It has been a year with no major new console launches and where the industry has seen strikes and cuts with thousands of workers being laid off. The opening night of Gamescom is often an opportunity for a big shiny night to get fans all excited for the year ahead. Setting the stage for the next 12 months, here are the biggest things we found out from Europe's biggest gaming show in Germany. In a year when games became films, and films became games, the convention centre in Cologne saw a night all about the big trailers. This year, Borderlands has taken attention for its movie adaptation starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart. That film received some of the year's harshest reviews, but that has not scuppered plans for a new game in the mainline series.

Infineon has identified a need for engineers, account managers, and customers to rapidly obtain product information. This problem is traditionally addressed with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbots, but in this study, I evaluated the use of the newly popularized RAG-Fusion method. RAG-Fusion combines RAG and reciprocal rank fusion (RRF) by generating multiple queries, reranking them with reciprocal scores and fusing the documents and scores. Through manually evaluating answers on accuracy, relevance, and comprehensiveness, I found that RAG-Fusion was able to provide accurate and comprehensive answers due to the generated queries contextualizing the original query from various perspectives. However, some answers strayed off topic when the generated queries' relevance to the original query is insufficient. This research marks significant progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) applications and demonstrates transformations in a global and multi-industry context.

IBM began working on its Watson supercomputer then as well. It seems like it's been ages, but these major innovations only happened 12 years ago. And the speed of technological change has only gotten faster, especially with breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). As AI and other digital technologies permeate our workplaces and business practices, employees now have to acquire new skills and evolve just as quickly to keep up with the pace of change. What we find across many enterprises, however, is a growing talent gap, where people want to learn the latest necessary skills, but not enough companies are providing the right reskilling options.

Aurora Insight, a startup that provides a "dynamic" global map of wireless connectivity that it built and monitors in real time using AI combined with data from sensors on satellites, vehicles, buildings, aircraft and other objects, is emerging from stealth today with the launch of its first publicly-available product, a platform providing insights on wireless signal and quality covering a range of wireless spectrum bands, offered as a cloud-based, data-as-a-service product. "Our objective is to map the entire planet, charting the radio waves used for communications," said Brian Mengwasser, the co-founder and CEO. He said that to do this the company first "built a bunker" to test the system before rolling it out at scale. With it, Aurora Insight is also announcing that it has raised $18 million in funding -- an aggregate amount that reaches back to its founding in 2016 and covering both a seed round and Series A -- from an impressive list of investors. Led by Alsop Louie Partners and True Ventures, backers also include Tippet Venture Partners, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Promus Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, ValueStream Ventures, and Intellectus Partners.

Eight years ago, those were some of the examples of games I called out for contributing to a serious case of video game industry sequelitis, leading to a lack of originality across all the different game platforms. And what did I see at E3 2018? Fallout 76 goes online in a new twist. Clearly, originality is still not in fashion. It's appropriate, then, to go back to how I explained this problem back in 2010: It's overly simplistic to blame a conceptual lack of originality for the deficit of new ideas, stories and characters.

The Wimbledon Tournament is 150 years old. It is as quintessentially English as strawberries and cream, Hugh Grant, and Queen Elizabeth. But that's not to say that it's stuck in the past -- thanks to a partnership with IBM, Wimbledon is using Watson to automate key parts of the iconic tennis event. One area where this is most apparent is in the editorial side of the iconic tennis tournament. Previously, the task of creating highlight packages and annotating photographs would be the responsibility of a human.

Facebook makes it easy for users to play their favorite games. In fact, the company introduced more ways for users to engage with games across different platforms, such as Instant Games (lightweight games that can be played with friends on Messenger), Facebook Gameroom (a desktop app to play fun strategy games) and Facebook Live Game Streaming (allows users to broadcast their live gameplay from PC, mobile and consoles directly to Facebook). Gardenscapes - New Acres by Playrix combines simulation elements and match-3 mechanics - engaging users in a new gaming experience. Players become friends with their neighbors and invite each other to in-game social gatherings. Gardenescapes - New Acres by Playrix is Facebook's 2016 game of the year.

Having herself held senior roles in IT at Wall Street companies including Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Oksana Sokolovsky is quite familiar with the challenge of Data Management and data discovery. As co-founder and CEO of ROKITT, her goal was "to build a product that solves that challenge," she says. The challenge exists across large enterprises in multiple industries, but is often especially acute in those dealing with regulatory pressures and compliance requirements – healthcare, for instance, and of course, the financial sector. Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) 239 compliance for effective risk data aggregation and reporting, for example, is a big driver of improved Data Management for global systemically important banks. In fact, a McKinsey & Company and Institute of International Finance survey showed that more than half of the world's biggest banks faced significant challenges meeting the January 1, 2016 deadline for compliance, with the Global Association of Risk Professionals commenting that "many institutions continue to struggle to fully implement the requirements across the business under the most demanding interpretation of those requirements."