Cannes Lions, the glitzy celebration of all things advertising, had been set to take place next week. But when Covid-19 hit in the spring, advertising's biggest event of the year was canceled for 2020. But that hasn't stopped ad-tech firm Cognitiv from celebrating the festival's signature tipple.A tribute to HBO hit series Silicon Valley's Not Hotdog app, Cognitiv created its own Rosé/Not Rosé app to detect whether the drink in a user's hand is indeed rosé. The app, set to be released next week, draws on machine learning to pick out the beverage's light-pink hue--or lack thereof--from a user-submitted selfie.But while the app itself offers a bit of levity, the underlying programming was far from simple, Cognitiv CEO and co-founder Jeremy Fain told Adweek. "It's one thing to train a deep-learning algorithm to identify wine. It's totally another level to develop an algorithm that can accurately discern between rosé, red wine, white wine or water."

Now that artificial intelligence and machine learning have become increasingly common tools in a business' arsenal, it is equally important to have employees who are capable of using – or developing – such tools. Chief among them should be a data scientist: someone with the experience and ability necessary to work with structured and unstructured data, and build systems capable of mining that data to come up with actionable and useful insights. The exact responsibilities of a data scientist can vary depending on the type of organization they work for, which means that it's up to an individual business to determine what they are, and how they want to incorporate data science and machine learning into their company. In addition, data science is a relatively new field so, as a Forbes article put it, "large number[s] of data scientists are willing to apply yet few have the required experience." As careers in data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning grow increasingly lucrative, it is not unusual to see hordes of recent graduates looking for jobs in those fields. This, coupled with the dearth of data scientists with extensive job experience, means that for the time being, most companies will be hiring people who are either straight out of school or have limited work experience.

Everyone knows the answer: Data. All of these companies have managed to leverage the vast amounts of information they get from their multitude of users - whether it be their search habits, the posts they share, the products they buy, or the music they listen to - into major revenue streams. It's not just the fact that these companies have been able to gather data on millions (or billions, in the case of some of these companies); it's that those companies have managed to effectively utilize that data to better understand and market to their users. All of these companies are using artificial intelligence (or, more accurately, deep learning) to do this. Of course, it's important to note that you don't have to be a dominating enterprise like Amazon or Google to turn data into a competitive advantage.

Newswire) OurCrowd, the leading global equity crowdfunding platform, today announced the launch of Cognitiv, a specialized $100 million global fund focused on early-stage companies that leverage AI, deep-learning, IoT, robotics and digital manufacturing to become tomorrow's category leaders. Cognitiv is the 12th fund to launch for funding on OurCrowd's platform and will give investors access to approximately 20 companies, with initial investments in EquityX, KolGene and FreshKeep. Cognitiv is a direct result of the success of OurCrowd First, the first fund entry by OurCrowd, raising approximately $12 million, closing in May 2016. Cognitiv is led by three storied entrepreneurs, collectively responsible for creating value in the billions of dollars. Cognitiv's newest General Partner, Avi Reichental is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of 3D Systems, (NYSE:DDD) and brings decades of executive leadership in late stage global corporations.

Another legal tech startup coming out of the UK: Cognitiv is applying artificial intelligence to automate contract analysis and management, offering businesses a way to automate staying on top of legal risks, obligations and changing regulatory landscapes. Co-founder Vasilis Tsolis might therefore be forgiven for viewing Brexit as a sizable opportunity for his startup -- though he more tactfully describes it as a "legislative challenge that we can help out with". "There's going to be a lot of changes in legislation, there's going to be a lot of changes in regulation, and you really need to know what's going to happen to your contracts and if you need to do any changes on your legal documents or not. So it's going to be a huge challenge," he says of Brexit. "I think this is going to happen more and more often," he adds, pointing to another incoming EU regulation that will be upping businesses' compliance needs in the near future: aka the GDPR, coming into force (including in the UK) in May 2018.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is surging in ad/mar tech land. Or resurging, depending on how good your memory is. IBM continues to push Watson, and, in the run-up to their respective conferences, Salesforce and Oracle talked up their own AI initiatives. Also, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon banded together to create best practices around AI technologies. And startups like Adgorithms, Boomtrain, Cognitiv, Kenshoo, Lattice Engines, Rocket Fuel and numerous others continue to extol the virtues of their AI-powered applications.

The legal AI market has another new cognitive engine: UK-based Cognitiv, which is a system designed to review documents and contracts, while also cross-referencing them with the latest regulation in order to provide a compliance tool. Based in King Cross, London, Cogntiv is the brainchild of CEO Vasilis Tsolis and CTO Achilleas Michos. Artificial Lawyer had a chat with Tsolis about how the company came about, where it's headed and how he sees the legal AI market evolving. Vasilis Tsolis is an engineer, but also has a law degree. He says he found himself having to deal with a lot of procurement and contract review issues in his previous jobs.