Talis Capital has invested in Luminance. Luminance, of London, provides document analytics software for the legal industry. Investors include Invoke Capital and law firm Slaughter & May. London, 15 December 2016 – Luminance, a pioneer of artificial intelligence for the legal industry, has secured funding from Talis Capital, which values the company at over $20 million. Launched in September, with the backing of Invoke Capital and Magic Circle law firm Slaughter & May, demand for Luminance's product is growing rapidly, with the company recently completing its tenth data room project.

In the sci-fi film Ex Machina, reclusive inventor Nathan Bateman foresees a bleak future, telling the movie's protagonist Caleb that, "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa." When we don't understand something, we tend to fear it; which is one reason popular movies like Ex Machina and HBO's nail-biting new series Westworld like to imagine futures in which artificial intelligence plots to destroy humanity. Fortunately, AI is far more likely to recommend those titles to your Netflix queue than to result in a dystopian society out of a George Orwell novel. While technologies including Amazon's Alexa have been busy making people's lives outside of the workplace easier, bots were the big office story in 2016, helping companies handle routine tasks such as managing support tickets and streamlining workflows. In the coming years, machine learning will take on more of the non-routine work as well, ushering in the new era of artificial intelligence--one that looks to be far brighter than the future Hollywood typically envisions.

A Russian company has launched a programme that can identify a stranger among 300 million Twitter users in less than a second. The social media platform has responded to the new software, called "FindFace", saying it its use is in "violation" of its rules and it is taking the matter "very seriously". Trump'obviously aware' Russia behind election hacks, White House says Syria's Assad says Donald Trump will be Russia's'natural ally' Trump'obviously aware' Russia behind election hacks, White House says Syria's Assad says Donald Trump will be Russia's'natural ally' "We see lots of opportunities for Twitter users on the service," Artem Kukharenko, co-founder of NTechLab told BuzzFeed. "We think this is something many people will use," he added, claiming the technology could be used to reduce spam profiles. "Not in the US, but in other countries there is a real problem of politicians, reporters, finding that someone created a fake account for them. "I was involved back in Russia with scandals with a fake account posing as a politicians that tweeted something and created political scandal." he said. Christopher Weatherhead, Technologist at Privacy International said: "The software created by NTechLab highlights the ease to which cross-referencing profiles photos is possible.

In fact, 80 percent of businesses reported already incorporating or planning on adding chatbots by the year 2020. That's according to a study pulled together by Oracle, surveying more than 800 decision makers at companies in France, the Netherlands, South Africa and the U.K. Most were in the C-suite -- chief strategy officers and marketing officers; others were senior sales and marketing executives. They were asked about emerging technologies and whether they've already employed them or are interested in moving in a certain direction. In general, the survey found that these leaders are turning to focus on automation-related technologies, specifically implementing chatbots to enhance or fix issues around sales, marketing and customer service. Speaking of customer service, more than 40 percent of those executives said they think automation will improve that experience over the short and long haul.

Here are some story lines I don't want you to miss today. Donald Trump has chosen one of the most consistently conservative presidential cabinets in recent history -- one whose presumed members' views don't always align with what Trump promised on the campaign trail. In Washington circles, the biggest guessing game is how it will all play out. Somehow, you have to think tweeting is involved. We don't want to jinx it, but … all of California should be in for some rain today.

Over the summer, I spent a month at Stugan, a Swedish "game development acceleration camp". That may sound like a faintly sinister concept, but it was in fact stupidly idyllic. The eight-week event, organised by alumni from game publishers Rovio and King, took place in adorable red wooden cabins perched on a hill overlooking a lake – apparently called "Bjursen", although we just called it The Lake, because we couldn't pronounce anything correctly. While not working on our game development projects, we watched meteor showers from a nearby mountaintop, swam beneath the Northern Lights, and sat around a campfire getting sloshed on schnapps. The Stugan attendees were from all over the world, but we'd ended up in this tiny corner of Scandinavia, brought together by the one thing we shared: the desire to create and play video games. I turned up three weeks late, and already an outsider as the only journalist, but within a few days I felt like I'd been welcomed as one of the team.

Last week, I wrote about the development of co-working innovation spaces in South Africa as a strategy to encourage entrepreneurship. Innovation is seen as a key driver of job creation at a time when most African countries are facing a youth unemployment crisis. Research in computing, however, is tilting towards artificial intelligence (AI) that may be counterproductive to employment creation. Computing is slowly moving away from using elaborate instructions (codes) to execute functions to leveraging data and learning through algorithms that improve with experience to perform more complex activities that mimic human intelligence. There is growing fear that AI will in future eliminate most of the jobs that exist today. Google's Africa Internet Academy, which invited us to South Africa, is in the midst of emerging innovations.

The Abraaj Group has deployed RAVN Connect Enterprise to bring about long-term transformation of its approaches to knowledge management and firm-wide collaboration across 20 offices. The new solution enables Abraaj's employees to easily search and access both proprietary and commissioned knowledge sources via a single interface working in a seamless manner on its proprietary'Opera' platform. Additionally, the Knowledge Graph feature allows Abraaj to visualise and navigate the interrelationships between experts, content, investments, and investors in a way that was previously impossible, making rapid access to the relevant resource in a secure manner a reality. Ovais Naqvi, Managing Director - Head of Market Engagement at Abraaj, said: "Our primary goal here is to leverage knowledge to accelerate business and deal decision-making and to harness the collaborative power of a multi-geography growth markets organisation." "RAVN Connect is an important component in a differentiation we bring to our investors around how we share knowledge and get to more dynamic decisions on deal flow. Additionally, it helps us harness macro-economic, sectoral and functional knowledge flows seamlessly and is ultimately a major competitive advantage for us," he said.

Three years after CEO Jeff Bezos secured a massive dose of publicity with the announcement that Amazon was working on drone deliveries, that vision is a reality. First-ever #AmazonPrimeAir customer delivery is in the books. Check out the video: https://t.co/Xl8HiQMA1S Workers at a British fulfillment center are stuffing shoebox-sized packages--in one case with a Fire TV and some popcorn--and loading them into the belly of electric, quadcopter drones, which set off to the customer. The company claims the drones, guided by GPS and flying below 400 feet, can make deliveries within 30 minutes, from click to plop.

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Global Artificial Intelligence Market (2016 - 2022)" report to their offering. The global artificial intelligence market is estimated to reach USD 16,274.0 The report aims at estimating the size and future growth potential of the market across different segments such as technology, application, and region. With the rise in adoption of AI in the media & advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare sectors, the machine learning and natural language processing technologies are expected to play a key role in propelling the growth of the AI market in the next five years. Artificial intelligence (AI) could double annual economic growth rates within two decades by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine.