In the Editorial, Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, identifies many lessons that can be learned from the success of the popular AVG Pokémon Go(tm), in which players can log hours of walking as they physically chase the animated Pokémon creatures based on video images displayed on their smart phones. Dr. Baranowski encourages researchers to conduct well-designed studies to assess the health effects of AVGs. Game developers could then use this information to create new games that would be both fun to play and promote beneficial physical activity. "Pokémon Go(tm) stimulated substantial amounts of physical activity in many likely-otherwise sedentary game players without intending to! We might call this stealth exergame programming, and we have a lot to learn about how to achieve this!" says Dr. Baranowski.

Artificial intelligence helps profits surge at Shop Direct Very.co.uk generated sales of more than 1 billion for the first time as parent company Shop Direct announced a 44 per cent increase in profits before tax. Liverpool-based Shop Direct grew underlying profit to 150.4 million as sales increased by 4.3 per cent to 1.86bn. The 12-month period to June 30 represented its first full financial year as a pureplay digital retailer, having ceased catalogue production in January 2015. The group, which also operates digital department stores VeryExclusive.co.uk, That was realised on the back of new features such as push notifications and touch ID to its MyVery app, which is nearing a million downloads.

Programming languages are the primary tool of the software development industry. Since the 1940's hundreds of them have been created and a huge amount of new lines of code in diverse programming languages are written and pushed to active repositories every day. We believe that a source code classifier that can identify the programming language that a piece of code is written in would be a very useful tool for automatic syntax highlighting and label suggestion on platforms, such as StackOverflow and technical wikis. This inspired us to train a model for classifying code snippets based on their language, leveraging recent AI techniques for text classification. We collected hundreds of thousands of source code files from GitHub repositories using the GitHub API.

With the recent success of depth cameras such as Kinect, gesture and posture recognition has become easier. Using depth sensors, the 3D locations of body-joints can be reliably extracted to used with any machine learning framework, specific gestures or posture can be modelled and inferred. Real world applications in Virtual Reality can be used for Yoga, Ballet training, Golf, anything related to activity recognition and proper postures. I also see application of it in the Architectural, Engineering, Construction and Manufacturing Industry by sending depth sensor data to the cloud. This is a proof of concept to detect pose "Y", "M", "C", "A" and stream the result back to the browser. This video explains a littlebit how it's hooked up together.

In the latest episode of #CoffeeWithAGoogler met with Christine Robson of Google's Machine Learning teams. We spoke about what was new and exciting in the realm of Machine Learning, including Project Magenta. We see how Magenta came up with a machine-generated piece of music, and how some artists jammed along with it! In this piece of music, we trained the model using the first four notes of'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star', and using a recurrent neural network, trained with everything from the Beatles to Bach, it came up with the tune. Listen to a great conversation with an expert on Machine Learning -- where Christine steps us through some pretty advanced concepts, but makes it so clear that even I could understand it!

You get home from the supermarket only to find that you've forgotten a vital ingredient for your dinner. But there is good news that could make sure you never forget key ingredients again. Microsoft has teamed up with refrigerator company, Liebherr, to create a new'SmartDeviceBox' which reminds people which foods they need to stock up on. We've all been there - you get home from the supermarket only to find that you've forgotten a vital ingredient (stock image left). But Microsoft has teamed up with Liebherr, to create a new'SmartDeviceBox' (pictured right) which reminds people which foods they need The SmartDeviceBox is an internet-connected device that uses cameras and object recognition technology to track what is in a refrigerator.

The mobile marketing attribution analytics company AppsFlyer, and Chinese internet giant Tencent have announced a partnership to make AppsFlyer's analytics platform available for marketers to track the effectiveness of app install campaigns on Tencent Social Ads. "The app economy is quickly becoming a global economy, and this partnership with Tencent Social Ads, one of the biggest and most important distribution platforms in the world, opens up myriad possibilities for app marketers and developers looking to grow in China, while enabling us to expand our footprint in Asia and globally as well," said Elad Masiach, VP Partner Development at AppsFlyer. Google has added automatically generated insights of data into the Android and iOS versions of Google Analytics. This new feature is quite similar to the insights in plain English that are provided by products like BeyondCore, which was acquired by Salesforce very recently. Machine learning and artificial intelligence is used to convert raw data into credible information which "lets you see in 5 minutes what might have taken hours to discover previously", said Google in a company blog post. Salesforce announced the expansion of its Wave Analytics portfolio with new Salesforce Wave Apps for B2B Marketing and Financial Services, as well as 19 apps from ISV partners.

In this special guest feature, Pallab Deb, Vice President and Global Head, Analytics at Wipro Limited, outlines how you can gain benefit from using your gut business instincts by combining them with extreme data insights. Pallab Deb in his current role heads the Wipro's Analytics service line which delivers state of the art analytics solutions to a global clientele. With his extensive experience in Information Technology, Pallab has not only held multiple leadership roles in Connected Enterprise Services (CES) service line of Wipro, client engagements & strategic alliances but also has led sales teams on complex consulting, system integration and outsourcing deals in North America and Europe in High Tech, Manufacturing, Retail & Consumer Goods, Life Sciences and Utilities industries delivering on aggressive sales growth targets for seven consecutive years. Organizations are tantalizingly close to a vast amount of data that can prove meaningful to business. There is a prodigious amount of text, visual and audio information flowing across media reports, company filings, government records, surveys, research documents, social media, messaging applications, blogs, email, IVR, machine logs, contracts, ERP, POS, CRM, MES, IoT, etc. Somewhere, within that blur of rapidly flowing real-time data, is the insight that could change your business.

For four years, eBay has been collecting customer search data, along with search click-through rates and other customer interaction data, and feeding the information into its machine learning system. In an interview with InformationWeek, Dan Fain, the company's VP of engineering, outlined the steps being taken, and the business motiviation behind them. The use-cases are worth exploring for any IT professional looking to help improve a company's bottom line by applying machine learning to customer-facing applications. Search, customer click patterns, language translations, item recommendations, and image analysis are among the key ways machine learning is being put to use at eBay, according to Fain. The first, and most important, appliction of machine learning is to improve search functions on eBay.com, according to Fain. "We have several machine learning models working behind the scenes to ensure we get the best search results," said Fain in our interview.

No company is immune to cyber criminal activity. In 2013, Target was hacked despite receiving as many as 10,000 security alerts per day. While Target is a Fortune 100 retailer, even medium-sized companies have to sift through hundreds of thousands of alerts each year. Alerts are investigated before being categorized as false positives and ultimately ignored, but most alerts are idiosyncratic to a product or application with little context of the overall business impact. To prevent financial and reputational loss, security teams are driven to find the most critical needles in an ever-growing haystack of security information.