The usual movers and shakers of the analytics ecosystem last week found themselves having to share the limelight with Infosys Ltd., which made headlines by unveiling a machine learning platform for automating common business activities. Mana, as the system is called, can be used to do most of anything from processing payments to answering customer support tickets. The launch comes as part of an ongoing effort from Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka to move his firm beyond merely helping organizations with their application projects to providing the software itself. If successful, the push could improve the outsourcing giant's margins while creating new opportunities for its consulting arm to sell workload implementation services. A similar financial motivation led Oracle Corp. to shell out 663 million last week for Textura Corp, a cloud vendor that specializes in managing the massive amounts of data produced during building projects.

Artificial intelligence is a tool that allows technology to go a step further. Throughout the history of Artificial Intelligence, there have been several subfields developed as methods for problem solving. One of them is Deep Learning. Today we will be delving into TensorFlow. TensorFlow is an open source python library that uses deep learning and graph computation.

Last month American fast food giant Taco Bell introduced the "TacoBot", a Siri-like version of the cashiers that take your order at its restaurant. TacoBot is loftily described as the future of ordering tacos and the software makes use of AI (artificial intelligence) advancements like natural language processing to let users talk with the bot, order food, and even pay for items entirely through platforms such as Facebook and Slack. "The TacoBot Slack integration is the latest step on our journey to make the brand more accessible wherever and whenever our fans want it," said Lawrence Kim, Taco Bell's director of digital innovation and on demand, in a statement. "Taco Bell is about food tailor-made for social consumption with friends, and that's why integrating with a social communications platform like Slack makes perfect sense. TacoBot is the next best thing to having your own Taco Bell butler… and who wouldn't want that??" TacoBot has the ability to recommend menu items, answer questions, organise group orders, and facilitate transactions fully equipped with a Taco Bell "personality" as seen below.

More on Artificial Intelligence Why Artificial Intelligence Sucks Right Now How Can You Tell If a Machine is Thinking? In this episode, Trace tries to imagine what an AI-powered future might look like. One outcome that a lot of futurists predict is "the singularity": the merging of man and machine. In 1990, noted futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that this was the inevitable conclusion of where technology will lead us. Kurzweil reminds us that the computer powering his cellphone is literally several billion times more powerful and 100,000 times smaller than the computers he used 25 years ago.

Way back in 2005, when Will Wright unveiled Spore to an astonished crowd at GDC, there was one particular part of the demo that seemed to generate buzz: procedural dance. Spore uses player input to generate everything from a creature's walk animation to its mode of social interaction, but it was the ability to take a novel body shape and make it dance that seemed to excite people's imaginations the most. Yet Spore took the easy road: None of the creatures look like human beings, which means we have no idea what they're supposed to dance like. Spore basically just defined dancing as rhythmic movement, sometimes around a fire; that's not a bad definition by any means, but it's also nowhere near good enough to generate lifelike human dance.

Speaking of design we usually think about the wonderful front-ends your customers, and sometimes employees, love. We might also think of industrial design or even city shaping. These days we are so focused on the front-end; we might be tempted to forget the back-end. They say, beauty is what lies inside. With multi-channel, or even better onmi-channel and cross-channel, companies try to reach out to the customers and design a rich pallet of interfaces shaped to match the size of the channel and fitting it's character.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - MAY 28: Google senior vice president of product Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote address during the 2015 Google I/O conference on May 28, 2015 in San Francisco, California. Have you wondered about a world run by AI (Artificial Intelligence)? A world where everything is possible with just a click of a button? According to a new report, Google is gearing for a future where you will no longer care about your devices because everything will be about AI. In the annual shareholder letter by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, he revealed that they have been building the best AI team and tool in the past years.

No one is surprised to hear that Michael Jordan is at the top of his list. A recent study has deemed him to be the most important player in his chosen field... Okay, before you wonder if you went to the wrong site, you didn't. He is currently the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. So what list are we talking about and how did he get to the top? Well, for those of you that have dipped into academics as a career, you already know that your reputation is established by the connections that are expressed in your published work.

During the last couple of weeks, I spent some time in San Francisco and Napa Valley. Next week, I will revert to the Napa Valley trip, but this Monday, I will focus on the visit to the world's technology centre and the start up environment there. Now, clearly it is a relatively new focus area for me, as you all know and therefore, I am still easily impressed. But, boy, when you are used to the toxic and money-starved startup environment in Europe, and you then experience the amazing energy and huge money floating around in Silicon Valley, it is really hard not to be impressed. Or rather, it is hard not to reconsider your priorities, and this is exactly what I intend to do.

I've written a few times recently about a number of projects that are using drone technology to monitor vast environments. As you can perhaps imagine, with such endeavors, there is a huge amount of data generated, and while it presents rich pickings from a scientific perspective, nonetheless raises challenges about how that data can be managed. A recent study tested the role automation could play in both easing the burden on research teams and making data analysis more effective. The paper revealed that when teams are looking for optimal speed and accuracy that an approach that combines both machine and human can be the best. The researchers used the analysis of aerial images taken by camera drones in the Kuzikus wildlife reserve as their testing ground. The drones were used to count the wildlife in the park, and generated a huge amount of images over the course of the study.