A Recommender System predicts the likelihood that a user would prefer an item. Based on previous user interaction with the data source that the system takes the information from (besides the data from other users, or historical trends), the system is capable of recommending an item to a user. Think about the fact that Amazon recommends you books that they think you could like; Amazon might be making effective use of a Recommender System behind the curtains. This simple definition, allows us to think in a diverse set of applications where Recommender Systems might be useful. Applications such as documents, movies, music, romantic partners, or who to follow on Twitter, are pervasive and widely known in the world of Information Retrieval.

IBM Machine Learning for z/OS could be a boon to big banks and insurance companies that want advanced analytics on the mainframe. Next up is the IBM Power platform. Public cloud providers have popularized machine learning with low-cost, easily accessible services, but that's a separate world from the tightly regulated, on-premises computing environments maintained by many big banks and insurance companies. Now IBM is bringing cutting-edge analytics to these mainframe customers with IBM Machine Learning (IBM ML) for z/OS. Announced February 15 in New York, IBM ML is a private-cloud-only offshoot IBM Watson Machine Learning, the public-cloud service on IBM Bluemix.

Technology can inspire people to be creative in new ways. Magenta, an open-source project Google launched last year, aims to do that by giving developers tools to explore music using neural networks. To help show what's possible with Magenta, Google recently created an interactive experiment called A.I. Duet, which lets users play a duet with the computer. Just play some notes, and the computer will respond to your melody. You don't even have to know how to play piano--it's fun to just press some keys and listen to what comes back.

Pics Brit chip startup Graphcore has produced sexy images of its graph processing. We wrote about Graphcore scoring $30m A-round funding in October. The processor designer came out of two years in XMOS-incubated stealth mode at that time, and was founded by CEO Nigel Toon and CTO Simon Knowles. XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company developing micro-controllers, and it was founded in 2005 in Bristol, UK. There is a wide spread of Graphcore investors: Bosch, Samsung, Amadeus Capital, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital and Pitango Venture Capital.

Should banks wait for technology to advance before deploying a bot? We find out if bots are ready to be bankers . . . Chatbots are slowly and steadily taking over the Digital World, however, the big question is – Are Bots ready for Banking? It is one thing to use a bot to shoot out a tweet and another to entrust your money to a chatbot to transfer funds. Let's find out if chatbots are ready to handle the high-stakes world of managing people's money.

Increasingly, the world is becoming an intelligent, digitally enabled mesh of people, things and services. Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future, and ordinary people will experience a digitally-enabled world where the lines between what is real and what is digital blur. Rich digital services will be delivered to everything, and intelligence will be embedded in everything behind the scenes. We call this mesh of people, devices, content and services the intelligent digital mesh, and this forms the basis for our Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have reached a critical tipping point and will increasingly augment and extend virtually every technology enabled service, thing or application.

Bono and The Edge are excited by Nuritas' potential for impact and profitability. Try to imagine walking into your local grocery store ten years from now. You head towards the back, as you've done countless times before, to snatch a handful of your favorite cereal bars. Only this time, the packaging looks a bit different. You notice that there are two new versions, each with a label below the brand name.

I met Aman Naimat, Senior Vice President of Technology at Demandbase at their headquarters in San Francisco on my recent visit to California for Social Media Strategies Summit. Aman is working on leveraging the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science for marketing and sales platforms. On this podcast, episode 150, Aman and I discuss how AI functions in account-based marketing (ABM). Before working with Demandbase Aman was previously founder and CTO of Spiderbook, a data-driven sales engine for account-based targeting. Aman has been building CRM systems since he was 19 and was the architect for the Oracle CRM Applications.

In October 2014, speaking to students at MIT, Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceX and Tesla) proclaimed that A.I. was the greatest threat to mankind, saying "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful."[i] Then, in December 2014, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking added fuel to the fire, saying "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race … It [A.I.] would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate," he said. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."[ii]

Business leaders want to understand the return they are getting from social media marketing investments, just like all other marketing channels. Additionally, they want to understand how their brand's efforts are doing compared to the competition and overall industry. Today, brands can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to see real-time performance of their social media efforts and to develop a social media competitor analysis. Most social networks offer analytics and insights for the profiles you manage. Plus, there is no shortage of social media management tools that import data into a centralized dashboard.