Mumbai: ICICI Bank, India's largest private sector bank, today announced the deployment of'Software Robotics' in over 200 business processes across various functions of the bank. The bank is the first in the country and among few, globally, to deploy'Software Robotics' that emulates human actions to automate and perform repetitive, high volume and time consuming business tasks cutting across multiple applications. At ICICI Bank, software robots have reduced the response time to customers by up to 60% and increased accuracy to 100% thereby sharply improving the bank's productivity and efficiency. It has also enabled the bank's employees to focus more on value-added and customer-related functions. The software robots now perform over 10 lakh banking transactions every working day.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Apple has acquired a new machine-learning company, Tuplejump, based in India/US. According to a report by TechCrunch, this is the third machine-learning company Apple has acquired within a window of two years. Though there hasn't been any official confirmation by the Cupertino giant, their response to the queries regarding the acquisition gives a clear indication that the deal has happened. The company responded to the questions saying, "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." Though Tuplejump's website has been taken down after the acquisition, a Wayback Machine capture reveals this was the companies introduction: "A few years ago people realised that the volume of data that businesses generate was becoming unwieldy. A new set of technologies to handle this huge amounts of data cropped up. We were one of the early adopters of these'big-data' technologies. Having helped Fortune 500 companies adopt these technologies we quickly realised how complicated they were and how much simpler they could get. Thus started our quest to simplify data management technologies and make them extremely simple to use. We are building technology that is simple to use, scalable and will allow people to ask difficult questions on huge datasets."

Apple has acquired a Hyderabad-based machine learning startup Tuplejump to strengthen its expertise in artificial intelligence, reports TechCrunch. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." the Cupertino giant told the publication, indicating the deal was likely an acqui-hire. Tuplejump was founded in 2013 by Rohit Rai, Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu and Deepak Alur and helps companies to store, process and visualise big data. Tuplejump's website has now shut down and founders Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu have joined Apple, as indicated by their LinkedIn profiles. This deal comes a month after Apple acquired another machine learning company Turi. It had also bought deep learning company Perceptio in October last year.

The rivalry between Uber Technologies Inc. and GrabTaxi Holdings Pte. Ltd. expanded to a new front Friday, when Grab said it was teaming up with self-driving car company nuTonomy in Singapore. Selected Grab customers in the city-state will be able to register to use the ride-hailing app to book a nuTonomy vehicle. The rides will be free, though restricted to the relatively uncongested one-north business district and adjacent neighborhoods. Founded by two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nuTonomy began testing its self-driving taxi service in Singapore last month with government approval, beating Uber's trials in Pittsburgh by days. The public trial is still small-scale: NuTonomy said it plans to have a dozen self-driving cars available by the end of the year; Grab has more than 40,000 drivers in the city.

The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is a single track meeting that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by parallel-track workshops that up to 2013 were held at ski resorts. According to Microsoft Academic Search, NIPS is the top conference on machine learning. US tops the chart and has been the top research contributor with the highest number of accepts. UK stands second with an marginal increase in paper accepts from 2014, whereas India and China both dropped, with lesser number of accepts in 2015.

Not every scientific study can be about weighty topics, like gravity waves or gene editing. Sometimes you can gain a true scientific insight by discovering that mammals of vastly different sizes require roughly the same amount of time to empty their bladders, or by noticing that people who speak 10 disparate languages all came up with a version of the word "Huh." These awards are bestowed every fall by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research. There are 10 winners in a range of categories, which typically include fields like physics, neuroscience and mathematics (but which also may include entomology, safety engineering, fluid dynamics or acoustics). The prize-winning scholarship may sound silly, but that doesn't mean it's trivial.

LinkedIn is one of the more popular sites on the Web -- the go-to place for job searches and professional connections. Now the social network is making a big push to change that. The company, which said it was being acquired by Microsoft earlier this year, launched a wholesale redesign of its platform on Thursday. Brimming with buzzy social features like chatbots, hashtags, and breaking news notifications, it's the company's latest attempt to become a place people visit every day. Roughly 105 million people visit LinkedIn every month, compared to Twitter's 313 million monthly active users and Facebook's massive 1.7 billion audience.

Google's machine learning platform might be a few years from solving any of the world's major problems, but for one farming family in Japan, the TensorFlow platform has already reduced the amount of time spent sorting cucumbers into standards. Makoto Koike, a former embedded systems designer, implemented the TensorFlow platform into his family's cucumber farm. See Also: Are big data analytics more important than the cloud? The goal was reducing the amount of time his parents spend sorting cucumbers, which can reach eight hours per day at peak harvest. Koike crafted an Arduino powered conveyer belt and connected it to a Raspberry Pi 3 processor. Webcams hanging above the belt take low resolution photos of the cucumbers, which are sent to the cloud and assigned a standard.

Approximately 8 of the 319 million people in the United States read the Wall Street Journal, good for 2 percent of the population. If you look at the language -- standardized English -- being fed into many natural language processing units, it's based on the language of that 2 percent. And many machines literally use the venerable, business-focused newspaper to better understand English language. It might seem like an obvious choice. Standardized English is taught in schools, it's used in legal documents, and it sets the basis for formal society.