Last week, I introduced the notion that businesses can gain deeper customer insights if they connect their disparate data silos. Similar to how oncologists can leverage information from genome sequencing to tailor cancer treatments for a specific patient in order to improve health outcomes, businesses can use all customer data from disparate data silos to personalize interactions with their customers to improve customer loyalty. Using the 2x2 graphical approach to understanding data size (i.e., number of customers and number of variables), we can see how the value of your integrated business data is greater than the sum of its parts. Figure 1 illustrates these two components of size by examining four different scenarios of how businesses use their data. In the lower right quadrant, it is business as usual; when departments keep their data siloed, each department only knows a few things about the customers.

Many of the big players in IT are taking an interest in artificial intelligence nowadays. A.I. has already become a part of our daily lives and has the potential to penetrate further to fulfill our day-to-day needs. It is apparent from the existing tools that A.I. has a significant role to play in the areas of business and marketing. Here are some of the best A.I.-based tools that can benefit small and medium business. Gluru acts like a personal assistant that will keep a watch on your calendar, track meetings and events, and give you a daily digest of your deadlines, to-dos, and appointments.

The release continues, "AI is creating new ways for people to engage with technology and with one another. Apple's Siri leverages natural language processing to recognize voice commands. Facebook's deep learning facial recognition algorithm can instantly identify a person with nearly 98 percent accuracy. And Amazon, Netflix and Spotify all utilize machine learning to understand how each item in their massive catalogs relates to the other and each customer's preferences. However, the technical expertise and infrastructure required to develop AI solutions are beyond the reach of most companies. They must bring together massive and diverse data sets, which requires significant engineering resources to manage complex data integration processes. Specialized predictive models must then be built to extract value from the data and continuously learn from it, requiring extensive data science expertise."

New York City-based Datorama, a marketing analytics provider, closed on a 32 million round of Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. It plans to invest the funds in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to support its machine-learning capabilities. Datorama has raised 50 million since it was founded in 2012. Before founding the company, Sarig spent nearly three years in at MediaMind (now Sizmek), most recently as vice president of research and development. He also worked for Swets Information Services and Pointech Information Systems and spent six years as an officer in the Israeli Navy.

An agreement to send Canadian authorities passenger name record (PNR) data for flights from the European Union cannot be entered into in its current form, a top European Union judge has said. That's because parts of the draft agreement are incompatible with EU citizens' fundamental privacy rights, according to Paolo Mengozzi, Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the EU, in a legal opinion issued Thursday. His opinion, on a case brought by the European Parliament, is only advisory, and it still remains for the CJEU to make a final ruling on the matter. But if the court follows his advice, it could disrupt the European Commission's plans for a new directive on the sharing of PNR data among EU member states and with other countries. The agreement, which the EU and Canada began negotiating in 2010, concerns the transfer of PNR data to Canadian authorities for the purpose of combatting terrorism and other serious transnational crime. The passenger name records concerned contain 19 categories of information, covering the passenger's identity, nationality, address, contact details of the person making the reservation, payment information such as the number of the credit card used to reserve the flight, luggage details, and additional services requested concerning health problems, mobility, or dietary requirements.

Abstract: With the mission "leave no valuable data behind", we developed techniques for knowledge fusion to guarantee the correctness of the knowledge. This talk starts with describing a few crazy ideas we have tested. The first, known as "Knowledge Vault", used 15 extractors to automatically extract knowledge from 1B Webpages, obtaining 3B distinct (subject, predicate, object) knowledge triples and predicting well-calibrated probabilities for extracted triples. The second, known as "Knowledge-Based Trust", estimated the trustworthiness of 119M webpages and 5.6M websites based on the correctness of their factual information. We then present how we bring the ideas to business in filling the gap between the knowledge at Google Knowledge Graph and the knowledge in the world.

Two London trusts have become the first in UK to establish data sharing between their Cerner Health Information Exchanges, covering a population of 1.3 million people. Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Barts Health NHS Trust went live on with the connection 12 July, with clinicians in both acute hospitals able to view a summarised care record from the other site. The visible information for each trust includes discharge summaries, diagnosis, medications, investigations and results. Niall Canavan, Homerton Hospital's director of information technology, said the next step was "to open this data to any contributing partner organisation in east London". Charles Gutteridge, Barts' chief clinical information officer, said the move had been "relatively simple to do, as Homerton also used the Cerner Millennium system, but a really big step forward".

Developing intelligent systems requires combining results from both industry and academia. In this report you find an overview of relevant research fields and industrially applicable technologies for building very large scale cyber physical systems. A concept architecture is used to illustrate how existing pieces may fit together, and the maturity of the subsystems is estimated. The goal is to structure the developments and the challenge of machine intelligence for Consumer and Industrial Internet technologists, cyber physical systems researchers and people interested in the convergence of data & Internet of Things. It can be used for planning developments of intelligent systems.

Companies today are awash in data, but current tools and processes are not enabling them to keep it secure. That's according to Informatica CEO Anil Chakravarthy, whose says his company -- which has traditionally focused on data management and integration -- is embarking on a major push to go further into data security. "You hear about breaches all the time -- just imagine all the ones you're not hearing about," Chakravarthy said in a recent interview. "Data security today is an unsolved problem for customers." Last year, Informatica launched a product called Secure@Source that promises a data-centric approach to information security by helping organizations identify and visualize sensitive data wherever it resides.