Microsoft is surging forward with its commitment to artificial intelligence (AI), formally announcing its latest chatbot, Zo. In a post outlining its commitment to AI, Microsoft introduced Zo as the next chapter in the evolution of its attempts to create a social chatbot. Zo is built on the back of the same technology that powers Microsoft's other chatbots in China and Japan, Xiaoice and Rinna. Zo is meant to learn from her interactions with humans, and is able to respond to conversations with her own personality. In a nod to an awkward turn of events involving Microsoft's last attempt at a social chatbot, Tay, the company notes that Zo has guards in place to prevent exploitation.

'Tis the season for the public relations exercise known as "here's what we think (or hope) will happen in the tech sector next year," flooding my inbox with predictions for 2017. No one knows what will happen tomorrow, let alone over the next 12 months, but the exercise yields interesting insights into what's hot (and what's not) in technology today. Artificial intelligence (and machine/deep learning) is the hottest trend, eclipsing, but building on, the accumulated hype for the previous "new big thing," big data. The new catalyst for the data explosion is the Internet of Things, bringing with it new cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The rapid fluctuations in the relative temperature of these trends also create new dislocations and opportunities in the tech job market.

If you have been as glued as we are in the Mysoft office to the new series of Channel 4's'Humans' then you will be fascinated by the idea of this'Artificial Intelligence' future that it presents. The concept of code going to this next level, where it is able to write and develop itself into thoughts, feelings and actions, feels like science fiction but has some eerie roots in reality. Will a similar plethora of new AI technology soon become main stream? And what could it mean for the advancement of ERP and Sage X3 solutions? We are already seeing a wave of products that use AI technology to enhance the user experience.

Our Chief Scientist Louis Monier gives you the straight dope on AI. Artificial Intelligence, always a very polarizing subject, is back on top of the news. Unless you have been on a deep space mission for the past year, you have been exposed to opinions ranging from "this will change everything for the better" to "this will spell our doom". But what are the facts? Why is it seeing a resurgence now?

What if I told you to tie your shoes, but you had no laces? Or to cook dinner, but you had no pots or pans. There are certain tools we need to succeed, which we often don't have access to or are held back by a gatekeeper. Dozens of AI / Machine Learning startups experience this same problem because they don't have enough data to properly train their AI algorithm. Startups that aim to eliminate the error involved in judging cancerous tumors.

Attendees inspect a Google self-driving car that's now part of Waymo's test fleet, at a conference in Paris in June. Google's self-driving car group, which helped ignite a race among automakers and tech firms to develop cars that drive themselves, is spinning off as a stand-alone unit dubbed Waymo. While Google was an early leader in popularizing the vision of vehicles driven by artificial intelligence rather than a human, it now faces intense competition to commercialize the technology. Uber, the ride-hailing giant, this year acquired robot-trucking tech developer Otto, a company begun by Google alumni, and has set a goal of getting autonomous vehicles into its fleet as soon as possible. Likewise, Elon Musk is pushing Tesla Motors to be a leader in driverless car technology and has begun equipping all of its electric vehicles with sensors and computing power intended to automate control of driving functions.

Datacenters, especially the really big guys known as the Super 7 (Alibaba,, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Tencent), are experiencing significant growth in key workloads that require more performance than can squeezed out of even the fastest CPUs. Applications such as Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for Artificial Intelligences (AIs), complex data analytics, 4K live streaming video and advanced networking and security features are increasingly being offloaded to super-fast accelerators that can provide 10X or more the performance of a CPU. NVIDIA GPUs in particular have benefited enormously from the training portion of machine learning, reporting a 193% Y/Y last quarter in their datacenter segment, which is now approaching a $1B run-rate business. Microsoft has recently announced that Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) accelerators have become pervasive in their datacenters. Soon after, announced that Baidu is using their devices for acceleration of machine learning applied to speech processing and autonomous vehicles.

Jean took NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp pr... between Sept 23 to Dec 18, 2015. The post was based on his first class project(due at 2nd week of the program). Check out the full report here! You will find all the details of the code behind the analysis and the visualisations. For this project, we wish to present and explore the data provided by Lending Club.

If it wasn't clear enough, AI, and more specifically the machine learning sub-branch, is a big deal -- and not just for Google. It's not much of a "next big thing" aimed at supplanting everything that has come before it from above, but rather a more silent revolution branching out from underneath. In this new and fascinating video shared by Google, the company gives us a more comprehensive look at the importance of machine learning and the many ways it's being used to reshape the very way certain things are done. As one of the Googlers interviewed puts it, "The promise of AI and machine learning is that we can actually produce solutions to previously unsolved problems that will really help people." We see machine learning used in tasks from massive things like image and voice recognition and even blindness prevention, but it's also used for minor, very specific tasks.

Mobey Day Toronto speakers and participants discussed the converging factors driving the evolution of the financial services industry. From the indelible mark left by the pervasiveness of smartphones to recent developments in augmented and machine learning, attendees were treated to insights on how collaboration between financial services, fintech and government can contribute to redefining banking and payments. "The major winners will be financial services companies that embrace technology." Atakan Cetinsoy (@atakante) December 7, 2016 "People need banking, not banks." Wolfond is at #MobeyDay explaining #fintech solutions offered by @SecureKey-- Ryan Weaver (@ryandrjweaver) December 7, 2016 "Insurance companies are falling behind," was a repeated notion.