A few days ago, the news emerged that Chinese search engine Sogou (搜狗) is aiming to raise up to $585 million in a U.S. Initial Public Offering. Sogou, which is owned by internet company Sohu, Inc., announced the terms for its proposed IPO on Friday. The news has caused a stir among those keeping an eye on the Chinese tech space, as Sogou is backed by Chinese tech giant Tencent, the company behind the hugely popular messaging apps WeChat and QQ. But for those of us who might not be up on the state of search in China, what do you need to know about Sogou, and how does its IPO play into the wider search landscape? And could there be any potential knock-on effects for the rest of the industry?

Diversity was a central theme in the ACM SIGIR 2017 held in Shinjuku Ward in Tokyo, Japan. Fuji, a view of Shinjuku sky-scrapers, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (Office), as seen from Keio Plaza the conference hotel, and fireworks celebrating the 40th anniversary. The colorfulness of the fireworks and the circles within and enclosing the logo represent diversity and inclusion." SIGIR 2017 featured a session on Women in IR (Information Retrieval) organized by Laura Dietz of the University of New Hampshire on the first day, just before the welcome party. A week before the conference, I received an email from the secretary of the session, Maram Hasanain, a graduate student in computer science (CS) at Qatar University, asking if I would like to prepare a one-minute introduction of myself for the session. I was so overwhelmed by her beautifully written e-mail, and the excitement of a first-time contact with someone from Qatar, that I immediately accepted her invitation.

Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute and a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is the most influential biomedical researcher of the modern era, according to a computer program. Lander, a geneticist and mathematician, ranks first on a new list of top biomedical researchers produced by the scientific literature search tool Semantic Scholar. Semantic Scholar, launched in 2015, is an academic search engine aiming to tackle the problem of information overload. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help users sift through huge numbers of scientific papers and understand (to a limited extent) their content. The free tool was developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), a nonprofit based in Seattle, Washington, that was co-founded in 2014 by Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen.

Fresh off its AI-powered tool for countering watermark removal from photos, Shutterstock is using machine learning for something else. "This tool allows users to specify one or more keywords, or to search for copy space, and arrange them spatially on a canvas to reflect the specific layout of the image they are seeking," a press release reads. "The patent pending tool uses a combination of machine vision, natural language processing and state of the art information retrieval techniques to find strong matches against complex spatially aware search criteria." So, dragging "pen" to the lower left corner of the search box, and "desk" to the upper right corner will come back with photos where the pen is in the lower left of the frame, and a desk is in the upper right. At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Monday it was looking into whether Russians bought U.S. election ads on its Bing search engine or on other Microsoft-owned products and platforms, after rival Google said it had discovered such ads on its products.

Content marketing lies at the intersection of art and technology, so it's only logical that artificial intelligence comes into play. AI plays a big role in search and it can be useful in creating content, too. While it's not known exactly how the Google algorithm works, researchers and marketers have conducted experiments that make a strong argument for topic modeling as a key component of the Hummingbird algorithm. Also, Wired reported last year about how Google's search engine now uses artificial intelligence to rank content. A basic understanding of how search engines interpret text and its quality can help you develop a strategy that produces consistently high-ranking content because topic modeling – done manually or with software – allows you to create blueprints for the best possible content.

When is milk not milk? This is no trick question -- it's a distinction that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have to learn to make in order for eMerchants to fully leverage the potential of machine learning. To one customer, "buy milk" means buy a gallon of whole milk; to another, a 1.4-liter jug of unsweetened vanilla almond milk. Digital shopping lists, apps and virtual assistants must understand this and not force the customer to spell it out each time before these platforms can successfully become the new normal. "We think about things in shorthand, not in terms of specifics," Dave Barrowman, Skava VP of Innovation, told PYMNTS' Karen Webster in a recent webinar.

The current applications of AI in legal work includes drafting and reviewing contracts, mining documents in discovery and due diligence, answering routine questions or sifting data to predict outcomes. AI is a human-like legal issues spotter providing relevant information on contract terms, therefore allowing lawyers to focus their review on the relevant segments of each contract, saving countless lawyer-hours. The tools are simple to use, making litigation document management easier and more efficient, allowing companies to manage more of this work in-house without resorting to outside counsel. Predictive technology analyzes past legal reference data to provide insights into future outcomes, powered by advances in machine learning.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said on Wednesday the company's search engine, Bing, will focus on expanding in the PC search market after losing its deal with Apple Inc's Siri.

Today, Oath, the Verizon-owned company born of the merger between AOL and Yahoo, released the source code of a data-crunching tool called Vespa, which has long-powered search and other features across the Yahoo empire. Yahoo also uses Vespa to power related-article recommendations and ad-targeting on many Yahoo-branded sites, including Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and its advertising network. Don't Laugh: Yahoo's Open Source AI Has a Secret Weapon Vespa's history traces back to the Norwegian search engine AlltheWeb, which Yahoo acquired in 2004. By making Vespa open source, Oath VP of engineering for big data Peter Cnudde says the company hopes to replicate the benefits it has reaped from supporting Hadoop, an open-source software framework for managing big data.