Predicting firm's failure is one of the most interesting subjects for investors and decision makers. In this paper, a bankruptcy prediction model is proposed based on Artificial Neural networks (ANN). Taking into consideration that the choice of v ariables to discriminate between bankrupt and non - bankrupt firms influences significantly the model's accuracy and considering the problem of local minima, we propose a hybrid ANN based on variables selection techniques. Moreover, we evolve the convergence of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by proposing a training algorithm based on an improved PSO and Simulated Annealing. A comparative performance study is reported, and the proposed hybrid model shows a high performance and convergence in the context of missing data.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Tangier, Morocco, Charity Wayua laughs as she recounts her journey to the city for a conference on technology and innovation. After starting her trip in Nairobi, Kenya, where she leads one of IBM's two research centers in Africa, she had to fly past her destination for a layover in Dubai, double back to Casablanca, and then take a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Tangier. What would have been a seven- to eight-hour direct flight was instead a nearly 24-hour odyssey. This is not unusual, she says. The hassle of traveling within the region isn't the only thing making things difficult for Africa's research community: the difficulty of traveling out of the region has often left its researchers out of the international conversation.

As the world descends into geopolitical competition, other powers increasingly challenge European countries' ability to defend their interests and values. Russia is willing to weaponise energy supplies, cyber capabilities, and disinformation; China invests strategically and uses state capitalism to skew the market; Turkey instrumentalises migration; Saudi Arabia leverages its energy resources. And the Trump administration is willing to exploit European dependence on the transatlantic security alliance and the dollar to achieve short-term policy goals. What unites these disparate powers is their unwillingness to separate the functioning of the global economy from political and security competition. The EU has the market power, defence spending, and diplomatic heft to end this vulnerability and restore sovereignty to its member states.

Emirates NBD will also use AWS data analytics, Internet of Things, Natural Language Processing, alongside other innovative technology as part of its continuing efforts to better engage with clients and simplify banking. A front runner in retail banking creation, Emirates NBD is working with AWS due to its wide and deep portfolio of cloud solutions and the increased security and controls Emirates NBD can reach from the cloud, and is continued to purchase AWS as its preferred supplier for machine learning workloads. With AWS, Emirates NBD will take additional advantage of AWS artificial intelligence and system learning solutions including Amazon SageMaker, a totally managed machine learning service for construction, training, and deploying system learning models to provide pertinent real-time banking experiences. To create a more profitable and customer centric banking expertise, Emirates NBD can also be leveraging Amazon Personalize, an AWS system learning service which allows the evolution of personalized recommendations to establish new personalized retail banking software. Among the first of those software is a personal finance manager which uses an automated, self learning system to deliver an extremely personalized banking experience to clients so as to predict what each individual client needs as well as match this with the most suitable solution.

With artificial intelligence expected to generate more than 2.3 million jobs by 2020, Morocco has begun to prepare its students for the future by opening a school dedicated to AI training. Rabat – As technology continues to be central in the world's vision for the future, the development of artificial intelligence (AI), the simulation of human intelligence by computers and machines, has become an increasingly important field in science. Meanwhile, Morocco, along with the rest of Africa, has largely failed to capitalize on this demand for AI research and development. However, all of this will change in the future, with the opening of a new school dedicated towards AI in Fez. In September, the Euromed University of Fez (UEMF) will open its doors to the Euromed School of Digital Engineering and Artificial Intelligence (EIDIA), a brand new center dedicated towards AI research, development, and education.

The current crop also includes applications of on-demand manufacturing, augmented reality, music-assisted learning, interactive video, and online music creation. The Aussie team got the nod for their knack at using AI to separate, classify and up-res audio "for the purpose of audio search, discovery, recommendation, personalization, and quality enhancement," which works with studio, UGC audio and, maybe, live mobile communication, a statement from Techstars Music reads. Software engineer and chief of Mawson and Popgun Stephen Phillips paid tribute to his fellow Brisbanites with a tweet. Two more AI startups from Mawson are ready for take off. Both Replica and SuperRes have joined the Techstars Music 2019 program in LA. White says she's "excited and super grateful" to be a member of Techstars' 2019 class of music-based startups.

OXFORD, England, April 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When Nepal suffered devastating twin earthquakes in 2015 that killed nearly 9,000 people, the government provided help for families whose homes had collapsed to rebuild. But tens of thousands of others with damaged homes that were still standing faced a tougher decision: Was it safe to make repairs? Or were they better off building a new, often smaller home at their own cost? Artificial intelligence (AI), it turned out, could help, said Elizabeth Hausler, a U.S.-based engineer and builder who works on creating affordable, disaster-resilient housing. In Nepal, many homes are variations on a standard design - rectangular, multi-storey and with similar windows, she said.

In 2017 Gartner predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) would benefit procurement and sourcing technology. That moment has arrived, according to Mike Quindazzi, managing director at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and top financial-tech influencer. "We're now in the golden age of AI, where advancements come from voluminous sets of data, new algorithms being created, computing power and the ability to do this in the cloud at scale," said Quindazzi. Procurement data has exploded because procurement has evolved into something called "intelligent spend management," which oversees all corporate purchasing processes including direct and indirect purchases, travel and external labor. Quindazzi cautions that while AI has many use cases in procurement, such as rating vendors, "there will always be a human at the end of AI processes, so there needs to be a sense of accountability."

January 31, 2019Disaster relief, remote-healthcare diagnostics, tracking rhino poachers, upping student achievement--each of these disparate activities could get a big boost from artificial intelligence (AI). A recent discussion paper from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), "Notes from the AI frontier: Applying AI for social good," lays out just how AI can help tackle some of the world's most challenging social problems, analyzing 160 use cases. The good news: about one-third are already being used today. Still, there's much more that can be done, both to implement these solutions and to fully understand the breadth of what they can do for social-good organizations. We gathered questions about this topic from our social-media audience around the globe for Michael Chui, an MGI partner based in McKinsey's San Francisco office and one of the report's authors.

The Viral Marketing is a relatively new form of marketing that exploits social networks to promote a brand, a product, etc. The idea behind it is to find a set of influencers on the network that can trigger a large cascade of propagation and adoptions. In this paper, we will introduce an evidential opinion-based influence maximization model for viral marketing. Besides, our approach tackles three opinions based scenarios for viral marketing in the real world. The first scenario concerns influencers who have a positive opinion about the product. The second scenario deals with influencers who have a positive opinion about the product and produce effects on users who also have a positive opinion. The third scenario involves influence users who have a positive opinion about the product and produce effects on the negative opinion of other users concerning the product in question. Next, we proposed six influence measures, two for each scenario. We also use an influence maximization model that the set of detected influencers for each scenario. Finally, we show the performance of the proposed model with each influence measure through some experiments conducted on a generated dataset and a real world dataset collected from Twitter.