Opening a Kibana dashboard at any given time reveals a simple and probably overstated truth -- there are simply too many logs for a human to process. Sure, you can do it the hard way, debugging issues in production by querying and searching among the millions of log messages in your system. But this is far from being a methodological and productive method. Kibana searches, visualizations, and dashboards are very effective ways to analyze a system, but a serious limitation of any log analytics platform, including the ELK Stack, is the fact that the people running them only know what they know. A Kibana search, for example, is limited to the knowledge of the operator who formulated it.

With its complex rules, fine print and lengthy processes, it's little wonder that the $1.2tn insurance industry has a poor reputation for trust and customer service. In a recent global survey from accounting firm EY, consumers ranked insurance below banks, car manufacturers, online shopping sites and supermarkets for trustworthiness. A newcomer to the field, New York City-based Lemonade hopes to reverse that reputation by using technology and behavioral science to create a faster and more transparent service. The company is working with Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, to take antagonism out of its relationship with customers. Lemonade set out to create algorithms that make it easy and quick to sign up and approve claims – in minutes rather than days.

BNP Paribas Securities Services has taken a minority stake in Fortia Financial Solutions, a software company which uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and business process monitoring to help the fund industry meet rising compliance requirements and manage mounting volumes of data.

In this article, we also discuss an interesting physics problem: finding the point of maximum or minimum light, sound, radioactivity, or heat intensity, in the presence of an energy field produced by n energy source points. However, the main focus here is on finding the point that minimizes the sum of the "distances" to n points in a d-dimensional space. Both problems are closely related and use the same algorithm to find solutions. The sum of "distances" between an arbitrary point (u, v) and a set S { (x(1), y(1)) ... (x(n), y(n)) } of n points is defined as follows: The function H has one parameter p called power, and when p 2, we are facing the traditional problem of finding the centroid of a cloud of points: in this case, the solution is the classic average of the n points. This solution is notoriously sensitive to outliers.

Shopping in the future may feel a lot like shoplifting does today -- without the risk of getting nabbed -- if two artificial intelligence startups have their way. New Zealand's IMAGR and Silicon Valley's Mashgin aim to make checking out of grocery stores and company cafeterias a walk in the park. Many supermarkets offer self-checkout to save shoppers time. IMAGR founder William Chomley wants to skip the checkout altogether, so you can just walk right out the door. It's similar to the idea behind Amazon Go, being tested in a grocery store in downtown Seattle, which lets customers shop without ever stopping at a cashier on the way out.

It's full of nuance and layers, and regional and dialectal variations that complicate things even further. For example, if I was to describe something as "sick", do I mean that it's disgusting, impressive, or quite literally unwell? Again, there's the word "cool". Is it a positive adjective, or a statement of temperature? Sure, you can train an AI to identify spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

Chatbots are gaining popularity and are becoming a popular tool for marketing. Given the versatility of chatbot tools, their tasks can be programmed to retain data, respond to specific keywords and know when to offer an additional product to a consumer. It is also a method of increasing consumer interaction ratings and improving overall consumer experiences for increased sales. The ability for a chatbot to assist a customer right away markets the company's sense of urgency in consumer relations. Consumers are often annoyed when businesses only seem to keep banker's hours.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is advancing and penetrating swiftly into many areas, from smart personal assistants to self-driving cars. Though traditionally AI is portrayed as robots with human-like attributes, it can basically incorporate anything from autonomous weapons to Google's search algorithms to IBM's Watson. AI is primarily achieved by examining the human brain in terms of thinking, and determining how humans decide, learn, and work, while trying to accomplish a specific task. With the rapid advancements in the technology landscape, businesses are leveraging analytics, social, mobile, and cloud applications in their marketing activities. This is expected to help convert the business into a digital enterprise, in turn helping them target a larger base of consumers.

Unsecured IoT devices were used to launch crippling DDOS attacks in October 2016, targeting services such as Twitter, Spotify, and GitHub. Subsequent testimony to Congress about potential attacks on office buildings, schools, and hospitals raised the possibility for the IoT to harm and even kill people. Does the government need to intervene? In this power panel at @ThingExpo New York, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, leading IoT and security experts will discuss this very serious topic. Roger Strukhoff is Conference Chair of Cloud Expo @ThingsExpo, and Editor of SYS-CON Media's CloudComputing BigData IoT Journals.