If you've stumbled upon this article, you may already be in this position. However, what's more likely is that this is going to become your situation in near future, and learning from someone else's experience is now needed to prepare. While there's a plethora of theory around business applications for data analytics; there is a significant lack of practical, real-life experience to draw on. This is largely due to the fact that adoption of these technologies, for many industries, is new and the results of pilots are just coming to light now. Machine learning technologies are successfully used in predictive and recommendation services.

They never take days off and never strike -- artificial intelligence is set to replace more than 30 human workers at a Japanese insurance firm. The system will be based on IBM's Watson Explorer technology, and will help calculate payouts to Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance policyholders from January 29, the company said in a statement. IBM describes Watson as "cognitive technology that can think like a human". The AI will scan hospital records and medical certificates, and then extract data on injuries, patient medical histories and administered procedures to determine insurance payouts. Fukoku Life said it hoped the AI would increase productivity by 30 per cent, although final payments will still be processed by human staff.

At the risk of calling to mind some of the thousands of books, movies, and television shows centered on the onset of a technological apocalypse, we truly are facing an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. Competition between major tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, combined with the ever-present exponential patterns of Moore's law, have led us to some amazing breakthroughs in the past several years when it comes to advanced pattern recognition, data analysis, and machine learning. As marketers, we owe it to ourselves (and our audiences) to stay abreast of these advancements, learn what's coming down the pipeline, and start preparing our strategies and outlooks to accommodate those developments. Are we about to enter some kind of marketing apocalypse? But we're in for some serious changes in the years to come, and it's in our best interest to stay ahead of them.

Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou -- are vying for shares of a $200,000 prize purse. The ultimate goal for CMU computer scientists, as it was in the first Brains Vs. AI contest at Rivers Casino in 2015, is to set a new benchmark for artificial intelligence. 'Since the earliest days of AI research, beating top human players has been a powerful measure of progress in the field,' said Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science. 'That was achieved with chess in 1997, with Jeopardy! in 2009 and with the board game Go just last year.

HONG KONG: McDonald's Corp has agreed to sell the bulk of its China and Hong Kong business to state-backed conglomerate CITIC Ltd and Carlyle Group LP for up to $2.1 billion (Dh7.71 billion), seeking to expand rapidly without using much of its own capital. Zurich The Swiss National Bank expects a 2016 full-year profit of 24 billion francs (Dh86.68 billion; $23.6 billion), enabling it to shell out money to the federal government and municipalities. Foreign-currency holdings contributed more than 19 billion francs, and valuation gains on its gold holdings added 3.9 billion francs, the central bank said on Monday, citing an initial estimate. Last year's result is set to be the second-best in the Read More ... Tags: Corporate Enterprises Finance Sectors Banks Profits Financial institutions German automaker Volkswagen saw sales jump 16 percent in December for its namesake brand, propelled by a big increase in China, Volkswagen's biggest market. Global sales reported Monday rose to 567,900 from 487,700 despite the damage to the company's reputation from its scandal over cars rigged to cheat on diesel emissions tests.

Our lives are now heavily mediated by digital technology (music streaming, social media, e-banking etc). We are increasingly and often continuously online, open to engagement in a myriad of services and simultaneously open to cyberattack. We now need to defend against the lone wolf hacker, organised crime and terrorism, and nation states with well-funded advanced capabilities. The 2016 cyber message is clear – we have a big problem, it's going to get worse, and we need help. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a promising source of such help.

Nvidia had a strong showing overall at CES this year, but its most impressive demo had to be the self-driving vehicles it was showing off in a cordoned course built in a parking lot. The demo wasn't on city streets, as were others like the Delphi ride, but it was impressive in a different way; mostly because no human at all sat in the driver's seat of Nvidia's cars. Two cars were in rotation for Nvidia at its test track. The first is a Lincoln MKZ Nvidia purchased kitted with sensors ready for autonomous driving off the shelf from a third-party supplier that retrofits the vehicles specifically for this purpose, affectionately nicknamed'BB8.' BB8 has been in testing with Nvidia for some time now, and is the company's core vehicle for building out its neural network-based autonomous drive software. The second was an Audi Q7, newly equipped with Nvidia's DRIVE PX 2 in-car computer, which offers tremendous computing power in a very small package, and is suitable for handling the huge task of running a locally contained neural net that learns how to drive simply by observing the action of human drivers; these vehicles were trained in Vegas on only four days of driving, Nvidia's Senior Director of Automotive Danny Shapiro told me.

The combination of machine learning capabilities with streaming analytics provides really rich capabilities for not only generating predictions but even more importantly to act on the predictions. Machine learning is about letting the software figure things out on its own. For example, the Denstream Clustering algorithm lets you feed in a stream of data and find out *if* there are any related clusters – without having to know ahead of time. More importantly it identifies the outliers for you, or to put it another way – the clustering algorithm figures out groups of "normal" behaviors and flags the "weird" one's for you to react to. Even more importantly it adapts over time by aging out older values and giving more weight to recent events – the algorithm recognizes the "new normal" long before us humans ever could.

Another way of looking at this hype wave is to track the share price of NVIDIA, the leading graphics processing unit (GPUs) designer. In 2012, University of Toronto researchers developed a then state of the art convolutional neural network (CNN) that achieved a record breaking performance on a large scale image classification task. This feat was made possible, in no small part, because the authors optimised their network (henceforth known as'AlexNet') for parallel training and inference on two NVIDIA GPUs. Since then, NVIDIA GPUs along with their parallel computing platform and programming model (CUDA) have veritably become the shovels for the AI gold rush. The dramatic increase in parallelizable computing power has enabled developers to train deep, data-hungry architectures faster than ever before, whether they are neural network or reinforcement learning models. We've achieved incredible breakthroughs in environment perception, autonomy, robotics, machine translation, speech recognition and dialogue, search, image and video super-resolution, and many more to come.

Always wanted to become a Data Scientist or a Machine Learning Engineer? We have come up with a list of top online courses that we know you will surely have fun learning. These specially selected courses will help you get started with data science, machine learning, and deep mining along with learning Python and R programming. The Discounts will be available for a few days only, so make sure to take advantage of them NOW! This is not one of those fluffy classes where everything works out just the way it should and your training is smooth sailing. This course throws you into the deep end.