Accenture has launched a new immersive engagement and investment program targeting emerging technology software startups to help fill strategic innovation gaps for the Global 2000. Called Project Spotlight, the exclusive Accenture Ventures program represents a new approach to engaging with the global software startup community. Beyond making capital investments, Project Spotlight will offer unprecedented access to Accenture's technology domain expertise and its enterprise clients. Startups will co-innovate with Accenture at its Innovation Hubs, Labs and Liquid Studios, working with subject matter experts to adapt their solutions to the enterprise market and scale faster and more effectively. Created by six-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO, Tom Lounibos, Project Spotlight seeks to transform the transactional nature of venture capital into an immersive engagement model. "For many startups, the most challenging part of bringing a solution to market isn't having a powerful idea or securing funding," said Lounibos, who is the managing director, Accenture Ventures and Project Spotlight lead.

Enterprises adopt artificial intelligence in an effort to positively impact their business performance. But the power of AI goes beyond business and can even change human experiences. This 21st century technology is serving as a driver and even impacting consumer services across a variety of industries, from retail, finance and beyond. The following client experiences serve as a gateway to better understand AI, which not only helps create a reaction, the technology can also help us act proactively in advance. Imagine a young couple who just became first-time parents and want the peace of mind that if anything happens, their new family member is protected.

In his session at 23rd International CloudEXPO, Raju Shreewastava, founder of Big Data Trunk, will provide a fun and simple way to introduce Machine Leaning to anyone and everyone. Together we will solve a machine learning problem and find an easy way to be able to do machine learning without even coding. He solved a machine learning problem and demonstrated an easy way to be able to do machine learning without even coding. Speaker Bio Raju Shreewastava is the founder of Big Data Trunk (www.BigDataTrunk.com), a Big Data Training and consulting firm with offices in the United States. He previously led the data warehouse/business intelligence and Big Data teams at Autodesk.

With digital video content creation going viral and assuming the bulk of Internet traffic, how can the deluge of video content be analyzed effectively to derive insights and ROI? After all, video is not only huge in size, but it is complex given various visual, audio and temporal elements. Video summarization (a mechanism for generating a short video summary via key frame analysis or video skimming) has become a popular research topic industry-wide and across academia. Video thumbnail generation and summarization has been developed for years, but deep learning and reinforcement learning is changing the landscape and emerging as the winner for optimal frame selection. Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are improving the quality, aesthetics and relevancy of the frames to represent the original videos.

Most of us already know that adopting new cloud applications can boost a business's productivity by enabling organizations to be more agile and ready to change course in our fast-moving and connected digital world. But the rapid adoption of cloud apps and services also brings with it profound security threats, including visibility and control challenges that aren't present in traditional on-premises environments. At the same time, the cloud - because of its interconnected, flexible and adaptable nature - can also provide new possibilities for addressing cloud security problems. By leveraging the power of the cloud with a data science and machine learning cloud-based solution, security and risk professionals can solve many of the traditional security challenges found in popular apps like Office 365, Google Drive, Salesforce and Box. In her session at 19th Cloud Expo, Deena Thomchick, Senior Director of Cloud Security at Symantec, detailed how cloud-based data science, machine learning, computational analysis and intelligent algorithms can work together to help to deliver truly intelligent and responsive security and compliance for the cloud.

Darktrace is the world's leading AI company for cyber security. Created by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, Darktrace's Enterprise Immune System is the first non-consumer application of machine learning to work at scale, across all network types, from physical, virtualized, and cloud, through to IoT and industrial control systems. Installed as a self-configuring cyber defense platform, Darktrace continuously learns what is'normal' for all devices and users, updating its understanding as the environment changes. By applying its unsupervised machine learning, Darktrace has identified previously unknown threats in over 7,000 networks, including zero-days, insider threats and subtle, stealthy attacks. With 700 employees in over 32 offices and dual headquarters in San Francisco and Cambridge UK, Darktrace was named one of the'World's Most Innovative Companies' by FastCompany and one of CNBC's Disruptor 50.

Download session slides Here In very short order, the term "Blockchain" has lost an incredible amount of meaning. With too many jumping on the bandwagon, the market is inundated with projects and use cases that miss the real potential of the technology. We have to begin removing Blockchain from the conversation and ground ourselves in the motivating principles of the technology itself; whether it is consumer privacy, data ownership, trust or even participation in the global economy, the world is faced with serious problems that this technology could ultimately help us in at least partially solving. But if we do not unpack what is real and what is not, we can lose sight of the potential. In this presentation, John Bates-who leads data science, machine learning and AI in the Adobe Analytics business unit-will present his 4-prong model of the general areas where Blockchain can have a real impact and the specific use cases where Adobe sees potential.

Today, commercial pricing success demands new ways of managing data. Pricing organizations are tasked with managing increasingly large and complex data sets coming from diverse sources that change rapidly. As a result, there is a failure to operationalize pricing strategy over a long-term horizon. Pricing organizations can no longer rely on spreadsheets, custom software tools, and empirical observation to properly manage the complexity and challenges on the road to creating sustained success. The good news is advancements in pricing software solutions can empower pricing organizations with new ways of exploiting their data to unlock substantial value.

Infosys and its local rivals in India are some the largest IT outsourcers on the planet, and definitely the biggest in any emerging market. If you include New Jersey-based Cognizant in the mix, cofounded by Lakshmi Narayanan from Tata Consultancy, then six of the biggest IT services companies in the world are run by Indians. As it stands, five of the largest IT consultancies call India home. That's more than China, more than Ireland and France, and only two less than the United States if you consider the companies whose outsourcing practice is at the core of their business, like IBM for instance. India's biggest IT outsourcer of course is Tata Consultancy Services, ranked #404 on the Forbes Global 2000 list.

But what does "data monetization" really mean, how do you do it, and more importantly, who in the organization owns the job of "data monetization"? The role of Chief Data Officer (CDO) would seem to be a godsend to answer the data monetization challenge. They should be the catalyst in helping organizations to become more effective at leveraging data and analytics to power the digital transformation. However, all is not well in the world of the CDO. Many organizations appoint a CDO with an Information Technology (IT) background – the same background and experience as the Chief Information Officer (CIO).