In an age when technology companies routinely introduce new forms of everyday magic, one problem that remains seemingly unsolved is that of long-form transcription. Sure, voice dictation for documents has been conquered by Nuance's Dragon software. Our phones and smart home devices can understand fairly complex commands, thanks to self-teaching recurrent neural nets and other 21st century wonders. However, the task of providing accurate transcriptions of long blocks of actual human conversation remains beyond the abilities of even today's most advanced software. When solved on a broad scale, it is a problem that might unlock vast archives of oral histories, make podcasts easier to consume for speed-readers (tl;dl), and be a world-changing boon for journalists everywhere, liberating precious hours of sweet life.

In an age when technology companies routinely introduce new forms of everyday magic, one problem that remains seemingly unsolved is that of long-form transcription. Sure, voice dictation for documents has been conquered by Nuance's Dragon software. Our phones and smart home devices can understand fairly complex commands, thanks to self-teaching recurrent neural nets and other 21st century wonders. However, the task of providing accurate transcriptions of long blocks of actual human conversation remains beyond the abilities of even today's most advanced software. When solved on a broad scale, it is a problem that might unlock vast archives of oral histories, make podcasts easier to consume for speed-readers (tl;dl), and be a world-changing boon for journalists everywhere, liberating precious hours of sweet life.

I am a master's student in business informatics (or information systems) and researching how to apply NILM (non intrusive appliance load monitoring) to the field of IT-security. My experience in machine learning could be rounded off to 0, so I wanted to get some input on how best to approach this topic. The basic idea would be for example: Monitor the power consumption of an office and look for permanent increases in power consumption or decreases in idle times. This could point to a malware infection or ongoing attack. Some work has been done on smartphones on this topic, but none on desktop computers.

Facebook has recently made it easier for blind users to share the same experience as the rest of the community of Facebook users by filling in the Photo Blanks. Facebook introduced on Monday April 6, 2016 an automated alt text which is a new tool that helps blind users to visualize the images as they scroll up and down. "There seems to be a general movement towards making technology more accessible. I think people are recognizing the great opportunities. There are close to 250 million people around the world with visual impairments and almost 40 million who are actually blind," Susan Schreiner, an analyst at C4 Trends said for TechNewsWorld.

"YOU are a developer and you've just spent two weeks writing this amazing app. Your dream is to get it in front of every iPhone user." That was how Steve Jobs, then Apple's boss, introduced an online shop for smartphone apps eight years ago.

Digital technology is driving new forms of customer engagement that are rapidly eliminating the functional silos between online and offline retail channels. As a result many high street retailers are already experiencing falling footfall in their physical stores as customers increasingly switch to online competitors for better convenience, choice and prices. However, these bricks and mortar (B&M) businesses could use Liquid Big Data (cloud based analytics shared between partners, suppliers and potentially even competitors for their mutual benefit) to integrate the physical and digital customer experience into a unique, responsive personal customer journey online competitors can't imitate. So what might the Liquid Big Data Customer Experience be like for a global retailer selling ready to assemble home furniture, appliances and accessories for example? Traditionally high street retailers focus on their brand as source of differentiation to attract customers to their physical stores.

There's an Echo in Best Buy (and in a quantity greater than one). Tech Times reports that Amazon Echo, the voice-enabled, at-home assistant (whose own voice has a name, of course, and that name is Alexa), has made its way to Best Buy shelves (as well as to the retailer's website). It's been a bit of a long wait for Amazon Echo to connect with the major tech retailer, especially considering that the popular robo-helper has been available from chains, including Staples, Home Depot, Sears and others, going back to the winter holidays. According to Best Buy's website (as Tech Times points out), it is offering the device at the same price point as Amazon itself does -- 179.99 -- with quantities in stock and ready to ship in a day or two. So, any Best Buy loyalists who had been holding out until their preferred chain could avail them of the opportunity to ask Alexa to order them a pizza or a ride (to name just two of Amazon Echo's growing list of capabilities) can, at long last, do so.

Amazon acquired artificial intelligence start-up Orbeus last year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The tech giant allegedly bought the Californian image recognition firm in autumn 2015, according to a source familiar with the matter. Orbeus's website now greets visitors with a message saying it is no longer taking new customers. The domain name - 'Orb.us' - is also owned by a company subsidiary, Amazon Hostmaster. Its photo recognition technology is based on neural networks, and is available via consumer application PhotoTime.

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said his company is committed to playing a key role in the emerging market for artificial intelligence-based chat software, one week after the company's first Internet chat bot in the U.S. was so manipulated by users that it had to be pulled down within a day of its introduction. "It's a simple concept yet it's very powerful in its impact it is about taking the power of human language and applying it more pervasively in all our computing," Nadella said about the strategy the company has dubbed conversation as a platform. The CEO was speaking Wednesday at the company's Build conference for software developers in San Francisco. Later, in a keynote speech, Nadella will outline the company's strategy for conversation-based products working with bots, which are pieces of software that use artificial intelligence to automate or accomplish tasks, as well as tools for developers to create their own. Nadella has been trying to expand Microsoft's reach and influence in AI, emphasizing how the technology can augment products in the mobile and cloud-computing markets.

Switch chips have a very long technical and economic lives, considerably longer than that of a Xeon processor used in a server – something on the order of seven or eight years compared to three or four. As it turns out, the various GPUs used in Nvidia's Tesla accelerators look like they, too, will have very long technical and economic lives. Even after a new technology is introduced, sometimes the old one can be had at a much cheaper price and therefore continues to be a good price/performer even after it has been presumably obsoleted by an improved product. Its economic life outlives its technical life in this regard, and it is not obsoleted instantly (often to the frustration of its creator, which wants to sell the shiny new stuff). But sometimes this is in fact the plan.