Paul LaPorte is an expert in security, business continuity, and disaster recovery (DR). He is Director of Products at Metalogix and co-author of SharePoint RBS for Dummies, 2013 edition. Prior to Metalogix, he served as global manager for SaaS solutions at Proofpoint, a publicly traded email and data security company, principle strategist for Continuity Research, and a senior executive at Evergreen Assurance, a pioneer in real-time DR for mission critical applications. He holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Georgetown University.

This month we will talk about Applications of Deep Learning in this event hosted by our amazing sponsor Boxever (Customer Intelligence Cloud for Travel). Online booking sites for example in the travel industry often use personalised recommendations to drive conversions. The ability to link behavioural clickstream data with transactional order data affords us the opportunity to utilise feedback online with respect to the recommendations made. For example, it is common to deploy a recommendation model, test it as part of an A/B testing framework, and evaluate retrospectively for which customers the model worked and for which ones it didn't. This is often a manual process and as a consequence may fail to exploit the richness in the behavioural and transactional features.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been doing wonders in the field of image recognition in recent times. CNN is a type of deep neural network in which the layers are connected using spatially organized patterns. This is in line with how the human visual cortex processes image data. Researchers have been working on coming up with better architectures over the last few years. In this blog post, we will discuss a particular type of layer that has been used consistently across many famous architectures.

The Future of Machine Intelligence is a free collection of 10 interviews machine learning experts filed by David Beyer. The interviews explain exactly where we are with the state-of-the-art, the challenges to advanced machine learning, and some of the applications. In the last interview, Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google, describes sequence-to-sequence machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has been used to create descriptions of images, and could be used to summarize a 20 minute video into four descriptive sentences. In fact, this summarization ability isn't limited to graphical content: Perhaps five years is pushing it, but the notion of a machine reading a book for comprehension is not too distant. In a similar vein, we should expect to see machines that answer questions by learning from the data, rather than following given rule sets.

It took just two tweets for an internet troll going by the name of Ryan Poole to get Tay to become antisemitic. Tay was a "chatbot" set up by Microsoft on 23 March, a computer-generated personality to simulate the online ramblings of a teenage girl. Poole suggested to Tay: "The Jews prolly did 9/11. I don't really know but it seems likely." Shortly thereafter Tay tweeted "Jews did 9/11" and called for a race war. In the 24 hours it took Microsoft to shut her down, Tay had abused President Obama, suggested Hitler was right, called feminism a disease and delivered a stream of online hate.

We are living in exciting times because the very foundation of how we communicate with and consume media is changing. Last week I wrote about the future of 360 degree video and virtual reality, and next week I will talk about LIVE video. But there is another future that is equally exciting (if not more). It's the future of artificially intelligent chat robots. This is such an exciting future, because it has the potential of simply replacing much of what we define as the media today, which is both a good and a bad thing depending on how you look at it.

Google switched its search algorithm to machine learning technology called RankBrain for its search results in October 2015. Software as a Service offers irresistible benefits for organizations of all sizes -- from cost savings to scalability to mobile accessibility. We offer guidance on avoiding the pitfalls of the cloud and choosing your SaaS partners well. RankBrain uses an Artificial Intelligence learning system to guess at words and phrases it might not have seen before. This should make it more effective at responding to queries and improving overall search quality. RankBrain learning system interprets language and queries in a similar way that'gut feeling' or'guessability' works in people.

Channel Mark Ventures announced today that it will be launching Inteladesk through their technology development and sales company CenturySoft Ltd. This next generation customer helpdesk management solution is powered by a revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) platform. "Inteladesk's AI-based engagement solution is the ideal complement to our insight-driven approach of sales acceleration for our clients at their specific domain level," said Dan O'Shea, CEO at Channel Mark Ventures. In discussing their Inteladesk product O'Shea explained that "Inteladesk essentially drives a personalized sales experience. Inteladesk helps companies perfect their knowledge base by explaining misstep queries or missed opportunities to improve FAQs. Combined with the technology, Inteladesk users will have the ability to reduce incoming customer service emails and calls. With Inteladesk at work, new processes will emerge as the technology helps companies introduce new service enriching CRM processes not previously possible or financially feasible. In turn, employees can take on higher-level roles to formulate new ways to enrich customer service. We are beyond thrilled at the prospects here. There is nothing like it available on the market today. The Live Agent learns as it works and provides high-quality responses consistently, every day of the year, in every language your customers speak. Cognitive Code's technology is truly game-changing."

Since the rise of modern medicine, the pharmaceuticals industry has relied on the brainpower of chemists and biologists to discover and develop new drugs. Their painstaking work has brought about dramatic advances in human health yet the slow pace of progress has prompted a search for new approaches. As in so many areas, some of the most promising ideas are coming from Silicon Valley. In the era of big data and artificial intelligence, could computer algorithms provide a short-cut to the next generation of medical breakthroughs? Among the pioneers of computer-based drug discovery is a Californian company called Verseon.

When was the last time you needed to Google something and Google wasn't there? Odds are, you don't remember that ever happening. Sure, there are times when you can't reach Google because your internet connection is down. But Google's primary online services, from its search engine to Gmail to Google Docs and more, are nearly always accessible. The company's Google Apps suite, including Gmail and Docs, was available about 99.97 percent of the time in 2015, according to the company's own numbers.