Samsung is about to launch a new phone that will include all of the iPhone 8's biggest features. The upcoming Galaxy S7 will drop the physical home button so that the entirety of the front of the phone can be one big screen, according to reports. That will allow it to have much the same design as the one rumoured for the upcoming iPhone 8 – which is also expected to be made entirely of glass and not have any bezel. The new phone will also lose the headphone jack, according to reports. Apple dropped the headphone jack in its last iPhone, telling people to use wireless headphones instead, a decision that caused huge controversy.

Under, behind and inside many of the apps we use every day, a revolution is underway. It's a revolution that started decades ago but today is empowering companies to deliver better, smarter services with greater ease and on broader scales than ever before. At Singularity University's inaugural Global Summit, Neil Jacobstein, chair of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, provided a primer showing how artificial intelligence literally transforms everything it touches. First of all, it's critical to define the scope of artificial intelligence (AI), which can be categorized into four areas: techniques in pattern recognition, software agency (that is, software that acts like real users), an exponential technology that is accelerating other exponential technologies, and a vision of a future superhuman intelligence (that fortunately hasn't happened yet). Anyone who has seen a science fiction film is likely familiar with this last area, but it's the other three areas where AI is making huge strides at a revolutionary pace.

IBM provided an Analytics Assessment & Insights Impact Grant to the Shenzhen CDC to help further their mission of infectious disease prevention and control, shouldering the monitoring, alarming and treatment of emergency public health events in Shenzhen for the 12 million citizenry by building a self adaptive online machine learning module that provides cognitive-based modeling for epidemic disease prediction and analysis on case number and trend. The output of this work has allowed the organization to develop prediction models to help forecast seasonal flu outbreaks and provide information to citizens on affected areas. CDC organizations across China are now considering the implementation of this solution to help track flu and other infectious diseases.

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And in ecommerce in particular, brands who want to stay relevant and ahead of the curve are embracing AI as a way to enhance the customer experience, making it more personalised, efficient and intuitive. Here are three ways that we are already seeing artificial intelligence in action across various sectors, which when applied to ecommerce, have the potential to take customer experience to the next level. We've all experienced the frustrations of trying to search with keywords – a constant process of trial and error which results in many of us giving up in frustration. Wouldn't it be better if we could just talk to our computers in full sentences, explain the exact parameters of our search, and have them understand? Artificial intelligence, combined with the power of natural language processing – which allows machines to understand the nuances of human language – is making this possible.

A Data science-based solution needs to address problems at multiple levels. While it addresses a business problem, computationally it is comprised of a pipeline of algorithm which, in turn, operates on relevant data presented in proper format. Contrary to the popular belief, almost all non-trivial data science solutions are needed to be built ground up with minute and interrelated attention to the details of the problem at all three levels. In the following we shall try to understand that with the help of a running example of aspects of a churn analysis solution. It is vital to understand that in most real-world cases we are re-purposing the data for building the solution.

You are on a two week long business trip across multiple locations. Its been 5 days and you are wondering how much you current trip has cost you yet. You tap on your banks app on your phone and type in - 'What's my spend in New York last week?' A bot answers back'a total of $343.54' The bot promptly marks it to your expense list to submit to your company and sends you an email report of the same.

Apple appears to be shifting into the fast lane to exploring the creation of autonomous vehicles. In a letter it submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently, the tech giant appeared to confirm an open secret: That it is in fact working on a self-driving car. "The company is investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation," Apple said in a letter dated Nov. 22, the deadline set by the NHTSA. The Wall Street Journal first reported that Apple had submitted a letter to the agency. The development is in line with recent headlines about Apple's Project Titan, its rumored self-driving car enterprise.

Apple has long been secretive about the research done within its Cupertino, California, labs. It's easy to understand why. Conjecture can spin out of even the most benign of research papers or submissions to medical journals, especially when they're tied to the most valuable company on the planet. But it seems Apple is starting to open up about its work, at least in artificial intelligence. On Dec. 6, at an invitation-only lunch at an industry AI conference, the company's new head of machine learning, Russ Salakhutdinov, and other Apple employees gave a wide-ranging talk detailing the problems the company is using AI to tackle, according to nine slides from the presentation obtained by Quartz. Apple, unsurprisingly, is working on a lot of the same problems as other companies that are exploring machine learning: recognizing and processing images, predicting user behavior and events in the physical world, modeling language for use in personal assistants, and trying to understand how to deal with uncertainty when an algorithm can't make a high-confidence decision.

Digital assistants like Siri and Cortana do utilize traditional search engines, but only when necessary to find information. The key to optimizing in this new format is to make sure your business information is easily accessible to these assistants, rather than trying to funnel people to your site specifically. Search engines are evolving in strange new ways. Mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches (at long last), and competitors like Bing and Yahoo are growing more and more like Google every day, unifying the capacity of every major search brand. As if that weren't enough, a wave of digital assistants like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana have begun to emerge to redefine the search process -- rather than opening a browser window, going to a search engine site, and plugging in an entry only to wade through a string of possible results, users can now use conversational commands and queries to engage with a human-like interface and be met with an almost immediate answer.