FILE - This Oct. 20, 2015, file photo, shows a sign outside Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google unveils its vision for phones, cars, virtual reality and more during its annual conference for software developers, beginning Wednesday, May 18, 2016. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve.

Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. Reporters and bloggers from around the world will attend, ensuring that whatever the company unveils will also be featured in stories, pictures and video delivered to a vast audience of consumers. The three-day showcase also attracts thousands of computer programmers, giving Google an opportunity to convince them why they should design applications and other services that work with its gadgets and an array of software that includes the Chrome Web browser and Android operating system for mobile devices.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Consulting firm Accenture has announced a partnership with artificial intelligence software company, IPsoft, aimed at spurring the use of AI in the enterprise, ZDNet reports. The deal will see Accenture integrate IPsoft's AI program, Amelia, into a new business unit called Accenture Amelia. Amelia is similar to other virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, however, IPsoft's program is reportedly more expressive and capable of showing empathy than other programs.

Chatbots, virtual assistants, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence have all been growing in popularity in recent times. Prior to Google I/O 2016 we were expecting to finally hear something from Google about their efforts in creating an AI Bot platform of some type. If the rumours are correct Google will, in fact, be launching their Bot platform at their developer conference. However, we haven't been able to determine the scope or scale of the platform thus far. It could be intended as a platform to run on any network, Telegram, Slack etc or it could be used in conjunction with a new interaction platform to be launched by Google itself, be it a chat or voice interaction model – hello Google Home – or it could be all of these things or none of these things.

Qubit is a start-up which helps online retailers collect, analyse and act on data about the way their customers behave. We're looking for a Data Scientist to join our Research team, to help us develop intelligent products around this data, and conduct cutting-edge research into consumer behaviour on the web. This is a great opportunity to conduct real R&D around human behaviour. Our data collection tools store more than 1 billion data points every day. Overall, Qubit technology tracks consumer journeys leading to billions of pounds of online spending worldwide every year, for some of the largest names in online retail.

Many machine learning algorithms make assumptions about your data. It is often a very good idea to prepare your data in such way to best expose the structure of the problem to the machine learning algorithms that you intend to use. In this post you will discover how to prepare your data for machine learning in Python using scikit-learn. How To Prepare Your Data For Machine Learning in Python with Scikit-Learn Photo by Vinoth Chandar, some rights reserved. You almost always need to preprocess your data.

The audience at this year's IoT World Conference (Santa Clara Convention Center, May 10-12) was estimated to be 10,000. It grew rapidly from 750 in 2014 and 5,800 in 2015, according to IoT World founder Gavin Whitechurch. Ushered in by the fast-paced beat of La Roux's "Bulletproof," Gavin Whitechurch, founder of IoT World, stepped up to the stage to deliver his welcome address. The audience -- a stream of IoT believers, investors, and developers -- packed the ballroom. "It's been an amazing journey over 3 years," said Whitechurch. "We started three years ago on a street in Palo Alto.

Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. Reporters and bloggers from around the world will attend, ensuring that whatever the company unveils will also be featured in stories, pictures and video delivered to a vast audience of consumers. The three-day showcase also attracts thousands of computer programmers, giving Google an opportunity to convince them why they should design applications and other services that work with its gadgets and an array of software that includes the Chrome Web browser and Android operating system for mobile devices.

Dozens of companies who fancy their technologies as a great fit for the automotive market are on the hunt for alliances. For example, Kyocera and FotoNation announced Tuesday (May 17) a partnership agreement to develop intelligent automotive camera technology -- deemed critical in the coming era of semi- and fully autonomous cars. Kyocera has already dabbled in the auto sector with its rearview camera modules. FotoNation, with the lion's share of computational imaging solutions for mobile phones, entered the driver monitoring system market last year. "The two companies' interests are aligned," Sumat Mehra, senior vice president of marketing and business development at FotoNation, told EE Times, "to expand each company's presence in the automotive market" -- well beyond what they offer today.

Google relies heavily on AI to help with its search functions as well as features like Google Now. However it looks like Google could soon be thinking of applying their AI to other features, such as chatbots and potentially integrate them into their other services like Google Hangouts, a messaging platform for Google users. The idea of chatbots aren't new, although recently they seem to have undergone a resurgence in popularity and are being used by the likes of Facebook and Microsoft. This is according to a report from The Information (paywall; via USA Today) in which it reads, "Essentially, Google wants to get into the bot-making business more broadly than people realized, and in a way that's similar to Microsoft's strategy, and relying on its strengths in artificial intelligence to convince developers to use its tools." Last year there were reports that Google was planning something similar and that by integrating it into messenger services like Hangouts, users could pose questions to the bot and have it answered for them without having to leave the app itself.