Banks around the world are being confronted with a record number of regulations, and those falling short of institutional obligations are paying a high price for their errors. In response, major financial institutions are grasping big data solutions in a bid to comply with often dense regulations and reduce regulatory breaches. "Considering many banks have grown organically, often via merger and acquisition, their data is not always consistent and well organised," according to James Arnett, a partner at business and technology consulting firm Capco. Mr Arnett believes that new tools can be created through the application of data analytics, which will transform banks compliance programmes from manual, non-scalable projects into lower-cost and automated processes. "There is a real opportunity for banking clients to embrace data analytics to answer the underlying theme of regulation strategically rather than to treat each regulation as a'tick-the-box' exercise," he says.

Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American's, Science Talk, posted on November 10, 2015. A short episode today for which I'll turn it over now to Scientific American's associate tech editor, Larry Greenemeier. Larry Greenemeier: Computers have always been good at doing things that are really complicated for us humans. On the other hand, computers have a really hard time recognizing a particular voice or face in a crowd; something most kids learn to do before they're even out of diapers. But things are changing fast. Over the next decade or so, machines will more easily mimic inherently human abilities.

We study the statistical limits of both detecting and estimating a rank-one deformation of a symmetric random Gaussian tensor. We establish upper and lower bounds on the critical signal-to-noise ratio, under a variety of priors for the planted vector: (i) a uniformly sampled unit vector, (ii) i.i.d. $\pm 1$ entries, and (iii) a sparse vector where a constant fraction $\rho$ of entries are i.i.d. $\pm 1$ and the rest are zero. For each of these cases, our upper and lower bounds match up to a $1+o(1)$ factor as the order $d$ of the tensor becomes large. For sparse signals (iii), our bounds are also asymptotically tight in the sparse limit $\rho \to 0$ for any fixed $d$ (including the $d=2$ case of sparse PCA). Our upper bounds for (i) demonstrate a phenomenon reminiscent of the work of Baik, Ben Arous and P\'ech\'e: an `eigenvalue' of a perturbed tensor emerges from the bulk at a strictly lower signal-to-noise ratio than when the perturbation itself exceeds the bulk; we quantify the size of this effect. We also provide some general results for larger classes of priors. In particular, the large $d$ asymptotics of the threshold location differs between problems with discrete priors versus continuous priors. Finally, for priors (i) and (ii) we carry out the replica prediction from statistical physics, which is conjectured to give the exact information-theoretic threshold for any fixed $d$. Of independent interest, we introduce a new improvement to the second moment method for contiguity, on which our lower bounds are based. Our technique conditions away from rare `bad' events that depend on interactions between the signal and noise. This enables us to close $\sqrt{2}$-factor gaps present in several previous works.

Welcome to the second in a new series of brief reports. Every Monday, we might look back at last week; look ahead to this week; share a few thoughts (our own or others); or discuss anything that catches our eye. Anything goes, so here goes. Last week I was in Hong Kong, but that region has probably been discussed enough for the moment. As part of that trip there was the 2017 StartmeupHK Festival, which produced a few interesting points from a presentation and a panel discussion.

Corporate venture capital (CVC) is an investment by a corporate (fund) into external startups in order to make a financial return or to gain a competitive advantage. CVC is a polarizing subject and opinions are divided. Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures believes that it's evil and corporates should not invest in startups but simply buy them. While Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz on the other hand is co-investing with corporations such as General Electric. Whatever the opinions are, fact is that CVC is on the rise, also in the old continent.

The number of people defrauded in the UK by online dating scams reached a record high in 2016, the Victoria Derbyshire programme has learned. According to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, there were 3,889 victims of so-called romance fraud last year, who handed over a record £39m. Action Fraud, the UK's cyber-crime reporting centre, says it receives more than 350 reports of such scams a month. One woman who lost more than £300,000 says she felt emotionally "brutalised". Nancy - not her real name - is 47, and a single mother from North Yorkshire, who runs her own business.

DAVOS, Switzerland In this Swiss Alps town where the global elite have gathered to debate the world's problems, there seems to be little room on the radar for Africa, a continent of over a billion people where a commodity-fueled growth boom has soured with a vengeance.

SANAA/ADEN – Suspected U.S. drone strikes have killed three alleged al-Qaida operatives in Yemen's southwestern Bayda province, security and tribal officials said, the first such killings reported in the country since Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency Friday. The two Saturday strikes killed Abu Anis al-Abi, an area field commander, and two others, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release the information to journalists. U.S. drone strikes against suspected al-Qaida targets have been commonplace in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, as a retaliatory measure against the group. The use of unmanned aircraft as well as airstrikes in the Arab world's poorest country rose dramatically under President Barack Obama, with data from the Britain-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism showing spikes in attacks, especially in 2012 and 2016. On Thursday, U.S. intelligence officials said as many as 117 civilians had been killed in drone and other counterterror attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere during Obama's presidency.

In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens. Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India and Uganda have all shut off internet access when politically beneficial to their ruling parties. Nations like Singapore, Russia and China all exert outsized control over the structure and function of their national networks, often relying on a mix of political, technical and social schemes to control the flow of information within their digital borders. The effects of these policies are self-evident.

The internet was supposed to become an overwhelming democratizing force against illiberal administrations. It was supposed to open repressed citizens eyes, expose them to new democratic ideals and help them rise up against their authoritarian governments in declaring their basic human rights. It was supposed to be inherently resistant to centralized control. In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens.