In this article, I present a few modern techniques that have been used in various business contexts, comparing performance with traditional methods. The advanced techniques in question are math-free, innovative, efficiently process large amounts of unstructured data, and are robust and scalable. Implementations in Python, R, Julia and Perl are provided, but here we focus on an Excel version that does not even require any Excel macros, coding, plug-ins, or anything other than the most basic version of Excel. It is actually easily implemented in standard, basic SQL too, and we invite readers to work on an SQL version. In short, we offer here an Excel template for machine learning and statistical computing, and it is quite powerful for an Excel spreadsheet.

While the basic coding for neural network(NN) is ready, we could try to build a simple hypothesis for multi-class classification, a recognizer for classifying hand-written digits is a good topic for practicing. Let's kick off this demo from "Getting Started Project: Digit Recognizer" on the kaggle community. Our goal is clear: giving a grayscale image with 28x28 pixels, identify the digit the picture shows from '0' to '9'. Concretely, our raw features are the grayscale values at every pixel, with those values, NN attempts to figure out the relationship between pixels, and learning the stroke patterns from different digits, via the supervised learning process, NN could find out the most probable digit the pixels formed. These could be summarized in two facts: (1) the size of the feature space(input layer size) is equal to 784 since all grayscale values may vary independently, (2) we need 10 labels(output layer size) to indicate the digits from '0' to '9'.

The world of data and analytics has been transformed over the last few years, providing a broad range of technologies to hold and analyse data. It has been a challenge to keep up-to-date with new concepts from NoSQL, to machine learning, to Internet of things and blockchain. The Little Bee series of books were created by IBM to provide an easy introduction to these concepts and many more in any easy and fun format. They will not make you into an expert, but they will highlight the key concepts, advantages and application areas. The books are available online and, if you are based in the UK, you can order physical copies to enjoy.

The answer, and topic of this session, is with the help of Azure IoT and Machine Learning services! To achieve the objective, wearable and mobile devices are used and connected to the Azure IoT Hub for collecting information about location, commuting patterns and weather condition. All this information is then scored and evaluated in Azure Machine Learning to predict the best matching products and services. This session focuses on presenting all the technologies used to build the discussed use case, and how to integrate them in an end-to-end fully functional solution in Dynamics CRM.

Do you build bots for your team and wish it was just darn easier to setup? Do you spend hours redoing setups for different bot channels? Well, my dear developers, we have good news for you. We're launching Recime.io, a cloud based bot development platform to speed up your development time and save you hours of frustration. Build your bot of the future and worry less about setup environment!

You'll be aware of the recent explosion of interest in AI, and most likely have seen it in action too, in the form of smart assistants on phones, desktops (think Cortana) and elsewhere. Pretty soon, the ability of machines to achieve a greater understanding of the real world in all its messiness will become commonplace, in all aspects of both our personal and professional lives. The question here, however, is how to make use of it in your business. At the heart of the ability of algorithms to create sense out of the world as we humans know it is big data. AI requires large volumes of information to analyse, and has largely garnered its recent traction through the availability of low-cost processing and mass storage.

PayPal may be looking into voice recognition to enable more digital commerce use cases in the near future, if a new post-MWC blog post offers any hints. Looking back on last week's event -- for which we featured extensive firsthand coverage -- PayPal Head of Global Initiatives Anuj Nayar notes two dominant trends. One is the Internet of Things, including new connected car technologies like PayPal's new car commerce feature with Shell and Jaguar (and Apple). The other, as Nayar puts it, is "conversational commerce." Looking at emerging digital commerce opportunities in areas like virtual reality, connected appliances, and even drones, Nayar asserts that it "won't be convenient or realistic to pull out a credit card or punch in your information in any of these scenarios".

Chatbots, computer programs that mimic conversation with people by using artificial intelligence, "can transform the way you interact with the internet, from a series of self-initiated tasks to a quasi-conversation," The Guardian declared last year. Chatbots have been in use a long time, albeit in different forms. The automated customer-service robots that help navigate you through those seemingly endless phone trees when you call an 800 number were an early form of chatbots. So were the fake accounts that used to spam you on AOL Instant Messenger back in the opening days of the 2000s. Today, chatbots are much more sophisticated and make use of some pretty high-level artificial intelligence (AI).

Columnist Marc Saltzman covers this years SXSW festival and uncovers some of this years coolest gadgets and VR. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Columnist Marc Saltzman covers this years SXSW festival and uncovers some of this years coolest gadgets and VR.

With over-the-top television services like DirecTV Now, Playstation Vue, and Sling TV gaining popularity, the great unbundling is upon us -- and it's now easier than ever to dump your cable subscription for shows delivered via the Internet. But in order to watch your favorite online programs on a big screen, you'll probably need a streaming media device (unless you have a smart TV or a games console.) Improving all the time, these media streaming devices can connect you to everything from Amazon Video to YouTube TV, with apps and games added to the mix, too. One caveat: Even if you cancel cable TV, you'll still need to pay for Internet service to use these. Affordable and easy to use, the Amazon Fire TV can do a lot for your living room for little money.