Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things Everyone knows that the Internet of Things is big, really big. It's so big, in fact, that trying to manage even a small slice of it will challenge the savviest of tech professionals. That's what artificial intelligence (AI) can play a valuable role. By using AI, companies can tackle and otherwise insurmountable task, namely getting a handle on IoT in order to get value from it. Register for this episode of DM Radio to hear Host Eric Kavanagh interview Leo Sadovy of SAS, Dan Graham of Teradata and Eric Hewitt of Understoryweather.

In Personalization at Amazon, we use neural networks to generate personalized product recommendations for our customers. Amazon's product catalog is huge compared to the number of products that a customer has purchased, making our datasets extremely sparse. And with hundreds of millions of customers and products, our neural network models often have to be distributed across multiple GPUs to meet space and time constraints. For this reason, we have created and open-sourced DSSTNE, the Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Neural Engine, which runs entirely on the GPU. We use DSSTNE to train neural networks and generate recommendations that power various personalized experiences on the retail website and Amazon devices.

The Roll is a new smart app that can help you organize the thousands of photos you take with your mobile phone. The app scans a photo library, analyzes each image and tries to detect the ones that are similar. It then sorts the images into groups so copies can be deleted. The app also gives each image a score as a measure of its quality. It doesn't always get it right: a professional fashion image taken in a studio obtained a quality score of 50%, although it may help the user to know which photos are better or worse before sharing them.

FinTech business in Africa makes use of A.I & credit technology. MyBucks, a German listed FinTech company that holds three brands GetBucks, GetSure and GetBanked, has said its partnership with NGO (non-governmental organisation) Opportunity International continues to take strides forward in their vision of bringing financial inclusion to the unbanked and underbanked in emerging markets – most specifically in Africa. In a move that is contrary to the current trend worldwide where banks are acquiring FinTech companies to add value and expand services, the partnership marks, according to the company, the first time a FinTech company has acquired banks to bridge the gap between the virtual and traditional worlds of banking. This is ultimately to enable faster, more efficient and less expensive access to financial services for clients. The conclusion of the acquisition of four banks and two microfinance institutions from Opportunity International will add Ghana, Tanzania and Mozambique to MyBucks' country portfolio and regulatory approval has already been granted in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.

The terms "analytics" and "artificial intelligence" get bandied about in the media as harbingers of the future. But until recently, it's been rare to see them discussed in a common context. We know that analytics drives many aspects of business strategy and decision-making nowadays, but only recently have researchers, computer scientists and data scientists begun to move in earnest on the notion that AI systems, with their ability to process disparate bits of information quickly and learn while they're doing so, can have a real impact on challenges faced in areas like healthcare, finance and engineering. Probably the most high-profile example of this was the creation of IBM's Cognitive Business Solutions Group earlier this year. The unit advises organizations on how to use IBM's AI solution Watson in ways that go beyond what was previously possible in research and analytics.

Artificial intelligence has been a Hollywood staple for years. Often, films dealing with the technology involve robots rising up to destroy humanity. Except for the possibility that, well, maybe it could happen? After all, the goal of AI, really, is to foster machines that think like humans, and heaven knows we're capable of some very nasty thoughts. AI experts, though, say most of these films don't offer a realistic portrayal of how we'll actually get along with the technology.

Activists Cheer On EU's'Right To An Explanation' For Algorithmic Decisions, But How Will It Work When There's Nothing To Explain? I saw a lot of excitement and happiness a week or so ago around some reports that the EU's new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) might possibly include a "right to an explanation" for algorithmic decisions. It's not clear if this is absolutely true, but it's based on a reading of the agreed upon text of the GDPR, which is scheduled to go into effect in two years. Slated to take effect as law across the EU in 2018, it will restrict automated individual decision-making (that is, algorithms that make decisions based on user-level predictors) which "significantly affect" users. The law will also create a "right to explanation," whereby a user can ask for an explanation of an algorithmic decision that was made about them.

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. So the UK has just given itself a national headache. Whether you think the Brexit was the right decision or a dangerous and unmitigated screw-up (as I do), the consequences of the referendum will be non-trivial and take years to complete. But the mechanics of the UK exiting the European Union aside, the question of how people now feel about the Brexit is interesting. Are they awash in jubilation or has buyer's remorse set in?

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this TED video, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results: spectacular, hallucinatory collages (and poems!) that are machine generated. "Perception and creativity are very intimately connected," Agüera y Arcas says. "Any creature, any being that is able to do perceptual acts is also able to create."

If there's a bug you don't know where it is.