To further strengthen our commitment to providing industry-leading coverage of data technology, VentureBeat is excited to welcome Andrew Brust and Tony Baer as regular contributors. Is there a better way to build a search tool that produces more highly relevant results than just using keyword-based techniques? That's one of the many questions that former Google staffers Amr Awadallah (CEO), Amin Ahmad (CTO) and Tallat Shafaat (chief architect) wanted to solve with their new startup, which has been in stealth under the name ZIR AI. Today, ZIR AI is emerging from stealth under the name Vectara, with the help of $20 million in seed funding, and availability of the company's neural search-as-a-service technology. The foundational premise of Vectara is that artificial intelligence (AI)-based large language models (LLMs) combined with natural language processing (NLP), data integration pipelines and vector techniques can create a neural network that is useful for multiple use cases, including search.

As email continues to be not only an important means of communication but also an official record of information and a tool for managing tasks, schedules, and collaborations, making sense of everything moving in and out of our inboxes will only get more difficult. The good news is there's a method to the madness of staying on top of your email, and Microsoft researchers are drawing on this behavior to create tools to support users. Two teams working in the space will be presenting papers at this year's ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining February 11–15 in Melbourne, Australia. "Identifying the emails you need to pay attention to is a challenging task," says Partner Researcher and Research Manager Ryen White of Microsoft Research, who manages a team of about a dozen scientists and engineers and typically receives 100 to 200 emails a day. "Right now, we end up doing a lot of that on our own."

Businesses who begin exploring artificial intelligence (AI) technology will soon become aware that an affordable and relatively easy solution exists for addressing specific problems: leveraging cloud-based AI. Instead of installing new software at considerable expense, or beginning the lengthy process of developing your own solution, today your company, or you as an individual, can access APIs readily made in the cloud to do your heavy lifting for you. It comes as no surprise that three of the big names in cloud-based AI are Google (Google Cloud), Amazon (AWS cloud), and Microsoft (Azure). They all offer AI platforms where you can access similar things: machine learning (ML) toolkits for your natural language processing (NLP), image recognition, and data crawling needs, as well as much more. It is a common difficulty when choosing between the product offerings of the big three tech giants: they all offer a similar service, and all of them appear to be of a high quality.

The high-powered knowledge event was held at Atlantis The Palm on 19 November 2017, and brought together the UAE's smartest data professionals to explore new applications for machine learning and artificial intelligence. The speaker roster included decision-makers from Cloudera, AXA Gulf, DU Telecom, Etihad Airways, Microsoft and Wipro. Machine learning is helping companies detect fraud, predict their customers' behaviour, analyse consumer preferences to suggest products, and offer proactive customer support. Combined with big data, machine learning algorithms are sifting through terabytes of data to predict market movements and help derive competitive advantage. "We are very pleased to be able to bring such a high-quality cohort of data professionals and people on the cutting edge of technology to the same platform with the Cloudera Sessions Dubai 2017. These sessions are designed to help organisations harness the power of data to march ahead, and keep pace with the ideals set by Dubai and the UAE as they evolve smart government services. Data is widely recognised as one of the world's most valuable resources for organisations, yet most organisations struggle to make meaningful sense of it. At Cloudera, we help clients use machine learning to turn stagnant data pools into powerful predictions and market insights that power business success," said Cloudera co-founder and chief technology officer, Dr. Amr Awadallah.