A few days ago my fellow Red Hatters Mario Fusco, Matteo Mortari, Mark Proctor, Donato Marrazzo and myself (Edson Tirelli) had the opportunity to attend Decision Camp 2019. Following the tradition from previous years, this is a conference focused on Decision Management and related topics, with an emphasis on practitioners, vendors and users of the technology. In other words, a 3-day conference that packs a lot of content, mostly technical and strategic. This year in particular the agenda was packed full of interesting and relevant topics, ranging from human centric topics (like coordination of collaborative decisions), to compelling use cases (like airport gate scheduling), to glimpses of what is coming on the DMN standard (like temporal reasoning and discussions about DMN 2.0). You can find a good review of all the presentations on Sandy Kemsley's blog.

Noah Gift is lecturer and consultant at UC Davis Graduate School of Management in the MSBA program. Professionally, Noah has approximately 20 years' experience programming in Python and is a member of the Python Software Foundation. He has worked for a variety of companies in roles ranging from CTO, general manager, consulting CTO, and cloud architect. Currently, he is consulting start-ups and other companies on machine learning and cloud architecture, and is doing CTO-level consulting via Noah Gift Consulting. He has published close to 100 technical publications including two books on subjects ranging from cloud machine learning to DevOps.

May Masoud is a Solution Specialist at SAS Canada, as part of the Data Sciences team. Leveraging her analytics background, she helps businesses visualize the potential of their data, and surface insights using modern data mining and machine learning techniques. With a Master of Business Analytics following a Bachelor in Statistics & Economics, May aims to create value at every step of the analytics lifecycle: data discovery, model build, model deployment, and business strategy. She has touched the analytics landscape in a variety of industries, whether it is oil production models for the energy sector or solving churn problems in the telecom industry. May's aim is to ubiquitize self-serve analytics and enable citizen data scientists.

Across many industries, innovators are looking at machine learning as a solution for bringing their organization to the next level of productivity. Many organizations have already adopted machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions and are reaping the rewards. In my experience working with retail companies, those that have implemented AI solutions have an overall greater awareness of business practices and have been more successful at making important and difficult decisions effectively. To operate successfully, retailers encounter and must make thousands of decisions every day, from creating a new product to its placement in a store and, ultimately, to protection of revenue through asset monitoring. There's a simple way to make sense of retail and consumer goods companies' data and enjoy the best business rewards, and it starts with understanding AI solutions. It can be used to help retailers make more effective business decisions.

With today's consumer AI tools at your fingertips, it may feel like you don't need a computer science degree to understand how artificial intelligence will bring value to the communications process. "Siri, find me the top food and wine reporters . . . Assuming that didn't work for you, it brings up a larger point: While you don't need a degree in computer science to build an AI strategy, it is important that PR pros don't sit on the sidelines and let an AI strategy get defined for them without their input. In this post, we'll go through some practical steps you and your team can do to get started. Today, most agency executives only seem to agree on what the limits of AI in PR will be. In a recent column on PRWeek, Ivan Ristic of Diffusion suggested that while AI might be good for data mining keywords across blogs and online publications to find trends for clients, it still won't replace relationships that make the industry go-round. "A bot can't lay claim to emotional intelligence, a cornerstone of all PR work.

From neural networks and machine learning automation to virtual assistants and human-like robots, artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses many different things. But when AI is envisioned, many people automatically think of pure AI -- software that has equal or superior cognitive capabilities to the humans who created it. This can conjure images of an android butler announcing "dinner is served" or a robot-like Rosie from the Jetsons cleaning the house or helping Junior with his homework. For other people, pure AI can conjure frightening images of a future society controlled by Terminator-like robots that have too much knowledge and power. As with all unknowns, the future vision of an AI-driven world can be both exciting and scary, yet it is a world that we're heading toward nevertheless.

From neural networks and machine learning automation to virtual assistants and human-like robots, artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses many different things. But when AI is envisioned, many people automatically think of pure AI -- software that has equal or superior cognitive capabilities to the humans who created it. This can conjure images of an android butler announcing "dinner is served" or a robot-like Rosie from the Jetsons cleaning the house or helping Junior with his homework. For other people, pure AI can conjure frightening images of a future society controlled by Terminator-like robots that have too much knowledge and power. As with all unknowns, the future vision of an AI-driven world can be both exciting and scary, yet it is a world that we're heading toward nevertheless.

Digital business has hastened the interest in Artificial Intelligence that CIOs are rushing to build an AI strategy and investment plan. AI has the potential to influence their business and competitive landscape. Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst, Forrester suggests CIOs the step beyond to adopt the new buzzword Artificial Intelligence, which can probably transform the traditional business models and processes. Joseph categorized AI into two segments – Pure AI and Pragmatic (or Narrow) AI. Pure AI is the science fiction usually seen in movies, it is the ability of computing system to perform advance intellectual tasks that human can do.

Since the appearance of the first primates on earth around 55 million years ago, the brain evolution has progressed following a rather flat linear progression. Then, around 2 million years ago, while the evolutionary line leading to hominins finally became distinct and the Homo Habilis was walking its first steps, the growth rate of its cranial capacity suddenly began to increase exponentially from around 500cm3 to 1.330cm3 of the modern human brain. Along with its growth in size, brain kept increasing in the number of neurons it contained: from an estimated 40 to 50 billion neurons for Homo Habilis to the 86 billion of a modern adult human. And neurons are heavily involved in determining general information processing capacity (IPC), as reflected by general intelligence. The new'extra' portion of the brain that our ancestors gained, the neocortex, together with the high availability of neurons, is what makes us so special by giving us extraordinary cognitive abilities including feelings, language, thinking, planning, and personality.

Pragmatic AI will help you solve real-world problems with contemporary machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing tools. Noah Gift demystifies all the concepts and tools you need to get results--even if you don't have a strong background in math or data science. Gift illuminates powerful off-the-shelf cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and demonstrates proven techniques using the Python data science ecosystem. His workflows and examples help you streamline and simplify every step, from deployment to production, and build exceptionally scalable solutions. As you learn how machine language (ML) solutions work, you'll gain a more intuitive understanding of what you can achieve with them and how to maximize their value.