Omega for Enterprise

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Impresarios of hip hop have long spawned businesses that capitalize on their personal brand. Jay-Z publishes music under his Roc Nation brand, Sean “Brother Love” Combs peddles vodka under the Cîroc label, Lil Wayne joins the fun with Bogey Cigars, his Cigar company.

So it isn’t too surprising that will.i.am created a tech company called i.am+ which began as a purveyor of wearable tech. What is surprising is the fact that he is now leading the company into the enterprise B2B space with Omega for Enterprise, a virtual assistant for the office:

So will Omega carry the same moxy in the office as Alexa, Siri, and OK Google do in the home? It’s too early to tell really. Hip hop and enterprise IT seem to be strange bedfellows but who knows–maybe Omega will get it started in the office, finally.

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Introduction to Machine Learning

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Machine learning is a system of algorithms aimed at detecting patterns in big data and then learning from those patterns without being explicitly programmed by a human operator. These algorithms take a probabilistic, rather than a deterministic, approach to accomplishing goals. Let’s take a quick look at what that means by way of example:

Deterministic Approach

A human programs software in no uncertain terms to remind him to bring his umbrella to work if the chance of precipitation in his area is greater than 40%:

//Get the weather forecast
var chanceOfRain = myWeatherForecast().precipitationChance;

//Send the message
if(chanceOfRain > 40%){
    sendEmail("Bring your umbrella to work!");
}

This approach is deterministic because the outcome is predetermined by the author of the code in no uncertain terms.

Probabilistic (Machine Learning) Approach

An algorithm crawls big datasets such as tweets about the weather, weather news, forecasts, umbrella sales, and supervised feedback (we’ll get to that later) such as, “did you bring an umbrella to work today?”:

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