Jennifer Zhu Scott is the co-founder and principal of Radian Blockchain Ventures and Radian Partners, focusing on private investment in the Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and renewable energy sectors. Prior, she was head of business development and strategy in APAC for Thomson Reuters and led the firm's speech-to-text, deep search, and video-indexing project. She co-founded one of the first education companies in China and exited before moving to UK as a senior advisor to the education subsidiary of Daily Mail & General Trust. How is Blockchain technology currently applied? First of all, I think we should demystify it. The Blockchain essentially is a decentralised database with a variety of applications, but not universal applications.

Bengaluru: Last year, for the first time ever, an international beauty contest was judged by machines. Thousands of people from across the world submitted their photos to Beauty.AI, hoping that their faces would be selected by an advanced algorithm free of human biases, in the process accurately defining what constitutes human beauty. In preparation, the algorithm had studied hundreds of images of past beauty contests, training itself to recognize human beauty based on the winners. But what was supposed to be a breakthrough moment that would showcase the potential of modern self-learning, artificially intelligent algorithms rapidly turned into an embarrassment for the creators of Beauty.

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been sued by a major investor claiming he fraudulently concealed serious issues with the company, and sought power over the ride-for-hire firm "for his own selfish ends". According to a complaint filed by Benchmark Capital Partners in a Delaware court, Mr Kalanick - who stepped down as CEO of the company earlier this year - "fraudulently obtained control" of seats on Uber's board of directors by covering up "gross mismanagement and other misconduct." The examples listed offer a neat summation of the scandals and legal fights that have beset the Silicon Valley giant and links Mr Kalanick to all of them, arguing that he was aware of encroaching trouble but did not disclose that to investors. They include: a now-fired executive who sought to obtain the medical records of a woman who was raped by an Uber driver in India; a controversial program known was "Greyball," first revealed by the New York Times, that was used to elude municipal officials in cities where Uber operated; a "pervasive culture of gender discrimination and sexual harassment" that has illuminated overarching issues with sexism in the tech industry and helped precipitate Mr Kalanick's departure; and an ongoing lawsuit in which Waymo, the self-driving car division of Google, claims Uber stole trade secrets. By seeking to create three new board seats despite those corporate conflagrations, the lawsuit alleges that Mr Kalanick retained his leverage over the board of directors and guaranteed himself "an outsized role in Uber's strategic direction even if forced to resign as CEO".

Travis Kalanick is being sued by one of Uber's largest investors, Benchmark Capital, which accuses the former chief executive of engaging in fraud in order to "increase his power over Uber for his own selfish ends". The Benchmark complaint exposes an ugly battle for power at the top of the nearly $70bn startup, which has been buffeted from crisis to crisis all year and is still searching for a replacement for Kalanick. The suit, filed on Thursday in Delaware Chancery court and first revealed by Axios, seeks to remove Kalanick from Uber's board of directors and bar him from interfering with Uber's business affairs. It demands redress for the alleged "fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and breaches of contractual obligations" perpetrated by Kalanick. The former CEO has hit back at the lawsuit, saying through a spokesperson that the case against him was "completely without merit and riddled with lies and false allegations".

So what does this have to do with machine learning? Well, it turns out that machine learning algorithms are not that much different from our friend Doge: they often run the risk of over-extrapolating or over-interpolating from the data that they are trained on. There is a very delicate balancing act when machine learning algorithms try to predict things. On the one hand, we want our algorithm to model the training data very closely, otherwise we'll miss relevant features and interesting trends. However, on the other hand we don't want our model to fit too closely, and risk over-interpreting every outlier and irregularity. The Fukushima power plant disaster is a devastating example of overfitting. When designing the power plant, engineers had to determine how often earthquakes would occur.

Uber co-founder and former chief executive Travis Kalanick is being sued for fraud by Benchmark Capital, one of the ride-hailing giant's earliest investors. In a suit filed Thursday in Delaware Chancery Court, the Menlo Park venture capital firm alleges that Kalanick breached his fiduciary duty and contractual obligations by stacking the company's board with allies to shield his conduct from redress. The suit, which names both Kalanick and Uber, contends this was done to "clear the path for his eventual return as CEO -- all to the detriment of Uber's stockholders, employees, driver-partners, and customers." Kalanick stepped down as Uber's CEO in June after a series of controversies, including a lawsuit by Google's self-driving-car subsidiary, Waymo, alleging theft of trade secrets; another lawsuit by a woman in India who alleged Uber obtained her medical records after she was raped by one of the company's drivers; and widespread allegations of sexual harassment at the firm. Benchmark cited all three cases in its suit as examples of Kalanick's mismanagement.

With a forecast 80 billion connected devices by 2025, the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to transform the way business operates. From AI to VR and the IoT, technology is already having a marked impact on the way businesses maximise profit, improve efficiency and operate. Virtual reality is set to change the way we train our workforces. It enables trainers to deliver learning in an interesting and interactive way. They can present large amounts of complex information visually, to aid learning and help students retain information.

A viral app that added Asian, Black, Caucasian and Indian filters to people's selfies has removed them after being accused of racism. The update which launched yesterday was met with backlash - with many people criticising it for propagating racial stereotypes. The filters drew comparison with'blackface' and'yellowface' - when white people wear make up to appear to be from a different ethnic group. The filters drew comparison with'blackface' and'yellowface' - when white people wear make up to appear to be from a different ethnic group. The app uses Artificial Intelligence to transform faces.

Google's DeepMind AI has mastered Atari arcade classics and beaten human world champions at board games, and now it's set to take on a much bigger challenge - StarCraft II. The research lab has teamed up with video game company Blizzard Entertainment to open StarCraft II as an AI research environment the firms hope will give insight into the most complex problems related to artificial intelligence. Together, they are releasing a set of tools to accelerate AI research in the strategy game their algorithm can eventually beat it. Google's DeepMind research lab has teamed up with video game company Blizzard Entertainment to open StarCraft II as an AI research environment the firms hope will give insight into the most complex problems related to artificial intelligence DeepMind has tackled games like Atari Breakout, but StarCraft II presents new challenges in how it contains multiple layers and sub-goals. Players must accomplish smaller goals along the way, such as gathering resources or building structures.

Reports of satellite navigation problems in the Black Sea suggest that Russia may be testing a new system for spoofing GPS, New Scientist has learned. This could be the first hint of a new form of electronic warfare available to everyone from rogue nation states to petty criminals. On 22 June, the US Maritime Administration filed a seemingly bland incident report. The master of a ship off the Russian port of Novorossiysk had discovered his GPS put him in the wrong spot – more than 32 kilometres inland, at Gelendzhik Airport. After checking the navigation equipment was working properly, the captain contacted other nearby ships. Their AIS traces – signals from the automatic identification system used to track vessels – placed them all at the same airport.