As the sun rises on 2017, a highlight of this New Year will be the gathering strength of the cloud. If the big question posed by businesses and their CIOs in 2016 was whether they should migrate to the cloud; in 2017 the question will be what is the best way to get there. A recent IBM survey of more than 1,000 C-suite executives from 18 industries found that almost every company we surveyed is using cloud, but only in pockets of their business. At the same time, nearly half of workloads - or 45% - are expected to remain on-premises with dedicated servers. As businesses continue to benefit from integrating their on-premises infrastructure with the cloud, they are also increasing their investments in new workloads on public clouds.

Marketing technology has fundamentally recast the way marketers work. Analytics has provided much deeper insights into consumer behaviour and expectations, while new generations of marketing applications have made it easier to respond to customers by providing information and offers that best align to customers' needs. But, while marketing has come a long way, there is a revolution building that promises a huge jump forward in how marketers work: cognitive computing. This is a topic we explored in depth recently during a series of senior executive round tables with ADMA in Sydney and Melbourne. Like the participants in the round tables, you will certainly have heard of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Prof. Tom Griffiths is the director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at UC Berkeley. He studies human cognition and is involved with the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence. I asked him for insight into the intersection of cognitive science and AI. He offers his thoughts on the historical interaction of the fields and what aspects of human cognition might be relevant to developing AI in the future.

Smart devices have shown that they are vulnerable to security flaws in the past, so how do we secure ourselves as we move towards smart homes? Across the world Smart homes are on the rise, with the IoT creating new technological solutions to our everyday problems. As companies like Google and Amazon roll out their smart speakers, collating our devices and apps into easily manageable hubs, smart homes will surely only increase in popularity. According to ABI Research, by 2020 there will be 40.9 billion active wireless connected devices and this will largely be non-hub devices like sensors. IDC forecasts that by 2020 the worldwide market for IoT will surpass $7 trillion. The growth of these systems in the recent and coming years is astronomical but with all of our personal data uploaded into nebulous'cloud' systems how safe are we and how safe are our homes?

Whether you're interested in cognitive computing, artificial intelligence or machine learning, you probably know that the fourth industrial revolution is well underway and accelerating rapidly. The speed of change presents a challenge to developers who want to stay abreast of the latest ideas and approaches. Conferences, workshops and other meetings provide opportunities to learn where the jobs and technology is headed and a chance to learn and practice the skills necessary to keep up. Why you should attend: AI engineers, practitioners, researchers and scientists will discuss the latest developments in the field, while tutorials and workshops will give attendees a chance to hone their skills. Speakers will be drawn from a wide variety of sectors, including Microsoft, MIT, the National Science Foundation and NASA Ames Research Center.

Soon, every digital system will be measured on its cognitive abilities. Cognitive Computing will be a significant step towards digital humanism.

The advocates of machine learning are known to be a fiercely contentious lot, each asserting that its own approach is superior to all others, and that any evidence adduced to the contrary is propaganda, fake news of the worst sort, stemming from jealous advocates of inferior approaches. The closest approximation to the internecine warfare of the machine learning field is the human learning field, in which advocates of public, government-run and union-staffed schools exchange harsh words with advocates of charter schools, with a level of invective and passion that indicates that someone is strongly in favor of hopelessly uneducated machines and/or humans.

Persistence Market Research delivers pertinent insights on the growth of the Cognitive Computing Market and identifies key market dynamics impacting this growth. New York City, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/27/2017 -- In the ever changing world of information technology, business organizations are left with humongous amount of data with them. This data includes very critical information for business use, but business organizations are only able to utilize 20% of whole data available with them with the use of traditional data analytics technology. To process and interpret the reaming 80% of the data that is in the form of videos, images, and human voice (also called as dark data), there is a need of cognitive computing systems. Cognitive computing systems are typical combination of hardware and software that constitute natural language processing (NLP) and machine language, and have capability to collect, process, and interpret the dark data available with business organizations.

Andrea: First and foremost, this is not an overnight deal rather it is a journey. Your road map and strategies must align with the objectives and use cases we identify as benefiting from these technologies and know that they will evolve. Benefiting from cognitive technologies require that you measure outcomes and continue to tune and train your systems and users. In fact, ensure that you plan to govern the tuning mechanisms and training sets closely whether human built or system generated. The competitive advantages that businesses stand to gain are undeniable and as these technologies continue to evolve they will take on a life of their own.

Google plans to bring its artificial intelligence, machine learning and all its other developer tools to the small computer. Google has announced its partnership with Raspberry Pi to develop a range of smart tools that will made available in 2017. The company plans to bring its artificial intelligence, machine learning and all its other developer tools to the small computer. In a blog post, Raspberry Pi said: "The tech titan has exciting plans for the maker community… Google's range of AI and machine learning technology could enable makers to build even more powerful projects." With the help of Raspberry Pi makers, suggestions of ideas will be given to Google for development direction through the creation of a survey.