US consumers are getting more comfortable using mobile devices to manage their health, a new study finds. Even in the face of privacy concerns, Americans are increasingly sharing medical information, sending photos to their doctors, using fitness or activity trackers, and using AI to become active players in their healthcare. Ketchum conducted an online survey of 2,000 smartphone-owning Americans earlier this year, and found close to 58 percent of this group uses their phone to communicate with a medical professional. Almost half of respondents have a fitness, health or medication-tracking app, and 83 percent of people who use fitness or workout apps do so at least once per week. Of course, not everyone loves health apps – about a quarter of survey respondents said health and fitness tracking apps have made them feel bad, with 21 percent ending use of the apps.

Analysts say a handful of technologies are poised to change our lives by 2021. While Forrester Research sees 15 emerging technologies that are important right now (see the full list here), five of them could shake things up in a big way for businesses and the public in general, according to Brian Hopkins, an enterprise architecture analyst with Forrester. "The technologies we selected will have the biggest impact on your ability to win, serve and retain customers whose expectations of service through technology are only going up," Hopkins wrote in the report. "Our list focuses on those technologies that will have the biggest business impact in the next five years." Of Forrester's larger list, which includes the likes of edge computing, security automation and real-time interaction management, the five that Hopkins pulled out to highlight have the greatest potential for disruption.

This is the pattern where intelligence lives with the data in the database. Imagine a core transactional enterprise application built with a database such as SQL Server. What if you could embed intelligence, i.e. advanced analytics algorithms plus data transformations, within the database itself, to make every transaction intelligent in real time? That's now possible for the first time with R and ML built into SQL Server 2016. At the Summit, we'll illustrate this with a fascinating demo of real-time predictive fraud detection and scoring in SQL Server.

Salesforce (CRM), the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company, today unveiled Salesforce Einstein, bringing the power of artificial intelligence to every Salesforce user. With Salesforce Einstein, any company will be able to deliver more predictive and personalized customer experiences across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. Salesforce Einstein is a breakthrough innovation that embeds advanced AI capabilities in the Salesforce Platform--in fields, objects, workflows, components and more--so everyone will be able to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction, using clicks or code. "With Salesforce Einstein, we are delivering the world's smartest CRM," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. "Einstein is now every customer's data scientist, making it easy for everyone to take advantage of best-in-class AI capabilities in the context of their business."

No longer simply the subject of science-fiction movies, artificial intelligence is making its way into the insurance enterprise. According to Accenture, four in five insurers are planning to or have deployed some sort of artificial intelligence technology in their enterprises. Allstate Business Insurance deployed ABie -- the Allstate Business Insurance Expert -- virtual assistant to help walk agents through the quoting process for complex products. The context-aware technology understands agents inputs and is able to direct them through the process without using the call center. AIG has partnered with Human Condition Safety to deploy devices that "couples wearable technology with artificial intelligence (AI) and building information modeling."

This is the year artificial intelligence came into its own for mainstream businesses, at least as a marketing feature. On Sunday, Salesforce.com, which sells online software for sales and marketing, announced it would be adding A.I. to its products. Its system, called Einstein, promises to provide insights into what sales leads to follow and what products to make next. Salesforce chose this date to pre-empt Oracle, the world's largest business software company, which on Sunday evening began its annual customer event in San Francisco. Oracle calls its product Oracle A.I. Elsewhere, General Electric is pushing its A.I. business, called Predix.

NEW YORK--Only a few years ago, the launch of a new computer operating system set off impassioned clashes between devotees of the Mac and supporters of Windows. Tuesday's arrival of macOS Sierra seems like an after-thought by comparison, coming with nowhere near the media attention that's paid to an iPhone or even iOS release. The marquee feature is Siri's debut on the Mac, and while this is mainly a welcome if long overdue development, the fact is we all got to know Apple's loquacious personal assistant on the phone first. Indeed, with Sierra comes further evidence that we're fully entrenched in a post-PC world, where the computers in our pockets have trumped those on our desks. Microsoft with Windows 10 has for the most part designed a single operating system that is meant to work across PCs, phones, tablets, even Xboxes.

In this role, you'll be part of our European consulting team that is helping clients to design and deliver innovative solutions based on Cognitive Computing approaches - in particular based on IBM WATSON technology. We're looking for experienced professionals who have proven expertise in one or multiple of the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Semantic Technologies, Information Retrieval or Machine Learning. You'll provide advisory and implementation expertise to our clients including: use case and business case development for Cognitive Computing solutions; proof of concept execution to prove the value of Cognitive Computing use cases; solution outline and design of Cognitive Computing systems; as well as supporting business development activities.You'll have strong experience in designing and building innovative solutions based on the above technologies but you will also be have the expertise and architectural mindset to relate and integrate such solutions with existing client system infrastructures, such as e.g. Proven hands-on experience in conducting analyses on unstructured as well as structured / semi-structured data and in working with state-of the art technologies in Cognitive Computing will be expected. Examples of such technologies include but are not limited to: Natural Language Processing or Information Retrieval (e.g.

With natural language processing, we have a pile of documents (that's Supreme Court cases in this project), and we need to get to their true essence. Most words aren't helpful in this process, so we drop them (stopwords). We also know that words like "liking" are really the same as "like" in this context (shh don't tell my literature professors from college I said that), so we lemmatize, which means we replace all those -ings with their roots. After this, we have a few choices. We need to turn the words into "vectors" (fancy term for number, really) and use those vectors to inform our topic groups.

Let's face it, cancer sucks! We're sure that at all of us knows someone who is battling cancer or has lost a friend of close family member due to the perils of cancer. Given that this disease touches just about all of us, it should come as no surprise that billions of dollars are poured into researching cancer and ways to eradicate it for good. Luckily, the fine folks at Microsoft are well on their way to cracking the secret code that allows cancer to propagate in a host body. Microsoft's researchers from around the world are working together using artificial intelligence to effectively "solve" the cancer problem.