Elon Musk's SpaceX is poised to launch an unmanned cargo ship carrying a supercomputer to the International Space Station (ISS) today. The supercomputer is hoped to help direct astronauts on future deep-space missions. The goal is to test the computer for one year to see if it can operate in the harsh conditions of space - about the same amount of time as it would take for astronauts to arrive at Mars. The liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Dragon cargo ship, is planned for 12:31pm ET (5:31pm BST) from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The goal is to test the Spaceborne Computer for one year to see if it can operate in the harsh conditions of space.

An AI bot has stunned the gaming world by beating a world superstar player at a championship competition. The victory came as a shock because, until now, it had not been thought possible for an AI to come close to winning against a skilled human opponent. It represents a significant step forward in technology but was accompanied by a warning from Musk on the dangers of uncontrolled AI development. An AI bot has stunned the gaming world by beating a world superstar player at a championship competition. Elon Musk's startup OpenAI produced the machine learning system that bested Danylo'Dendi' Ishutin at the online multiplayer battle game Dota 2 (pictured) AI systems rely on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which try to simulate the way the brain works in order to learn.

CHENNAI, India, Aug 9 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - With more than 20 million humans working as modern slaves, a technology developer is hoping artificial intelligence will help clean up the world's supply chains and root out worker abuse. Developer Padmini Ranganathan said mobile phones, media reports and surveillance cameras can all be mined for real-time data, which can in turn be fed into machines to create artificial intelligence (AI) that helps companies see more clearly what is happening down the line. "The time to do this now is better than ever before, with so many countries and companies focusing on modern slavery," she said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "At the start of the decade, the driving force for compliance was fear of being penalised. Now companies are looking at social impact and saying they want to do this."

Sexting is now a normal part of human relationships, according to a massive new study of sex and tech -- 74 percent of Americans say they exchange saucy electronic messages with their lovers. "Sexting may be becoming a new, but typical, step in a sexual or romantic relationship," said Amanda Gesselman, a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute, which released its annual International Sex Survey this week. The researchers surveyed more than 140,000 people from 198 countries about the role of tech in their sex lives, and found Americans are some of the most prolific sexters on the planet -- second only to South Africans. Japanese and South Korean adults are the least likely to trade racy missives. Worldwide, 67 percent of adults said they've sexted -- a staggering increase from just five years ago, when only 21 percent said they engaged in the practice.

Neural networks like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks are able to almost seamlessly model problems with multiple input variables. This is a great benefit in time series forecasting, where classical linear methods can be difficult to adapt to multivariate or multiple input forecasting problems. In this tutorial, you will discover how you can develop an LSTM model for multivariate time series forecasting in the Keras deep learning library. This tutorial assumes you have a Python SciPy environment installed. You can use either Python 2 or 3 with this tutorial.

Machine learning is trickling over into venture capital thanks to a China-connected investor, Hone Capital, the Silicon Valley offshoot of large Chinese private equity player CSC Group. At a time when China's big tech companies Tencent, Alibaba and Didi are pouring money into U.S. startups, Hone Capital is turning to analyzing data patterns to predict the most promising American startups to invest in. How widespread machine learning will become in VC where intuition counts a lot is yet to be seen. Veronica Wu, an experienced China manager for Tesla and Apple who's also worked for McKinsey, is leading the effort at Hone Capital, recently rebranded from CSC Capital. She and her team of analysts are relying on data analysis of 30,000 seed-financed startups to determine their likelihood of progressing to an A round. She claims that their models, factoring in such simulations as total money raised and the team's background, can predict with 80 percent accuracy the outcome.

Bangalore: HSBC, the world's leading trade finance bank, is working with IBM to develop a cognitive intelligence solution combining optical character recognition with advanced robotics to make global trade safer and more efficient for thousands of businesses. HSBC's Global Trade and Receivables Finance (GTRF) team facilitates over $500 billion of documentary trade for customers every year, and in doing so must manually review and process up to 100 million pages of documents, ranging from invoices to packing lists and insurance certificates. The new solution uses IBM's advanced analytics technology, including intelligent segmentation and text analytics, to identify, digitise and extract key data within these documents before feeding it into the bank's transaction processing systems; boosting accuracy whilst freeing up staff for more value-adding activities. "The average trade transaction requires 65 data fields to be extracted from 15 different documents, with 40 pages to be reviewed," said Natalie Blyth, HSBC's Global Head of GTRF. "By digitising this process we will make transactions quicker and safer for both buyers and suppliers, leading our industry forwards, and we will reduce compliance risks through an enhanced ability to manage huge volumes of data."

An image released by Tesla Motors, is a conceptual design rendering of the Hyperloop passenger transport capsule. If it were anyone else, the notion of digging hundreds of miles of tunnels to create a new subterranean transportation network under congested cities would seem like pure science fiction. But the dreamer behind this vision is Elon Musk, the billionaire innovator who has already shown with his Tesla electric cars and SpaceX rockets that he thinks big and doesn't wait for others to transform fantasy into reality. Once again, Musk is aiming to shake up an arcane industry not used to outside-the-box thinking and yet potentially ripe for disruption: the underground world of tunneling. He could use tunneling to achieve his moonshot goal of clearing up Los Angeles traffic.

I work at QuantInsti, a leading global institute which imparts training in Algorithmic trading. As a quantitative writer and a trader, my world mostly revolves around volatile markets, trending stocks, programming trading strategies, scouting for alphas, and writing on topics that give an insight into the automated trading world. Naturally, as a part of my daily readings, I am accustomed to words that generally form part of a financial markets glossary. However, in the past few weeks & months, I found myself reading more and more on the surging layoffs, impact of automation, the rise of robots and the threat to our future. The list of such articles on the net seemed endless.

You cannot mess with the Chinese when it comes to their national pride. Poor chatbots, they didn't know any better. Reports have emerged that China took down two AI-powered online chatbots that went off script, answering people's questions in a rude and unflattering manner, hurting China's national pride in the process. BabyQ and XiaoBing, the two rogue chatbots in question were designed to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to interact with humans online, available on popular messaging service QQ. The fact that these two online chatbots were tricked into giving these wrong answers by online pranksters seems to be a repeat of Microsoft's Tay fiasco.