Uber is making an aggressive drive into meal delivery, backed by a wave of staff recruitment, with the U.S. tech heavyweight gearing up to enter at least 22 new countries and take on local rivals. In a measure of rising ambition beyond its taxi business, Uber will begin delivering meals in Amsterdam on Thursday just as Dutch market leader Takeaway.com And according to current job listings on Uber and other recruiting sites - for about 150 roles ranging from general managers and sales staff to bike couriers - UberEats is planning to enter at least 22 new countries across the world in the near future. That is on top of the six countries where it already operates. Uber is making an aggressive drive into meal delivery, backed by a wave of staff recruitment, with the U.S. tech heavyweight gearing up to enter at least 22 new countries and take on local rivals Download the UberEATS app and add your delivery address.

This post is by Herain Oberoi, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft. Just over a year ago, we announced the Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite with the goal of helping customers use Big Data, Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning technologies in the cloud to derive insights, predict outcomes and prescribe actions based on their data. Cortana Intelligence provides an end to end set of cloud services and pre-configured solutions to enable line of business departments such as Sales, Marketing, Finance, Operations and more to accelerate their digital transformation projects. A year into the release, Cortana Intelligence has had big impact on customers across healthcare, retail, manufacturing, financial services and government and other industries. The range of creative solutions that our customers have come up with, to address their business needs, has been very impressive.

Ben Robinson, chief strategy & marketing officer at banking software firm Temenos, explains how the future of finance will be shaped by artificial technology. Google's DeepMind triumph this year over one of the world's highest ranked champions at Go is a sign: computers with artificial intelligence (AI) are learning how to outperform us. If computers can learn to beat us at a game, why not at things that we can't afford to get wrong – medical diagnostics, risk analysis, legal and investment advice? And what effect over time – say 20 years – will this have on the way a host of services, such as banking, are delivered? "Service will be all about data and algorithms," David Brear, co-founder and CEO at 11:FS recently suggested.

The literature on judgment aggregation is moving from studying impossibility results regarding aggregation rules towards studying specific judgment aggregation rules. Here we give a structured list of most rules that have been proposed and studied recently in the literature, together with various properties of such rules. We first focus on the majority-preservation property, which generalizes Condorcet-consistency, and identify which of the rules satisfy it. We study the inclusion relationships that hold between the rules. Finally, we consider two forms of unanimity, monotonicity, homogeneity, and reinforcement, and we identify which of the rules satisfy these properties.

Taban Deng Gai, who is now first vice president of South Sudan, speaks to reporters in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa on Jan. 8, 2014. In an interview airing on Monday's PBS NewsHour, South Sudan Vice President Taban Deng Gai responded to a report that the country's top leaders were profiting off the five-year conflict by saying it's under investigation, but the report might be false. Human rights group The Sentry this month released the results of a two-year investigation that found South Sudanese politicians were spending international aid on mansions and fancy cars, and giving expensive contracts to family members. "They say that my president, for example, they accuse him of having a house in one of the suburbs of Nairobi city. I don't think a crime for a president -- a sitting president for more than 10 years" to have a house there, Deng told PBS NewsHour Weekend anchor Hari Sreenivasan.

Healthtech, Fintech and AI dominated Techstars London Demo day today in London. At a packed venue (the famous Royal Institution, no less) the teams demo'd their products in short pitches. Here is a run-down of the teams, with some more details of those that stood out. You can watch a Facebook Live recording of the demos here. Didimo They say: "Didimo creates Virtual Avatars ready to be animated with one photo."

The pascal visual object classes (voc) challenge.

Accessing data for investment decisions on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors can be challenging. Will artificial intelligence (AI) come to the rescue? Responsible investing covers a multitude of issues and risks -- from regulatory, social and cultural issues through to product liabilities, political risk and intellectual property matters to name just a few. Register now -- ESG webinar 28 Sep 2016: Can FinTech and AI solve the ESG data puzzle? The data generated are often unstructured but still need to be processed in real-time to be effective.

Public perception of A.I. and robots has changed often in the last 100 years. A.I. robots have been represented in pop culture as both friendly helpers like Wall-E, and sentient computer killers like HAL 9000. But now that actual homes and automobiles run on smart technology, it's no longer just pop culture. As robots are starting to look an awful lot like humans, science fiction is starting to look a lot less like fiction. If true A.I. (i.e. a machine/robot as smart and with behavior capabilities as skillful and flexible as ours) becomes a reality, is a world where humans have been replaced as dominant species nigh?