Organisations, big and small, have recognised the significance of digital impact and are gearing up for transformational changes in their business models by redefining processes, technologies and people capabilities aligned with the emerging needs of their customers. When it comes to people and the need for change, the focus seems to be on equipping them with the skills required to function effectively in the digital world. While this is indeed an essential pre requisite for the success of the transformation programme, with the realisation that'business as usual' would have to change in every aspect of business functioning, in order to be counted in as an effective partner in the transition process and beyond, learning and development function has to rethink its approach to learning design and outcomes. Gone are the days when learning and development function used to be viewed as a tool primarily for motivating employees and despite the frequent discussions on the ROI from the investment made in the learning initiatives, it was generally accepted that measurement of effectiveness and outcomes are difficult to establish. Hence the surveys and feedbacks from learners and their supervisors were the main sources to establish the relevance and the usefulness of the programme.

The two-three most promising areas where digital advances could revolutionise the customer experience are artificial intelligence, chatbots and personalization. Internet of Things is another area where some form of banking transactions could take place. Connected devices, equipped with biometric capabilities, could help enable transaction banking. Service offerings that combine these technologies could make banking very different from what it is today. For instance, you could have a device -- say your mobile phone -- from where AI gathers information of your spending habits or preferences or location, makes sense of the information and drives banking decisions.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE:ACN) and IPsoft today announced the creation of an Accenture Amelia practice, designed to accelerate client adoption of artificial intelligence to improve business outcomes and create new growth opportunities for their businesses. Accenture will utilize IPsoft's Amelia platform to develop go-to-market strategies, solutions and consulting service offerings around deployments of virtual agent technology for clients across several industries with initial focus on banking, insurance and travel. "Artificial intelligence is maturing rapidly and offers great potential to reshape the way that organizations conduct business and interact with their customers and employees. At the same time, executives are overwhelmed by the plethora of technologies and many products that are advertising AI or Cognitive capabilities," said Paul Daugherty, Accenture's chief technology officer. "With our new Accenture Amelia practice, we are taking an important step forward in advancing the business potential of artificial intelligence by combining IPsoft's world-class virtual agent platform with Accenture's broad technology capabilities and industry experience to help clients transform their business and operations."

The experts have recently discovered much to their surprise that an informatics-oriented scheme of designing may be integrated into normal everyday experiments. This will act as a catalyst to further speed up the search of new materials. These materials will have pinpointed properties. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications. Starting with a few experiments along with their initial data, new experiments can be designed that yield a plethora of substances and materials.

What: Kitt.ai, a Seattle software company specializing in natural language understanding as related to artificial intelligence Ph.D.'s galore: The three co-founders, Yao, Guoguo Chen and Kenji Sagae, all have doctorates in computer-engineering related fields. Yao and Chen studied at Johns Hopkins and Sagae at Carnegie Mellon. The idea: Yao came up with the idea for the company while at Johns Hopkins. He flew to Seattle to interview at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), and told Allen CEO Oren Etzioni he wanted to start his own company. AI2 agreed to incubate the startup, and Kitt.ai was formed.

Artificial intelligence isn't likely to replace doctors, says a researcher, but it's likely their role will change as more artificial intelligence is developed. A study by Whangarei doctors William Diprose and Nicholas Buist has highlighted rapid progress of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in the health sector. They say a safe and sustainable healthcare system needs to look beyond human potential towards solutions such as AI. Q: Could artificial intelligence spell the end of doctors as we know them? Diprose and Buist are right to highlight the prospects of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

Data science is deep knowledge discovery through data inference and exploration. This discipline often involves using mathematic and algorithmic techniques to solve some of the most analytically complex business problems, leveraging troves of raw information to figure out hidden insight that lies beneath the surface. It centers around evidence-based analytical rigor and building robust decision capabilities. Ultimately, data science matters because it enables companies to operate and strategize more intelligently. It is all about adding substantial enterprise value by learning from data.

Accenture has announced a new business unit in partnership with IPsoft focused on spurring adoption of artificial intelligence in the enterprise. The systems integration and outsourcing giant plans to use IPsoft's Amelia AI platform as the core of the new Accenture Amelia practice. Amelia is similar to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, but is touted as more expressive and capable of empathy than her AI peers. Accenture said it will develop a suite of go-to-market strategies and consulting services based off of the Amelia platform. As Accenture CTO Paul Daugherty explained, the point is to appeal to executives who "are overwhelmed by the plethora of technologies and many products that are advertising AI or Cognitive capabilities".

Yi-Jian Wu, Founder & CEO of Yuanqu Tech in China, talks about how NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are being used to train their interactive educational robot for children. Call the robot's name and the speech-controlled robot is able to tell jokes, answer educational questions, teach English and act as a patient tutor for a child. Watch more scientists and researchers share how accelerated computing is benefiting their work at http://nvda.ly/X7WpH

Big data analytics and the Internet of Things are still relative newcomers. Given how quickly technology moves, though, it's not surprising that their next incarnations are already being talked about: cognitive analytics and a much-grown Internet of Things (IoT). We all know about the Internet of Things: it's data from a host of Web-connected devices that can be analyzed and studied, just like traditional data analytics. But what is cognitive analytics? Well, think back to old sci-fi shows.