WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.

In May, J.P. Morgan’s quantitative investing and derivatives strategy team, issued the most comprehensive report ever on big data and machine learning in financial services.
Titled, ‘Big Data and AI Strategies’ and subheaded, ‘Machine Learning and Alternative Data Approach to Investing’, the report says that machine learning will become crucial to the future functioning of markets. Analysts, portfolio managers, traders and chief investment officers all need to become familiar with machine learning techniques. If they don’t they’ll be left behind: traditional data sources like quarterly earnings and GDP figures will become increasingly irrelevant as managers using newer datasets and methods will be able to predict them in advance and to trade ahead of their release.

The AI Index is an open, not-for-profit project to track activity and progress in AI. It aspires to be a comprehensive resource of data and analysis for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists and others to rapidly develop intuitions about the complex field of AI.
AI is the new electricity, and is transforming multiple industries. The AI Index will help current generations track and navigate this societal transformations. It will also help future generations look back and understand the AI's rise.

Tech giants including Baidu and Google spent between $20B to $30B on AI in 2016, with 90% of this spent on R&D and deployment, and 10% on AI acquisitions. AI investment has turned into a race for patents and intellectual property (IP) among the world’s leading tech companies.

ARK Invest aims to identify large-scale investment opportunities resulting from technological change. We believe innovation is key to growth. From a broad spectrum of disruptive innovations, Big Ideas represents our annual breakout of technologies that we believe will accelerate significantly in the months ahead.

Have you looked at Google Trends? It’s pretty cool — you enter some keywords and see how Google Searches of that term vary through time. I thought — hey, I happen to have this arxiv-sanity database of 28,303 (arxiv) Machine Learning papers over the last 5 years, so why not do something similar and take a look at how Machine Learning research has evolved over the last 5 years?

• 70% of retail decision makers globally are ready to adopt the Internet of Things to improve customer experiences.
• 73% of retailers rate managing big data as important or business-critical to their operations.
• 78% of retailers say it is important or business-critical to integrate e-commerce and in-store experiences, so an omnichannel experience is delivered to every customer.
• 87% of retailers will deploy mobile point-of-sale (MPOS) devices by 2021, enabling them to scan and accept credit or debit payments anywhere in the store.
• 90% of retailers will implement buy online, pickup in store by 2021.

Machine learning is on the edge of revolutionizing those 12 sectors. Most leaders in those industries look at Machine Learning and see a non-stable, none viable technology in the short term.

A look at the most promising global startups working with artificial intelligence.

What does 2017 have in store for us? We asked the industry’s experts for their views on the future of web design trends.

1. Conversational interfaces
2. Machine learning
3. Emotionally intelligent design
4. Virtual reality
5. Location and context awareness
6. Micro-interactions
7. Colors
8. Cohesive experiences
9. Even more JavaScript!
10. Designed failure
11. Design sprints
12. Better collaboration across design and development
13. Merging of UX and service design
14. Facebook and Google as destinations for content
15. Credibility becomes king
16. Mass disruption to foundational Internet services
17. The rise of the diversity designer
18. Bonus: 2017 According to Jeffrey Zeldman

Based on Forrester’s analysis in its latest TechRadar report, here’s my list of the 10 hottest AI technologies.

Raffi Khatchadourian on Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher who asks whether inventing artificial intelligence will bring us utopia or destruction.

People hated 2016 so much that the year itself became a punchline. But for every grim reminder that things are amiss, we saw people fight for a better future.

As we pass 2.5bn smartphones on earth and head towards 5bn, and mobile moves from creation to deployment, the questions change. What's the state of the smartphone, machine learning and 'GAFA', and what can we build as we stand on the shoulders of giants?

Facebook AML director Joaquin Quiñonero Candela explains why the social network wants to teach you about AI.

At 213 pages, there's a ton of data, but here are our Top 3 takeaways.

1) The internet itself is seeing slowing growth. In the past two decades, the internet economy was affected by macroeconomic trends, but it was external issues like the housing crisis and the financial crisis that were driving the slowdown. Now it is global internet growth itself that is slowing down.

2) Typing text into a search bar is so last year. In five years, at least 50 percent of all searches are going to be either images or speech.

3) The home screen has acted as the de facto portal on mobile devices since the arrival of the iPhone and even before. Messaging apps, with context and time, have a chance to rival the home screen as the go-to place for interaction.