Business intelligence has gone from static reports that tell you what happened, to interactive dashboards where you can drill into information to try and understand why it happened. New big data sources, including Internet of things (IoT) devices, are pushing businesses from those reactive analytics -- whether you look back once a month to spot trends or once a day to check for problems -- to proactive analytics that give you alerts and real-time dashboards. That makes better use of operational data, which is more useful while it's still current, before conditions change. "There's a demand for real-time dashboards," says Herain Oberoi from Microsoft's Cortana Analytics team. "A lot of businesses want to get the pulse of their business. But dashboards show things that have already happened."

Madeline MacDonald says she was an 18-year-old freshman at Brigham Young University when she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on an online dating site. She reported the crime to the school's Title IX office. That same day, she says, BYU's honor code office received a copy of the report, triggering an investigation into whether MacDonald had violated the Mormon school's strict code of behavior, which bans premarital sex and drinking, among other things. Now MacDonald is among many students and others, including a Utah prosecutor, who are questioning BYU's practice of investigating accusers, saying it could discourage women from reporting sexual violence and hinder criminal cases. Tens of thousands have signed an online petition calling on the university to give victims immunity from honor code violations committed in the lead-up to a sexual assault.

ONE Saturday night last year, 11 people went looking for love. Like countless speed daters before them, they met in a room draped with curtains, the lights on low. In one hand they held traditional glasses of bubbly, but in the other were sheets of paper they had filled with their personal data. This twist on speed-dating was part of an experiment run by a team at Newcastle University in the UK. They wanted to know what would happen in a world where instead of vetting potential dates by their artfully posed selfies or carefully crafted dating-site profiles, we looked at data gathered by their computers and phones.

Business intelligence has gone from static reports that tell you what happened, to interactive dashboards where you can drill into information to try and understand why it happened. New big data sources, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are pushing businesses from those reactive analytics – whether you look back once a month to spot trends or once a day to check for problems – to proactive analytics that give you alerts and real-time dashboards. That makes better use of operational data, which is more useful while it's still current, before conditions change. "There's a demand for real-time dashboards," says Herain Oberoi from Microsoft's Cortana Analytics team. "A lot of businesses want to get the pulse of their business. But dashboards show things that have already happened."

In exchange for 24.9 million, Apple will be allowed to continue loading its devices with Siri and the assurance that it's not going to be sued based on the same patent again... at least for the next three years. Dynamic Advances is getting 5 million as soon as the case is dropped, with the rest to follow. It expects to pocket half of the amount and divvy up the rest to pay Rensselaer and its lawyers, among the other entities involved in the case. If you're wondering, the patent in question is called "Natural language interface using constrained intermediate dictionary of results." The document says the invention "relates to user interfaces, and more specifically, to user interfaces that recognize natural language."

Of course we have all heard about machine learning and recommendation engines in big business ecommerce. For quite some time, massive ecommerce businesses like Netflix, Amazon, and Ebay have been leveraging the power of data science to improve customer service and boost sales. Where once this technology was cost-prohibitive to all but the major players, recently things have changed. Thanks to multi-channel ecommerce platforms like Shopify, and the developers who are building custom machine learning add-ons, now mom and pop online businesses get the chance to infuse their operations with the power of data science. In this article I introduce how machine learning algorithms work to produce recommendation systems for small business ecommerce.

We are fast moving from the app era to the era of the intelligent agent. By definition, these agents complete entire jobs by themselves, which means they must learn to understand us and our objectives. Therein lies the technical challenge--for humans often don't say what they mean. Worse, we believe that we're being clear when our communications are riddled with ambiguity. Amy's job is to schedule meetings.

When Amazon Echo was first launched in 2015, the voice-controlled, Internet-connected speaker had a handful of skills. Now, the Alexa-enabled speaker can dole out health advice about common ailments in children through a new app called KidsMD, which is powered by information curated by doctors from Boston Children's Hospital. Developed by the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA) team at Boston Children's Hospital, the app is also available on other Alexa-enabled devices as well including Amazon Tap, Echo Dot, and Amazon Fire TV. Parents who enable KidsMD on their Alexa device can now "decide whether symptoms like fever, cough, headache, rash, vomiting, sore throat, diarrhea, fatigue or shortness of breath warrant a call to the doctor," according to Boston Children's Hospital. Users can also ask for dosing advice for over-the-counter drugs such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen based on their kid's weight or age as well.

Artificial intelligence (AI), one of 20 core technologies I identified back in 1983 as the drivers of exponential economic value creation, is rapidly working its way into our lives from Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's M, to Google's Now and Apple's Siri. An example of how far AI has come is the recent news that a Google supercomputer, using its advanced AI software, was able to win a stunning 3-0 victory in a man vs. machine face-off against Go grandmaster, one of the game's all-time champions. For those who are not familiar with Go, it is a 3,000-year-old game that is widely considered to be the most complex game ever invented because it is reported to have more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Until just a few months ago, it was thought that a computer could not defeat a human grandmaster for at least another decade due to the game's complexity. How did Google's AlphaGo program advance so much faster than many expected?

A recent article titled "Why is AI Female?" made the connection that gendered labor, in service professions in particular, is fueling our expectations for gendered AI assistants and service robots. Furthermore, the author argues, this "feminizing -- and sexualizing -- of machines" signals a future with a disproportionate use of feminized VR and robots for a male-dominated sex industry. "Sex with robots is a big leap from asking Siri to set an alarm, but the fact that we've largely equated artificial intelligence with female personalities is worth examining. There are, after all, few sexualized male robots or avatars." Herbert Televox and Mr. Telelux, the early 20th century robots made by Westinghouse, were both male.