For humans, writing posts on social media just comes naturally. Humans understand each word that's said or typed, but for machines, it's not that easy. Understanding the meaning of words is one of the biggest challenges that artificial intelligence researchers face today, and this week's GitHub project named fastText aims to solve that challenge. Automatic text processing is a part of everyday interactions with computers, and it generates plenty of online data. With all of this data, specific tools are needed to understand the content of large datasets.

The global economic crisis and increased competition have led to a situation where Indian IT companies have been forced to improve productivity and quote lower prices to win deals. This week, Infosys rubbished reports that it was laying-off 3,500 workers, after losing a key project to implement technology solutions for the Royal Bank of Scotland. While the debacle was triggered by Britain's exit from the European Union, it is important for India to prepare for a scenario where the IT and BPO industries will no more be the major job creators that they were in the past. New recruitment in the IT industry has fallen consistently from 2.35 lakh in 2013, and could be significantly less this fiscal compared to the 2 lakh jobs created in 2015-16. When India was at the cusp of the IT boom, the considerable labour arbitrage was an attractive draw for big companies to shift their back-end operations and low-grade coding, maintenance and testing functions to India.

Can FinTech and AI solve the ESG data puzzle?

Can FinTech and AI solve the ESG data puzzle?

Here's something written by the AI at articoolo.com. Not bad, these AI's are best at summaries and press releases, but they keep getting better. We hear a great deal about Artificial Intelligence today, but several people truly realize what artificial intelligence actually is. Even more perplexing to beginners is that many people which are in the AI field argument its definition. Still compounding the problem is when commercial endeavors start touting their technology as unnaturally intelligent driven, when really they'ren't.

It's a competitive real-estate rental market out there, and Trulia wanted to capitalize on the interest with a new Facebook Messenger bot it launched earlier this month. The bot lets users search for rental properties and keep up to date on new properties when they become available. Trulia's bot came out of a quarterly hackathon project hosted by at real estate tech firm this past May, and the company learned a lot about bot-building. The experience showed that businesses should give bot-making a shot, even if they're not tech companies, said Yardley Ip, general manager for Trulia Rentals. "Given that the tools are so easy to use, and it's so lightweight to develop [a bot], I think businesses should try it," Ip said.

The hire marks the start of the Alphabet ( GOOG)-owned, Art Levinson-helmed biotech's drive to build out a computational biology and machine learning team. Calico will tap into that expertise--and that of the machine learning team it has tasked Koller with building--to advance its drive to understand aging and, in doing so, enable people to live longer, healthier lives. "Daphne and her team will work in close collaboration with the basic and translational scientists at Calico and partner with other machine learning experts, including the team at Google, to derive novel insights and effective interventions," Calico R&D President Hal Barron said. The plan now is to add more staff to work with Koller, including a machine learning engineer and someone capable of developing algorithms to analyze biological images and videos.

During the 20th century, advances in fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanized farming technology helped make it possible to feed a dramatically growing world population. Now, advocates say, the next big advance in agricultural technology may come from the digital world, as modern computer vision, precision sensors, and machine-learning technology help farmers use last century's advances more efficiently and precisely to grow healthier and tastier food. "We're at the cusp of this next wave of innovation in agriculture, which we call digital agriculture," says Mike Stern, the president of The Climate Corporation. "It has to do with, over the past five to seven years, the farm really digitizing, not unlike how our society has changed in terms of the tools and types of things we can do." The Climate Corp., which was purchased by agriculture giant Monsanto for roughly 1 billion in 2013, is one of several companies working to build a digital analytics hub for farmers, merging images from satellites, drones, and cameras, as well as readings for everything from soil thermometers to tractors' on-board computers.

In the words of Seth Godin, "Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell." Until now, marketers had two choices: they could either pick personalized, or scalable, but not both; they could opt for inefficient manual ways of personalized engagement, or choose static digital marketing that scaled but took a one-size-fits-all approach. Machine intelligence is changing that. AI-driven brand storytelling intelligently adapts to a consumer's unique preferences and behavior to deliver truly personalized stories at scale, by combining the human elements of storytelling with machine-powered personalization. Traditional human-driven storytelling follows a preset pattern.