This article first appeared in IEEE IT Professional magazine. IEEE IT Professional offers solid, peer-reviewed information about today's strategic technology issues. To meet the challenges of running reliable, flexible enterprises, IT managers and technical leads rely on IT Pro for state-of-the-art solutions. Science is actually pretty messy. When I was a chemistry undergraduate, I loved the theory behind biochemistry-the endless complexity allowed by simple rules; how massive, complex cellular machines could arise from a few building blocks. In lab, however, I struggled to make the simplest reactions work. Starting with pure crystalline compounds and expensive laboratory equipment, when the result was also expected to be crystalline, I ended up with piles of brown goo-with my instructor concluding, "Well, it could be in there" in reference to the experiment's objective.

California politics updates: Legislature rejects drug'injection sites,' weighs new cap-and-trade spending plan This is Essential Politics, our daily look at California political and government news. Lawmakers in Sacramento are in the final hours of the 2017 legislative session, and now considering the final versions of hundreds of bills. On Tuesday, they rejected a plan for "safe injection sites" for drug users, while agreeing to spend money to help "Dreamer" immigrants. Vice President Mike Pence has rescheduled his California fundraising trip for October. Lawmakers in Sacramento are in the final hours of the 2017 legislative session, and now considering the final versions of hundreds of bills.

Not a bad view, but the longer term potential is greater than implied. The Age of Digital Assistants – What and when to expect? By Shishir Kathurwar in CustomerThink " The better we get, the less time you spend talking to customer service.

A recent New York Times article highlighted a growing Hollywood industry trend -- if a film does poorly at the box office, blame Rotten Tomatoes. The website, which aggregates movie reviews and assigns a percentage score with anything 60 or above labeled "Fresh" and anything scoring lower labeled "Rotten," is catching a lot of flack for disrupting ticket sales and tanking films. But Yves Bergquist, the director of the Data & Analytics Project at USC's Entertainment Technology Center decided to throw some data at the issue and see if those claims hold up. From his findings, they do not. We should note that this work hasn't been published in a journal and hasn't been subject to peer review, but this side project of Bergquist's seems to show that there's very little connection -- if any -- between film success and Rotten Tomatoes scores.

It was just the latest move in the growing self-service customer experience space. "Consumers can begin a conversation through self-service, and complete the transaction with a live chat agent who has context of the previous conversation," said Scott Horn, chief marketing officer of [24]7. "The ability to use channels interchangeably, pick up where they left off, and never have to start over, results in a superior customer experience." These investments range from omnichannel support to data tagging to intent prediction, said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting and author of the recent, "2017 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) Product and Marketing Report" (fee charged). The list of technologies in which these companies are investing money is a long one she said, a list which also includes better content generation, task management and auto content generation among others.

In addition, in 2016 Etsy bought Blackbird Technologies to apply the firm's image-recognition and natural language processing (NLP) to its search function. UNIQLO, the global casual apparel retailer, has also taken a leadership position by offering its customers an expert, AI-powered assistant with deep knowledge about UNIQLO's product catalog, retail locations and more. "As one of the world's leading fashion apparel companies, UNIQLO is committed to delivering the industry's gold standard for customer service and support," said Makoto Hoketsu, Group Senior Vice President and CTO at Uniqlo's parent company Fast Retailing. The focus on natural language processing is dramatically growing as consumers are now accustomed to intelligent conversational assistance, fueled by the use and acceptance of consumer tools like Google Assistant, Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa. When looking at voice/AI-enabled application tools, the market is flooded with options and growing more competitive with every passing day.

Frost & Sullivan's research, Disruption in Global Financial Services, 2017--Machine Learning is Imperative, provides an overview of ML market dynamics, including technology trends, drivers, and challenges for adoption. Case studies and profiles of some of the key players in the report cover Google, IBM, Orange, Swisscom, Onfido, Darktrace, Klarna, Infosys, SAP, and Rasa.ai. To access more information on this analysis, please visit: https://goo.gl/4CtAwr "The biggest advantage of ML solutions is their ability to learn from every transaction and instance. Today, companies and consumers are more comfortable with hybrid services. However, the fact that machines are evolving at a rapid pace, learning continuously and using this knowledge to improve customer satisfaction and experience is the biggest differentiator," stated Digital Transformation Senior Industry Analyst Deepali Sathe.

The following is a guest blog post by Sahir Anand, Managing Vice-President, Research & Strategy, EnsembleIQ. Artificial Intelligence is defined as the study of "intelligent agents" and takes place when a device perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving." While traditional data mining extracts data for humans to analyze, AI draws conclusions on its own. AI uses predictive models and machine-learning to advance company strategy and relieve end-user efforts.

For many people, the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a thing of the future. It is the technology that is yet to be introduced. But Professor Jon Oberlander disagrees. He was quick to point out that AI is not in the future, it is now in the making. He began by mentioning Alexa, Amazon's star product. It's an artificial intelligent personal assistant, which was made popular by Amazon Echo devices.

British warships will soon integrate Siri-like voice systems into their controls, according to the head of the UK's Royal Navy. Speaking at the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition -- one the biggest arms fairs in the world -- First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Phillip Jones said the Royal Navy wanted to embrace the speed at which warfare is being transformed by IT, and pointed to new Type-31 frigates as an example. "The Type 31e will feature different app-based tools which can access the ship's data. These will be operated from a series of touchscreen displays, Siri-style voice-controlled assistants and perhaps even augmented reality technology," Jones said. "This is not a gimmick or a fad. As modern warfare becomes ever faster, and ever more data driven, our greatest asset will be the ability to cut through the deluge of information to think and act decisively."