"Flint seeks to invest in ground-breaking technologies that directly improve human life," said Flint Capital Partner Artem Burachenok. "Findo's ability to mitigate the growing challenge of massive data in everyone's inbox, cloud and storage solution is a game changer." Findo's smart search engine helps users quickly find information buried in a wide array of documents, slides, audio files, images, or any other information from sources as varied as Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote and Gmail, Exchange and Outlook. Findo search bots can search from Slack, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Skype and deliver results right to the messenger. "We are excited to have Flint as one of our investors," said Gary A. Fowler, Co-Founder and CEO of Findo.

WASHINGTON – Congress passed an aviation bill Wednesday that attempts to close gaps in airport security and shorten screening lines, but leaves thornier issues unresolved. The bill also extends the Federal Aviation Administration's programs for 14 months at current funding levels. It was approved in the Senate by a vote of 89 to 4. The House had passed the measure earlier in the week and it now goes to President Barack Obama, who must sign the bill by Friday when the FAA's current operating authority expires to avoid a partial agency shutdown. Responding to attacks by violent extremists associated with the Islamic State group on airports in Brussels and Istanbul, the bill includes an array of provisions aimed at protecting "soft targets" outside security perimeters. Other provisions designed to address potential "insider threats" would toughen vetting of airport workers and other employees with access to secure areas, expand random employee inspections and require reviews of perimeter security.

Newspapers and politicians around the world have been reacting to Boris Johnson's appointment as UK foreign secretary. Many were surprised, citing his history of faux pas including insulting the president of Turkey and commenting on the US president's ancestry. Here we take a look at the response in countries where Mr Johnson will now represent the UK. The Washington Post publishes a round-up of "undiplomatic" things Mr Johnson has said during his time in public life. Washington Post writer Ishaan Tharoor also writes that Mr Johnson "has controversially bucked the Western trend and praised Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for battling the Islamic State, no matter its parallel campaign of violence on Syria's civilian population".

Skoolbot has been chosen winner of the first-ever international botathon, organized by VentureBeat. The bot, which helps students using Google Classroom monitor grades, homework, and communication, was made by Liam McKinley of Great Falls, Virginia. McKinley was not physically onstage, but did join a crowd of more than 150 in San Francisco through a roving video robot. Other members of Team Skoolbot include family friend Miko Borys and father John. Hugh Cameron of Melbourne, creator of a bot that quickly responds to emails, won the popular vote.

The Andhra Pradesh Government and SAP have signed a MoU here on Thursday to set up a start-up accelerator here. The MoU was signed by SAP Director (Start-up Focus Programme) Mayank Mathur and IT Adviser to AP Government J.A. Chowdary. Mathur said that SAP would strive to create the right kind of eco system in Vizag for the flourishing of start-ups and to develop entrepreneurial spirit among the young. "We will launch the operations initially under our experts based at Bengaluru within a month. They will be visiting Vizag periodically," he said.

In the event of a c-section, if a robot suggested who should perform it, would you listen? Ninety percent of the time, nurses and physicians did. A robot programmed by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) suggests where to move patients and who should perform caesarian sections. The team from CSAIL thinks robots are most effective in helping with one of the most "complex" tasks in the labor ward of the hospital: scheduling. "The aim of the work was to develop artificial intelligence that can learn from people about how the labor and delivery unit works, so that robots can better anticipate how to be helpful or when to stay out of the way--and maybe even help by collaborating in making challenging decisions," says MIT professor Julie Shah, senior author on two papers based on CSAIL's research.

A panel of Venture Capitalists from throughout the Bay Area come together to discuss how Artificial Intelligence is catching the eyes of investors across the globe. Panelists discuss the growth of the field and the recent shift in investment from different types of disruptive technologies to AI specifically.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A former Google engineer, whose speech recognition software is used in more than a billion Android smartphones, has launched a company that uses blockchain technology to build a new operating system for banks. Paul Taylor, a Cambridge University academic with an expertise in artificial intelligence, speech synthesis and machine learning, started working on the system, called Vault OS, two years ago in a basement in London's Shoreditch district, known for being a tech start-up hub. The technology, which underpins the digital currency bitcoin, creates a shared database in which participants can trace every transaction ever made. The ledger is tamper-proof and transparent, meaning that transactions can be processed without the need for third-party verification. The system also negates the need for costly in-house data centers, as it uses cloud-based systems, which banks can use on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, which means that there is no single point of failure.

Diagnosing cancer is about to get more accurate, with the help of artificial intelligence. Pathologists have diagnosed diseases in more or less the same way for the past 100 years, by laboring over a microscope reviewing biopsy samples on little glass slides. Working almost robotically, they sift through millions of normal cells to identify just a few diseased ones. The task is tedious and prone to human error. But now, scientists and engineers have created a technique that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and can differentiate cancer cells from normal cells almost as well as a top-notch pathologist.

With the increase in adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs), proper utilization of the charging infrastructure is an emerging challenge for service providers. Overstaying of an EV after a charging event is a key contributor to low utilization. Since overstaying is easily detectable by monitoring the power drawn from the charger, managing this problem primarily involves designing an appropriate "penalty" during the overstaying period. Higher penalties do discourage overstaying; however, due to uncertainty in parking duration, less people would find such penalties acceptable, leading to decreased utilization (and revenue). To analyze this central trade-off, we develop a novel framework that integrates models for realistic user behavior into queueing dynamics to locate the optimal penalty from the points of view of utilization and revenue, for different values of the external charging demand. Next, when the model parameters are unknown, we show how an online learning algorithm, such as UCB, can be adapted to learn the optimal penalty. Our experimental validation, based on charging data from London, shows that an appropriate penalty can increase both utilization and revenue while significantly reducing overstaying.