In this special guest feature, Cecilia Pizzurro, Senior Director, Strategic Data Projects at LOGICnow, discusses the convergence of data/machine learning and cybersecurity, and the idea that these two are playing off of each other in a more meaningful way than ever before. Cecilia leads a team of data scientists and software engineers in Cambridge (US) and Newcastle (UK). These teams use machine learning and big data analytics to find business value in the vast amount of customer data gathered from LOGICnow's products. She was also the co-founder and CTO of the The Dolomite Group, a South American mining consortium, pioneering machine learning and big data analyses to improve mining efficiency and reduce environmental impact in Peru. This company is currently finalizing its acquisition by a Chilean mining company.

For the past few years we've seen big data and machine learning take more of a foothold in companies, with many believing the era of artificial intelligence (AI) is here. What is clear is that with advances being made on an almost daily basis now, businesses need to prepare for a vastly different future. But, in order to take advantage, some companies may need to make a dramatic adjustment in how they work. At the moment, for many companies, AI and big data are viewed in a way that limits the potential they have to offer. They are often seen as something that can help cut operational costs, rather than as a fundamental approach for generating increases in productivity, output and improved certainty over corporate direction.

Many of the discussions on automation surround how it will impact manual labor. However, while it's easy to see how robotics can take over precise and repetitive manufacturing tasks, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is allowing for more cognition-based tasks to be taken over by computers as well. Chui stated, "In about 60 percent of occupations, over 30 percent of the things that people do could be automated -- either using robots or artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, all of these technologies that we're hearing more and more about."

Facebook's artificial intelligence (AI) team has built a visual search system that can recognize content that appears in photos and return relevant search results. Called Lumos, Facebook originally created the platform so that its visually impaired users could understand the content of photos. But Facebook recognized that everyone could benefit from this type of visual search system. Facebook's image search system can detect and segment objects, scenes, animals, places, and clothes that appear in images or videos – and understand them. For instance, let's say you search for "black shirt photo."

Robots are taking increasingly bigger roles in life and business – moving well beyond manufacturing and into transportation, education, medicine and care for the elderly. But ethics and law haven't caught up. Dr. Kate Darling, a pioneer in the fields, is helping quicken the pace. A leading expert in robot ethics, she is a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab where she investigates social robotics and conducts experimental studies on human-robot interaction. Darling explores the emotional connection between people and life-like inventions, seeking to influence technology design and policy direction.

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has made a number of acquisitions as well. Saffron specialized in cognitive computing, combining data analytics with deep learning; this relates directly to Intel's efforts in the same area. Indisys provided natural-language recognition, gesture recognition, and virtual-assistant technologies, but also created user interfaces for unmanned drones. Itseez focused on software for the Internet of Things (IoT), cameras, drones, and autonomous driving. Movidius brought computer-vision hardware for drones and cameras; it also provided system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology for accelerating computer vision, as well as deep-learning capability.

With intelligent digital assistants invading the home, it's becoming fairly normal to have a conversation with an Amazon Echo, Siri or Google Now. You might not think it, especially when you're in the middle of an argument with your supposedly clever digital friend, but artificial intelligence is starting to outpace us in certain areas. It might not quite have the hang of a human conversation or understand the subtle nuances in our language and meanings, but it is getting better and better at making computations and calculations. With "automation" being a big buzz word in IT, there's a huge push to make complex and human-centric tasks more streamlined and intelligent with the help of decision-making scripts, computers and artificial intelligence. It's becoming possible to perform a complicated and traditionally long-winded task with a simple click, but there's always the worry that these "intelligent" processes may have a little too much control if checks aren't built in.

Ajit Jaokar is a leading expert working at the intersection of Data Science, IoT, AI, Machine Learning, Big Data, Mobile, and Smart Cities. He teaches IoT and Data Science at Oxford and also is a director of Smart Cities Lab in Madrid. Ajit's work involves applying machine learning techniques to complex problems in the IoT and Telecoms domains. You can follow him on twitter @AjitJaokar and his blogs at Future Text. We are beyond thrilled to announce that Ajit will not only be speaking at our Big Data, Berlin meetup February 17, but he will also be at the head of the second workshop of our'Dataconomy Presents' series.

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 1, 2017) - Skytree, the leader in Enterprise Machine Learning on big data, announces the release of Skytree 16.0 and Skytree's Machine Learning as a Service offering. We continue our trend of increasing ease of use via unprecedented automation, further enabling non-data scientist users to access the power of enterprise grade machine learning, gain insights, and to add value to their business. Skytree Smart Search continues to deliver industry-leading automation for finding the most accurate models. This is accomplished in much fewer iterations than brute-force grid searches, by performing a mathematically optimal exploration of the hyper-parameter space. Skytree Smart Search delivers highly tuned models with comprehensive cross-validation in every step, and delivers reliable execution with automatic resource estimation for the powerful Skytree distributed algorithm implementations that are highly optimized for scale, performance and accuracy.

McKinsey's 2016 data and analytics study found 120 potential machine learning applications in 12 industries -- and the evolution is accelerating. Join our latest VB Live interactive event for a deep dive into how machine learning can transform your business. The more data your customer gives you, the more you can infer their needs. AI and machine learning have advanced to the point where you don't just know what they want -- you know it before they do. "That's the side people would say is kind of creepy," says Quinn Banks, senior product marketing manager at Farmers Insurance.