PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aspect Software, a global provider of fully-integrated consumer engagement, workforce optimization and self-service solutions, announced today that it is making its Aspect Mila personal assistant chatbot available on leading workforce collaboration and messaging platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace. Announced last year, Mila provides contact center and enterprise employees with automated self-service functionality to view schedules, request time off or trade shifts with other employees. Mila simplifies day-to-day administrative challenges faced by thousands of employees in call centers and other large labor force employers while also reducing the oftentimes labor-intensive workload of schedule management. With plain, conversational language, Mila allows employees to easily ask for a day off or pick up a shift right from within Slack. Supervisors and managers no longer have to field the administrative requests from employees, leaving that instead to Aspect Mila and Aspect's Workforce Management solution.

Peruse the headlines, and you'll find hundreds of articles predicting the "next Silicon Valley." Pundits claim that the growing cost of living in the Bay Area is driving businesses away to more affordable regions that are rich in tech talent such as Austin, Phoenix, Boulder, and Miami. But try as they might, these "hubs" won't ever beat Northern California at its own game – the area will continue to dominate information technology because of its unique arbitrage of thought, culture and research. But that's okay, because striving to replicate the success of the Bay Area limits us by imposing an arbitrary constraint on our imagination. After all, does Silicon Valley represent the pinnacle of success in human innovation, or are there regions that have the potential to evolve into something even greater?

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. SoundHound, a startup that released its first voice assistant in March 2016, has raised $75 million in new funding, according to a Tuesday announcement. The company's AI platform, called Houndify, was built on top of 10 years of research and development (R&D) and powers SoundHoud's voice assistant app Hound. SoundHound plans to use this round of financing to make headway with its "collective AI" strategy, which enables developers using the Houndify platform to easily leverage information from third-party companies in order to improve their implementations of Houndify.

Having a personal assistant is often a signal that you're a member of the professional elite. The connotation is that only C-level executives and VPs are "worthy" of their own personal assistant handling their schedule.

If you have ever competed in a Kaggle competition, you are probably familiar with the use of combining different predictive models for improved accuracy which will creep your score up in the leader board. While it is widely used, there are only a few resources that I am aware of where a clear description is available (One that I know of is here, and there is also a caret package extension for it). Therefore, I will try to workout a simple example here to illustrate how different models can be combined. The example I have chosen is the House Prices competition from Kaggle. This is a regression problem and given lots of features about houses, one is expected to predict their prices on a test set.

When Tuomas Sandholm began studying poker to research artificial intelligence 12 years ago, he never imagined that a computer would be able to defeat the best human players. "At least not in my lifetime," he says. But Sandholm, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, along with doctorate student Noam Brown, developed AI software capable of doing just that. The program, called Libratus, successfully defeated four professional poker players in a 20-day competition that ended on Jan. 30. After playing 120,000 hands of heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold'em, Libratus was ahead of its human challengers by more than $1.7 million in chips.

Hackers have stolen the login details of 2.5 million PlayStation and Xbox users. The email addresses and passwords of gamers who had been using the unofficial Xbox360 ISO and PSP ISO forums, which players use to share links to download free and pirated versions of games, were exposed by the cybercriminals behind the hack. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los ...

The machines are here, and they're smarter than ever. Scientists have proven that machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) can perform some tasks better than humans. Where health and neuroscience are concerned, one doctor says this is "a good thing." By using advanced scanners and AI, a team of scientists from research labs all across the United States created the Human Connectome Project (HCP), the most detailed map of the human brain's circuitry. The AI programs were able to learn 100 new regions of the brain, while monitoring data from 210 adult test subjects.

A number of fascinating projects have emerged that aim to use AI to better understand the way vibrations can give us insight into the health (or not) of machinery. A recent paper from the University of Alabama in Huntsville describes a new algorithm that aims to provide a diagnostic function for the mechanical systems that form such a big part of our commercial engine. "The ability to extract dependable and actionable information from the vibration of machines will allow businesses to keep their assets running for longer while spending far less in maintenance. Also, the investment to get there will be just software," the researcher says. A number of companies are deploying this kind of approach in the real world, with German startup KONUX making headway in the railway industry.

If you play video games, imagine how much you sometimes empathize with the character you're controlling. You may even forget the separation between the two of you, experiencing the world as that character. Consider whether your control in these moments is different, both at a high level and in tiny movements, than what the character would do if you had simply written down a set of rules for it to act by. In that difference lies the promise of this method for developing character AI. In psychology research methodology, there's a broad consensus that if you want to know what someone would do in a situation, you don't ask them what they would do.