Researchers are now using AI, game theory and big data to protect wildlife and forests around the world, as technology finally catches up with poachers. The fight against poaching has proven very difficult in the past century, that's despite the advances in technology that have littered conservationism in that time. However, that could all be about to change thanks to a bit of clever thinking, with game theory and big data combining to arm park rangers with the necessary tools to fight back. The problem for park rangers is often scale, far too much land is monitored, on foot, by far too few. This means poachers have a relatively free reign, knowing the odds of the park ranger being at the right place, at the right time, is slim.

The complexities of customer support aren't lost on any CIO. Start multiplying a portfolio of products by all the potential problems, factor everything across support channels--phone, email, web chat, social media, an app and snail mail--and you quickly arrive at the intersection of unmanageable and impossible. A study conducted by Zendesk and Loudhouse found that only about 7 percent of consumers are "extremely satisfied" with the quality of omnichannel support, and 87 percent say that companies need to work harder to create a seamless customer experience. In addition, 78 percent indicated that a company's customer service reputation is a key factor in choosing products and services. All of this is motivating companies to push the boundaries on virtual agents.

I believe almost all readers of this blog already know well about Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)... so here I just show you a brief overview. CNN is a variant of Deep Learning and it has been well known for its excellent performance of image recognition. In particular, after CNN won ILSVRC 2012, CNN has gotten more and more popular in image recognition. The most recent success of CNN would be AlphaGo, I believe. Indeed, we already have a lot of implementation of CNN as libraries / packages.

Cognitive technology like IBM Watson and robotic process automation technology have been largely separate. After all, they're meant to perform different jobs for different situations. But what happens when you combine the two, bringing together the cutting-edge capabilities of cognitive and the practical, powerful abilities of RPA? The video above invites you to jump on our virtual elevator and see why we decided to devlop an enterprise solution that gives the best of both worlds. Want to see how it works?

We've long seen robots replacing well-paying manufacturing jobs, resulting in huge social and economic fallout. But what happens when AI evolves to the point where it displaces roles -- like recruiting -- once held by knowledge workers? I'm no futurist, so I really can't say what will happen. But I do know that the staid world of recruiting is ripe for a little AI. I've covered this topic in a previous post, when I discussed how emerging technologies are already eliminating huge waste in the hiring process.

Rob has worked for IBM for almost two decades, first as Fellow and Chief Architect for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) foundation. His current project is Watson, the company's cognitive computing technology that aims to change the way machines interact with humans at the linguistic, emotional and semantic levels. "Cognitive Computing" is like intelligence amplification for humans If we were to put "cognitive computing" into a category, it would probably look more like "intelligence amplification" (IA) rather than Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is the idea that machine learning can amplify human knowledge, capabilities, and aid day-to-day procedural decisions. IBM Watson, located at the company's research center in Yorktown Heights, New York (via Wikipedia) "Watson processes information by understanding natural language, generates hypotheses based on evidence, and, because it becomes more capable and precise, Watson will help leaders and organizations make better, more confident decisions."

As the world celebrated Earth Day on Friday, a team led by an Indian-origin researcher has found a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to protect the Earth's endangered animals and forests by outwitting poachers with technology. With support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Army Research Office, researchers are using AI and game theory to solve poaching, illegal logging and other problems worldwide, in collaboration with researchers and conservationists in the US, Singapore, the Netherlands and Malaysia. "This research is a step in demonstrating that AI can have a really significant positive impact on society and allow us to assist humanity in solving some of the major challenges we face," said Milind Tambe, professor of computer science and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active and habitual," said Fei Fang, PhD candidate from the University of Southern California (USC). Fang is part of an NSF-funded team at USC led by Tambe who is also director of the Teamcore Research Group on Agents and Multiagent Systems.

From a huge effort to help kids realize their potential to a celebration of our dear old planet, this week brought plenty of interesting and inspiring news around Microsoft. We've rounded up some of the highlights in this latest edition of Weekend Reading. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced grants to 100 nonprofit partners in 55 countries as part of YouthSpark, a global initiative to increase access for young people to learn computer science. In turn, these nonprofit partners -- such as Laboratoria, CoderDojo and City Year -- will use the power of local schools, businesses and community organizations to empower students to achieve more for themselves, their families and their communities. The nonprofits will build upon the work that Microsoft already has underway through programs like Hour of Code with Code.org,

Many companies are not as "leading-edge" in terms of analytics as they think. Achieving marketing excellence is based on making good marketing decisions. Making good marketing decisions involves highly skilled marketers, strong data and, above all, quality analytics. If you have good people, great data, and superior analytics, the customer will be at the center of all your strategies and operations. When you get this right, the customer experience will grow, and when that grows, so does revenue and profitability.

With all the buzz about artificial intelligence and the launch of the Facebook bot marketplace, I thought it might be helpful to look at the potential implications for marketers over the next 12 months and provide a relatively jargon-free look at some of the near-term opportunities and tips on how to start to prepare for them. At a high level, it's about using AI to power more direct interactions between brands and people, focusing on faster, smarter responses to their questions and needs. Yes, Facebook has released the bot store and messenger maps will become the primary channel for digital customer service and inquires. Facebook is not the only one -- Microsoft has a bot API in Skype and other popular messaging apps such as Kik have also released functionality. Brands like KLM have already rolled our messenger bots for accessing your flight data, and airlines are some of the biggest users of customer service via Twitter.