For those who are more adept at catching Squirtles than they are significant others, there's now an online dating service able to match potential mates over their shared love Pokémon Go. The website, appropriately called PokéDates, launched Wednesday. It prompts its users to answer a few questions and provide times when they might be available for date (or just a Pokémon battle), and quickly gets to work to match users with someone they might like -- emailing both parties with a convenient time and meeting location. If the users both agree to the date, the user is charged 20, though there are no subscription fees. The first PokéDate is free. The website for PokéDates, which is run by dating startup Project Fixup, says that augmented reality game is "arguably the best idea of the 21st century" and hopes that users "catch'em all together."

PokéDates, a new service from the dating firm Project Fixup, is here to help. Pokémon Go, the mobile game that's taken the country by storm, has inspired its own dedicated dating service. Those who want to sign up to find a partner in gaming and in life can navigate their way to gopokedates.com, Amid all the reports of injuries, robberies and people running into police cars, there also have been anecdotes of love found among the pocket monsters. PokéDates users also will have to include extra Pokémon Go-related information, such as when you'll be available to go searching for monsters and love.

Stories about racist Twitter accounts and crashing self-driving cars can make us think that artificial intelligence (AI) is a work in progress. But while these headline-grabbing mistakes reveal the frontiers of AI, versions of this technology are already invisibly embedded in many systems that we use everyday. These everyday uses include everything from fraud detection systems that monitor credit card transactions to email filters that learn not to swamp your inbox with spam. You've probably already interacted with an AI system today without even knowing it and probably enjoyed the experience. One increasingly common form of AI can be found in chatbots, a type of software that lets you interact with it by having a conversation.

Stories about racist Twitter accounts and crashing self-driving cars can make us think that artificial intelligence (AI) is a work in progress. But while these headline-grabbing mistakes reveal the frontiers of AI, versions of this technology are already invisibly embedded in many systems that we use everyday. These everyday uses include everything from fraud detection systems that monitor credit card transactions to email filters that learn not to swamp your inbox with spam. You've probably already interacted with an AI system today without even knowing it and probably enjoyed the experience. One increasingly common form of AI can be found in chatbots, a type of software that lets you interact with it by having a conversation.

Hi everyone, my name is Clara and I joined Dataiku's data science team a while ago for an internship. Today I'm going to tell you about a project that was inspired by an overheard conversation during lunch: Alivia Smith (who you are already familiar with if you are an avid reader of our blog) was struggling with the schedule of the Avignon Festival, a French theater festival; struggling because there are so many plays and events happening, but no real guide or documentation to help her decide on her schedule. Since we're a great big loving family at Dataiku, and we're always enthusiastic about playing with data, a couple of us data scientists figured we could use machine learning to build a play recommender for her, so she could have insights regarding which plays she might like, based on her tastes and the theater community's appreciation. We computed several recommendations for Alivia using a method known as collaborative filtering. Essentially, she gave us several plays she had already seen and liked, and from those we deduced a list of other plays she may like, with a score (i.e., an estimation of how much she would like them).

I am a senior Marketing student at Clemson University, graduating in May 2017. I am currently taking advantage of the incredible opportunity to spend my summer in Barcelona, Spain working as a Marketing Assistant for Marketeer.

Sure, Facebook has "M", Google has "Google Now", and Siri's voice isn't always that of a woman. But it does feel worth noting that (typically male-dominated) engineering groups routinely give women's names to the things you issue commands to. Is artificial intelligence work about Adams making Eves? The response to this critique is usually about the voices people trust and find easy to understand. Adrienne LaFrance over at The Atlantic does a good job discussing those points, so go read her article.

Ask the robot about the bad decision, and then don't do what it says. Hospitals are, even at the best of times, a sort of ordered chaos. Patients, overwhelmed by it all, wait or wander looking for care. Nurses and doctors, in the thick of it, juggle deep knowledge with pressing need and dozens of immediate tasks. It's a lot to manage, which is why researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory trained a small NAO robot to evaluate the situation and offer suggestions when asked.

The Internet of Things together with changes in consumer-buying habits are set to have profound consequences for marketers. Connected devices are growing at an astonishing rate. Cisco's latest Visual Networking Index has predicted that, by 2020, there will be 26 billion connected devices across the globe, up from 16 billion connections in 2015. This is a trend that will revolutionise many aspects of life--not least, commerce. At Salmon we've termed this new era of retail "Programmatic Commerce" and believe it to be one of the most significant trends on the horizon for marketers in the digital age.

When I woke up this morning, I asked my assistant a simple question: "Siri, is it going to rain today?" Siri understood my intent, pulled the local weather data via an API and answered me in less than two seconds: "There's no rain in the forecast for today." In the not-too-distant past, this kind of human-computer interaction would have blown away technologists and delighted consumers -- but in 2016, it's nothing special. Conversations with Siri are commonplace, just like they are with Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa. Machine learning (ML) and narrow forms of artificial intelligence (AI) have officially reached the mainstream.