin. Today, Google is launching Allo, a revamped messaging app meant to compete with the likes of Apple Messages and Facebook Messenger--two products that in recent months have steadily unveiled a slew of new features. Google thinks it could leapfrog them both, thanks to its most valuable assets: a wealth of data about what we do and search for online, and the billions of dollars it has invested in machine learning. When you message people, Allo creates smart replies akin to those found in Inbox--but those smart replies are carefully calibrated to both the content and context of your conversation. So, for example, if someone sends you a picture of them skydiving, you can immediately tap on a series of well-tuned responses: "So brave," "How fun," and "So exciting!"

Blizzard Entertainment announced it has restored access to its gaming servers. The login issues have been resolved. UPDATE: 7:30 a.m. EDT -- With about two hours since the DDoS attack began on the servers of Blizzard Entertainment, popular games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch are still inaccessible by players around the world. PoodleCorp, which took responsibility for the latest DDoS attack on the gaming company, said it would stop the attack when its tweet announcing the attack was shared 3,000 times. And as of 7:30 a.m. EDT, it had been retweeted just over 1,100 times. Some gamers, livid at the repeated interruption of Blizzard servers over the last few weeks, were angry with PoodleCorp for targeting the gaming company repeatedly.

Last week, I introduced the notion that businesses can gain deeper customer insights if they connect their disparate data silos. Similar to how oncologists can leverage information from genome sequencing to tailor cancer treatments for a specific patient in order to improve health outcomes, businesses can use all customer data from disparate data silos to personalize interactions with their customers to improve customer loyalty. Using the 2x2 graphical approach to understanding data size (i.e., number of customers and number of variables), we can see how the value of your integrated business data is greater than the sum of its parts. Figure 1 illustrates these two components of size by examining four different scenarios of how businesses use their data. In the lower right quadrant, it is business as usual; when departments keep their data siloed, each department only knows a few things about the customers.