Amazon Web Services is expected to announce a new version of its PostgreSQL database for its cloud customers during its AWS re:Invent conference next week, according to a Fortune report. AWS hopes its PostgreSQL database will appeal to larger companies, some of which have complained about the price of Oracle and Microsoft offerings. Amazon also intends to announce new machine learning tools for AWS developers, according to the report. AWS' annual conference is sure to reveal a bevy of new capabilities. Cloud providers often try to one-up other services providers with new, flashy capabilities and re:Invent will likely be no different.

The ongoing evolution in advanced analytics and other emerging technologies is transforming the operational processes in government and public service agencies throughout the world. With the help of these technologies, such organisations are trying to address citizen demands, helping to overcome persistent challenges such as regulatory compliance, outdated legacy IT infrastructures and organisational cultures, according to a new study report from Accenture. In its latest report titled, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, Accenture surveyed nearly 800 public service technology professionals across nine countries to identify emerging technologies being implemented or piloted. The technologies include advanced analytics/predictive modelling, the IoT, intelligent process automation, video analytics, biometrics/identity analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing/generation. The survey found that while more than two-thirds, (70%) of public sector agencies are evaluating the potential of emerging technologies, only a small percentage (25%) is moving beyond the pilot phase to full implementation.

The list of activities in which artificial intelligence machines have bested humans is increasing at an alarming rate. Face recognition, object recognition, chess, Go, various video games, and numerous other tasks have all fallen in this battle. So it's natural to ask about the types of tasks that machines still have difficulty with. Where do humans still rule the roost? Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Mohit Iyyer at the University of Maryland in College Park and a few pals.

Google has previously taught its artificial intelligence to play games, and it's even capable of creating its own encryption. Now, its language translation tool has used machine learning to create a'language' all of its own. In September, the search giant turned on its Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system to help it automatically improve how it translates languages. The machine learning system analyses and makes sense of languages by looking at entire sentences – rather than individual phrases or words. Following several months of testing, the researchers behind the AI have seen it be able to blindly translate languages even if it's never studied one of the languages involved in the translation.

As the conversation shifted the opportunity and challenges for Artificial Intelligence for the average person, hit home. Those of means (money, education, location, etc.) will get super human powers augmented by data driven, people specific technologies. Those born of lesser means may be quickly left behind. In the next 5 - 10 years, 3 million US truck drivers will be the first to suffer as the transport industry goes driverless. Yes, there might be a person on board, much like a train has a conductor, but eventually, this will probably go away.

Information and communications technology (ICT) stands at an evolutionary inflection point as 3rd Platforms comprised of cloud, Big Data and social technologies are being adopted on a massive scale, according to a digital transformation forecast from IDC FutureScape report. Enterprise-scale businesses are assembling and making use of these 3rd Platforms more rapidly than initially anticipated, and that's driving a digital transformation of their businesses and the economy, according to IDC. The market research provider forecasts that this digital transformation, or DX, will be macroeconomic in scale and reshape the global economy over the next three to four years. Digital Transformation Forecast To wit, IDC makes the following 10 predictions in the digital transformation forecast in the company's new FutureScape report: By 2020, 50% of the Global 2000 will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create digitally-enhanced products, services, and experiences. For industry leaders, the fastest revenue growth will come from information-based products and services.

He studied English Literature and History at Sussex University before gaining a Masters in Newspaper Journalism from City University. Businesses are often data-rich but information-poor. Machine learning (ML) is changing that. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to let computers learn independently through algorithms without being explicitly programmed can help companies process vast quantities of complex data to improve analytics, predictive accuracy and decision-making. Machine learning is already being used in everything from fraud detection to self-driving cars, and in sectors from marketing to government.

The new, hippest technology product comes in innovative packaging, is very expensive and comes with an advertising campaign that boasts of how its obsessive engineering makes it the best in the world. Casper is the company at the forefront of a technology (and marketing) revolution that's seeing perhaps one of the most domestic and boring of products – bedding – become this year's must-have tech product. And that's entirely on purpose: the company is being advertised on tech podcasts, and promotes its mattresses with the kind of fun marketing that would usually be reserved for a phone or a computer. It hasn't come easily, and it hasn't been as much of a trick as it might seem. Instead, the company says that it really is a tech company – and that it has the product to prove it.

The world of big data analytics is incredibly diverse, and people are coming up with new analytic tools and techniques every day. But one particularly productive combination that should not be overlooked involves the use of text analytics and machine learning. Tom Sabo, principal solutions architect at analytics giant SAS, says the one-two punch of predictive modeling on structured data, and text mining with unstructured data, can deliver insights that are more than the sum of their analytic parts. "They really run side by side," Sabo tells Datanami. "Let's say somebody has predictive models in place against whether customer will churn or to maximize profit, for instance. If they have text, like notes, in the rest of that structured data…we can incorporate that additional free form information for actionable insight."

A new artificial intelligence tool created by Google and Oxford University researchers could significantly improve the success of lip-reading and understanding for the hearing impaired. In a recently released paper on the work, the pair explained how the Google DeepMind-powered system was able to correctly interpret more words than a trained human expert. The tool is called Watch, Listen, Attend and Spell (WLAS), and the paper describes it as a "network that learns to transcribe videos of mouth motion to characters." Using videos from the BBC, the team trained the system with a dataset of more than 100,000 natural sentences. While similar attempts in the past have focused on a narrow set of words, the report said, Google and Oxford wanted to address lip reading through "unconstrained natural language sentences, and in the wild videos." The professional human lip reader whom the researchers compared the results against had roughly 10 years of experience in the field and had deciphered videos for the royal wedding and in court for trials as well, the report said.