Demonstrating its leadership and vision in the Cloud ERP market, Oracle today announced the latest updates to Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud. The updates enable organizations of all sizes to enhance productivity, reduce costs and improve controls by introducing both product innovations and industry-focused solutions. "Oracle continues to extend its lead in the Cloud ERP market with powerful new innovations to support the changing demands placed on finance and operations teams," said Rondy Ng, senior vice president, Oracle Applications Development. "Integrating intelligent assistants and machine learning capabilities into Oracle ERP Cloud enables customers to reduce the number of mundane--but important--tasks for their employees. This improves productivity and accuracy, enhances business insight and decision making and helps free up employees for strategic, creative and fulfilling work."

It seems like only yesterday that artificial intelligence (AI) was the stuff of science fiction - a concept, rather than grounded in reality. Marketers in particular have waxed lyrical about the potential of AI for perhaps five years or so, but during that time much of the conversation around AI has been the manifestation of a sort of'shiny new tech syndrome'. To suggest – as many do – that AI is still a buzzword, is to vastly underestimate how it, when paired with the right data and the increase in demand for intelligent virtual assistants, is already radically altering aspects of marketing. At The Drum Arms at Advertising Week New York, last week, The Drum co-founder and editor-in-chief, Gordon Young, took the stage with Microsoft Advertising, the American basketball league NBA and digital agency Digitas, to discuss how this combination of data and AI will define – and in some cases is already defining – the future of marketing. Jorge Urrutia del Pozo, head of fan audience strategy and engagement at the NBA, discussed how he and his team utilize the huge and various amounts of data that the NBA creates.

For more than 70 years, the study of artificial intelligence (AI) and the study of communication have proceeded along separate trajectories. Research regarding AI has focused on how to reproduce aspects of human intelligence, including the ability to communicate, within the machine (Frankish and Ramsey, 2014). In contrast, communication historically has been conceptualized as foremost a human process (e.g. Schramm, 1972), with research within the discipline as a whole focused on how people exchange messages with one another and the implications thereof (see Craig, 1999). Today, this gulf between AI and communication research is narrowing, bridged by AI technologies designed to function as communicators. Recent advances in AI have led to more powerful and consequential AI technologies being integrated across daily life (Campolo et al., 2017). Individuals routinely chat with Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and other digital assistants (Pew Research Center, 2017), with people's interactions with smart devices expected to grow along with the emerging Internet of Things (Rainie and Anderson, 2017). Within industry, media providers such as the Associated Press are using AI-enabled technologies in the production and distribution of news (Marconi et al., 2017). In response, some communication scholars are advocating for the discipline to devote greater attention to understanding increasingly life-like and communicative AI technologies, people's interactions with them, and their implications (e.g. However, communication researchers studying communicative AI face a substantial hurdle: AI and people's interactions with it do not fit neatly into paradigms of communication theory that for more than a century formed around how people communicate with other people (Gunkel, 2012a).

AI have entered into a partnership to provide TOPdesk users with expanded IT support through cognitive Artificial Intelligence (AI) by using Amelia, IPsoft's industry-leading digital AI colleague, as a digital IT service desk employee. Amelia will automate routine IT service desk functions to deliver efficient and more timely support services to TOPdesk users, freeing up time for support employees to focus on more critical tasks. AI solution is offered as a service and integrated with TOPdesk's service management software, using Amelia's conversational interface -- in natural language -- as an interactive front-end for users. AI will support this partnership by working together with participating customers to seamlessly integrate Amelia's cognitive AI abilities with their existing TOPdesk deployments. "Amelia is rated as the most intelligent virtual agent by Everest Group and through her unique programming and algorithms, Amelia utilizes each of the human brain s eight core cognitive skills to deliver unparalleled capabilities, surpassing mere chatbots in every way. We look forward to being able to offer Amelia capabilities to TOPdesk users," said Ramon van Leeuwen, CCO at TOPdesk.

Up until recently, when users wanted to search for something online, they would need to type their queries into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. However, the development of voice search technology means that users can now simply speak their query aloud into a device such as a smart speaker (e.g. the Google Home) or an AI-powered virtual assistant (e.g. the Amazon Alexa) and receive a verbal answer to that query. ComScore predicts that voice search will account for half of all online searches by the year 2020. So, what exactly is the appeal of this technology for users? Vocal search is changing how people search for things online so you will have to adapt your approach to keyword research accordingly.

Our research aims to develop interactive, social agents that can coach people to learn new tasks, skills, and habits. In this paper, we focus on coaching sedentary, overweight individuals (i.e., trainees) to exercise regularly. We employ adaptive goal setting in which the intelligent health coach generates, tracks, and revises personalized exercise goals for a trainee. The goals become incrementally more difficult as the trainee progresses through the training program. Our approach is model-based - the coach maintains a parameterized model of the trainee's aerobic capability that drives its expectation of the trainee's performance. The model is continually revised based on trainee-coach interactions. The coach is embodied in a smartphone application, NutriWalking, which serves as a medium for coach-trainee interaction. We adopt a task-centric evaluation approach for studying the utility of the proposed algorithm in promoting regular aerobic exercise. We show that our approach can adapt the trainee program not only to several trainees with different capabilities, but also to how a trainee's capability improves as they begin to exercise more. Experts rate the goals selected by the coach better than other plausible goals, demonstrating that our approach is consistent with clinical recommendations. Further, in a 6-week observational study with sedentary participants, we show that the proposed approach helps increase exercise volume performed each week.

-- T owards conversational agents that are capable of handling more complex questions on contractual conditions, formalizing contract statements in a machine readable way is crucial. However, constructing a formal model which captures the full scope of a contract proves difficult due to the overall complexity its set of rules represent. Instead, this paper presents a top-down approach to the problem. A user-friendly tool we developed for this purpose allows to do so easily and at scale. Then, we expose the statements as service so they can get smoothly integrated in any chatbot framework. For a long time, researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) have been intrigued by the idea of developing a conversational agent that is capable of having a coherent conversation with humans [1]-[3]. Recent breakthroughs in semantics and speech recognition have given rise to hopes for robust solutions to the problem [4], [5]. Major information technology companies have released digital assistants and chatbot frameworks to facilitate the building of conversational agents [6], [7].

A new Senate bill would require tech companies to label internet-connected devices equipped with either a camera or microphone. Introduced by Cory Gardner, a Republican senator from Colorado, the Protecting Privacy in our Homes Act is intended to enhance consumer privacy as more and more tech devices come equipped with surveillance tools that aren't always obvious. The Federal Trade Commission would be responsible for creating the specific language for the label and for determining and enforcing penalties for non-compliance. Amazon's Alexa (pictured above) comes with a microphone that records users even when they're not using the device. The bill would exclude devices marketed specifically as cameras or microphones.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way in a short time. No longer relegated to only outwitting humans in chess matches, AI now powers virtual assistants like Siri and self-driving cars testing their way through our neighborhoods. But if AI is getting more ingrained in society, why has it not boosted economic growth -- as technological innovations like electricity or computers have done in the past? Erik Brynjolfsson, a leading economist in AI, says it's only a matter of time. Brynjolfsson, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, spoke Tuesday at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), on "The AI Awakening and the Coming Productivity Boom."

Just the mention of AI and the brain invokes pictures of Terminator machines destroying the world. Thankfully, the present picture is significantly more positive. So, let's explore how AI is helping our planet and at last benefiting humankind. In this blog on Artificial Intelligence applications, I'll be discussing how AI has impacted various fields like healthcare, finance, agriculture, and so on. Marketing is a way to sugar coat your products to attract more customers.