When Isoken Igbinedion was 10 years old, she had a "very dangerous encounter" with chemical relaxers that caused her natural hair to fall out. She spent the next 20 years using extensions to give her hair a chance to regrow. And in that time, she realized how much friction there was in the hair products and services market. "In those 20 years, we've seen very little innovation used to improve the hair buying and installation process for customers or the manufacturing process," says Igbinedion, 30. And so the vision for Parfait came into focus, a direct-to-consumer platform leveraging AI to better customize wigs from head size to the tint of the lace front.

Created in 1995 by the Engineering Faculty of the University of Mons, the research innovation center of Multitel has adopted IBM Watson Machine Learning Accelerator to harness the power of deep learning (DL) and tackle some of the biggest challenges of our time. Jean-Yves Parfait, AI Team Leader at Multitel and Franz Bourlet, Power Systems Expert at IBM, explain why ML is an added-value for industrial players. F. Bourlet, IBM: Arthur Samuel is one of the pioneers of machine learning. While working at IBM, Arthur Samuel wrote a Checker's playing program on IBM's first commercial computer 701. IBM Research has been exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies and techniques for decades.