As 2017 wound down, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant rose up to the top of Apple's App Store while Amazon's Echo Dot was its own bestseller. But some of the millions of those devices sold have already found their way into hospitals like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Northwell Health in New York, the Commonwealth Care Alliance in Boston, and Libertana Home Health in Los Angeles. "When we went from laptops to smartphones as our primary means of doing computing, that was a major paradigm shift," said John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel. "Ambient listening tools probably will replace mobile devices." Amazon is hardly alone in the market. Apple Siri, Google Home and Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana are also available. At least one hospital is already girding to implement Google Home as well.

Machine learning has had fruitful applications in finance well before the advent of mobile banking apps, proficient chat bots, or search engines. Given high volume, accurate historical records, and quantitative nature of the finance world, few industries are better suited for artificial intelligence. There are more uses cases of machine learning in finance than ever before, a trend perpetuated by more accessible computing power and more accessible machine learning tools (such as Google's Tensorflow). Today, machine learning has come to play an integral role in many phases of the financial ecosystem, from approving loans, to managing assets, to assessing risks. Yet, few technically-savvy professionals have an accurate view of just how many ways machine learning finds its way into their daily financial lives.

A California judge said "we swipe left, and reverse" a lower court's ruling. A California judge said "we swipe left, and reverse" a lower court's ruling. A California appeals court has found the dating app Tinder's pricing model to be discriminatory and says the company must stop charging older customers more for its paid premium service. Tinder has argued that the pricing difference on its Tinder Plus service was based on market research finding "customers age 30 and younger have less capacity to pay for premium services" and they "need a lower price to pull the trigger." But Judge Brian Currey, writing for California's 2nd District Court of Appeal earlier this week, wrote that Tinder "employs an arbitrary, class-based, generalization about older users' incomes as a basis for charging them more than younger users."

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people find love on Match.com. And Match puts you in control of your love life; meeting that special someone and forming a lasting relationship is as easy as clicking on any one of the photos and singles ads available online. Whether you're interested in Christian Dating, Jewish Dating, Asian Dating, Black Dating, Senior Dating, Gay Dating, Lesbian Dating, Match.com can help you find the date or relationship that fits you best. Literally, hundreds of thousands of single men and single women right in your area have posted personal ads on Match.com. Young and old alike, gay and straight, from everywhere around the world, singles come to Match.com to flirt, meet, date, have fun, fall in love and to form meaningful, loving relationships.

Children are being taught to be rude and demanding by their interactions with voice recognition gadgets, a new report has warned. Youngsters have been quick to embrace smart assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, who respond to any command that is barked at them. This new'Alexa generation' is learning less-civil ways of communicating that could spill over into their interactions with other people, research suggests. One solution could be to add a setting that requires a polite inquiry in order to get a response. Children are being taught to be rude by their interactions with voice recognition gadgets, a new report has warned.

In early 2014, Srikanth Thirumalai met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Thirumalai, a computer scientist who'd left IBM in 2005 to head Amazon's recommendations team, had come to propose a sweeping new plan for incorporating the latest advances in artificial intelligence into his division. He arrived armed with a "six-pager." Bezos had long ago decreed that products and services proposed to him must be limited to that length, and include a speculative press release describing the finished product, service, or initiative. Now Bezos was leaning on his deputies to transform the company into an AI powerhouse. Amazon's product recommendations had been infused with AI since the company's very early days, as had areas as disparate as its shipping schedules and the robots zipping around its warehouses. But in recent years, there has been a revolution in the field; machine learning has become much more effective, especially in a supercharged form known as deep learning. It has led to dramatic gains in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing. In the early part of this decade, Amazon had yet to significantly tap these advances, but it recognized the need was urgent. This era's most critical competition would be in AI--Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft were betting their companies on it--and Amazon was falling behind.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention from investors these days and with good reason. It's a technology with the potential to transform everything from transportation to cloud computing. Many companies are betting that AI will influence not just their products and services, but nearly every aspect of their business. Read on to discover nine things you may not have to know about this burgeoning technology. Artificial intelligence is often used as a catch-all to describe computer systems that can learn.

Basic machine learning technology is already used by some procurement applications in areas such as spend analytics and contract analytics. This is mostly limited to automating the processes of collecting, cleaning, classifying and analyzing expenditure data in an organization -- to identify savings or paths to greater efficiency. Today, procurement technology vendors are creating cognitive procurement advisors (CPAs) and virtual personal assistants (VPAs) that use natural-language processing (NLP) and natural-language generation to further increase automation and efficiency. "A procurement VPA can improve the end-user experience of traditional procurement tools and increase spend under management by guiding people to the correct purchasing tool," said Magnus Bergfors, research director at Gartner. "A CPA can provide summaries, recommendations and advice in everything from supplier assessments and performance management, to risk management and compliance."

Another year older and wiser, and the digital advertising industry shows few signs of slowing down. To understand the current landscape and get a sense of what lies ahead, we dug deep into industry data as well as the Marin Advertising Index--which represents billions of dollars of annual ad spend on the Marin platform. I hope you enjoy the result--our list of 10 digital advertising trends that promise increasing opportunities and unique challenges for global advertisers. By the end of 2017, Google and Facebook owned 63 percent of the U.S. digital ad market and 54 percent of digital ad revenue worldwide, according to eMarketer. Nationally, Microsoft grew but remained a distant third place, claiming four percent of the total U.S. revenue share.

While Microsoft continues to be buoyed by enterprise and cloud services like Azure, chief executive Satya Nadella tried to reassure analysts that Microsoft still has a consumer strategy: Xbox, PC gaming, and devices powered by digital assistants like Cortana. With the demise of consumer products like the Zune music player, Groove Music Pass, and Windows phones, some customers have wondered whether Microsoft indeed has a consumer strategy in mind. "When I come home at night, I'm talking to Alexa... not Cortana," one analyst said during a Microsoft investor call on Thursday. "Our real strategy going forward is not only to do great work on the console but also complement that with the work we're doing on the PC," Nadella replied. PC gaming is a growth market, Nadella said, and Microsoft's goal is to bring those platforms together: via its Game Pass subscription service (an Xbox-only offering for now); its Mixer streaming service, where gamers can stream themselves as they play either PC or Xbox games; and mobile gaming, where Nadella highlighted the fact that Minecraft has been ported to pretty much everything.