One month into the New Year, now is a good time for every chief human resource officer and his/her team to take stock of the big bets they should be making in 2017. After a tumultuous 2016 on this front, we're seeing stronger interest from CEOs and CHROs in clearly expressing their company's brand purpose and values, especially to establish a stronger connection with talent and customers. When evaluating a potential employer, job candidates cite "culture and values" as their most important consideration, according to the latest LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends Report. "Mission and vision" is the third most important consideration. Given the CHRO's role as the top HR leader, he or she plays a crucial part in articulating what it means to work for your organization, and why talented people should commit to it over other organizations.

From left, Dr Michael Tompsett (UK), Professor Eric Fossum (USA) and Professor Nobukazu Teranishi (Japan) are announced as the winners of the 2017 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering at Carlton House Terrace on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017 in London. Taking a selfie is one of the easiest and quickest things you can do on your smartphone. But as with any landmark invention, it took decades and plenty of graft to develop the camera technology that lives in your pocket. A trio of engineers behind the invention of the image-sensing technology found in billions of smartphones, camera phones, PCs and hospital scanning technology, won the £1 million ($1.3 million) Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering on Wednesday, and spoke about where the image-sensor technology they developed should go in the future. "I feel gobsmacked and very thankful to the Queen Elizabeth prize for this honor," said one of the engineers, Eric Fossum.

Remember all the buzz around "Big Data" just 5 years ago? It was all the rage in the tech industry and you could barely read an industry article or interact with a tech vendor without a reference to "Big Data". That early hype eventually led to a maturing market and big data is now a proven reality with IDC forecasting sales to reach $187 billion by 2019. That's quite a staggering amount especially when you compare it to Gartner's estimate of the Business Intelligence and Analytics market being $16.9 billion in 2016. Nowadays, there's a whole new set of technology trends which are dominating the technology landscape similar to the way big data dominated things just a few years ago.

Recently, I've been learning about Gradient Descent. It's a really beautiful algorithm that helps find the optimal solution to a function, and forms the foundations of how we train intelligent systems today. It's based off a very simple idea -- rather than figuring out the best solution to a problem immediately, it guesses an initial solution and steps it in a direction that's closer to a better solution. The algorithm is to repeat this procedure, until the solution is good enough. My theory is that this is the way we humans work.

SYS-CON Events announced today that SD Times BZ Media has been named "Media Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. BZ Media LLC is a high-tech media company that produces technical conferences and expositions, and publishes a magazine, newsletters and websites in the software development, SharePoint, mobile development and commercial UAV markets. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades. With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @CloudExpo @ThingsExpo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 - November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA.

The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) invites applications for a postdoctoral Research Associate for the project'Policy, Responsible Innovation and the Future of AI'. The appointment will be for 3 years, and is based in Cambridge. CFI is an exciting new interdisciplinary research centre addressing the challenges and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence (AI). Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, CFI is based at the University of Cambridge, with partners in the University of Oxford, Imperial College, and UC Berkeley, and close links with industry partners and policymakers. This project examines the prospects for a robust safety and benefits culture within the AI industry, in anticipation of the development of increasingly powerful AI systems that will present ever-greater real-world opportunities and challenges.

WikiLeaks has turned its focus to the upcoming French presidential election, revealing that its archives contain thousands of potentially sensitive documents on three candidates. A series of posts on its Twitter account targeted Republican Francois Fillon, far-right leader Marine Le Pen and independent candidate Emmanuel Macron. WikiLeaks claims to have over 3,000 files on Fillon, whose popularity has dropped amid allegations that he paid his wife close to €1 million of public money with little evidence of work. Fillon denies any wrongdoing, but calls for him to drop out of the presidential race are mounting. Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls according to the latest numbers from Elabe, is the subject of a further 1,138 WikiLeaks documents.

Among the employees in highest demand are what Paul Kent calls "analytically creative problem-solvers." Almost every company has mounds of data, but it's these creative problem-solvers who use it to make profit-oriented decisions, like which product to make, what price to charge, or when to send someone a coupon. Paul Kent thinks about these star employees because, as vice president of big data initiatives in the R&D group at SAS Institute, his job is to look down the road and anticipate which kinds of creative problems to solve next with all that data. Kent sees big opportunities in two broad areas: speed and the cloud. Companies have spent the past few years gathering their data into one place.

Today's consumers are a tough nut to crack. They tend to look around before they buy, talk to their entire social network about their purchases, demand to be treated as unique and want to be sincerely thanked for buying products. Big Data allows us to profile these increasingly vocal and inconstant little'tyrants' in a far-reaching manner so that we can engage in an almost one-on-one, real-time conversation with them. This is not actually a luxury. If we don't treat them like they want to, they will leave us in the blink of an eye.

It's a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions like Asperger's, this can make social situations extremely stressful. But what if there was a more objective way to measure and understand our interactions? Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say that they've gotten closer to a potential solution: an artificially intelligent wearable system that can predict if a conversation is happy, sad or neutral based on a person's speech patterns and vitals. "Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious," says graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a related paper with PhD candidate Mohammad Ghassemi that they will present at next week's Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in San Francisco.