Malaysia's strategic investment fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd is making a strategic investment of 100 million into New Jersey-based Fractal Analytics, a leading global provider of analytics, to accelerate its growth. In a press release, Khazanah executive director Chinta Bhagat commented: "The availability of large amounts of real-time information and the ability to analyse it at scale, will transform how the world makes decisions. Fractal is one of the companies leading this change and with our partnership, it can dramatically accelerate its programmatic investments and acquisitions." TA Associates, a Boston-based global private equity firm and AIMIA, the world's largest loyalty firm and Gulu Mirchandani of Onida are some of Fractal's current investors. Fractal Analytics co-founder and chief executive officer Srikanth Velamakanni said, the investment will allow the company to step up development of its artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning-based software stack.

It is not often that you meet someone who looks at technology as a tool to make an impact on customers and in turn bring returns to business decisions. It is unfortunate that most of the business world puts customers second, but spend enormous amounts of money in acquiring them. The world of IT is not about information capture, it is about the "machine" learning continuously to understand the queries of clients or consumers – of the enterprise – when a transaction is made on the smart phone. Co-founder of Helpshift Abinash Tripathy is a technology proponent and believes that it can improve lives. But, he is vociferously against technology that focuses on trading – like ecommerce businesses that sell on discounts to capture consumer eye-balls.

When you get right down to it, developing vaccines is about data and luck. Scientists start with a set of variables--what drugs a virus responds to, how effectively, and for whom--and then it's a whole lot of trial and error until they stumble upon a cure. One of the most exciting possibilities in medical research right now is how technology like machine learning could help researchers rapidly process those enormous sets of data, more quickly leading to cures. This is already starting to happen: In a study published Wednesday in the journal Macromolecules, researchers from IBM and Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology reveal a breakthrough that could help prevent deadly virus infections. With the help of IBM super computer Watson, they hope their finding will soon make its way into vaccines.

MasterCard Inc. says new machine-learning technology has helped it quickly control three separate cyberattacks that targeted automated bank tellers, limiting the damage to about 100,000 each. The transaction-monitoring system, which also employs data visualization tools, caught the three attacks during the first two months of 2016, according to MasterCard. The company declined to identify the banks. The Safety Net system, rolled out globally late last year, analyzes more than 1.3 billion transactions per day involving MasterCard debit and credit accounts at banks, merchants and ATMs, using algorithms that assess customer behavior in real-time. In the three attacks this year, directed against two U.S. banks and one bank in South America, Safety Net identified anomalies such as large cash withdrawals or transactions outside the usual geographic area for a given account.

With improvements in facial-recognition technology and the increasing popularity of smartphones, the threat to one's privacy unexpectedly posed by Internet photos posted by strangers is growing day by day. To protect against unwanted scrutiny, trading company Nissey Corp., based in Sabae, Fukui Prefecture, has developed special glasses that thwart electronic facial recognition. The Privacy Visor is a set of white titanium goggles with lenses that have a mesh-like surface providing many tiny spaces to see through. "Since the view might not be clear, driving or riding on bicycles must be avoided," a Nissey spokesman warned. The glasses were jointly developed with the National Institute of Informatics, a research institute dedicated to information technology.

The Brooklyn Cruise Ship Terminal opened in 2006 - the same year that Twitter launched. So, you'd think that when one of the tech sector's biggest events - TechCrunch Disrupt New York - moved to the birthplace of hipsters, that cutting-edge development and a good amount of facial hair would be on display. But this year's New York Disrupt didn't seem very disruptive. TechCruch's biggest Disrupt conference in San Francisco, its London version, and past New York events have always attracted innovative technology developers. Jordan Crook, senior writer for TechCrunch, was unconcerned by what seemed to be a slow burn in the sector, even in areas like virtual reality and artificial intelligence. "It's easy to see with hindsight that what seemed to be a slow transition was really a massive shift," she says.

Apple has invested US 1 billion in China's largest ride-hailing company, Didi Chuxing, in a move that could give it an opportunity to participate in the local company's bid to build a data-driven ride-share platform. Didi, which is already backed by big local players like Tencent and Alibaba, said it has raised the Apple investment as a part of its latest funding round. The investment by Apple is the largest single investment Didi has ever received, it added. Apple has been indicating that such an investment was coming for some time now, said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. The company has already said that it plans to increase its services revenue and that the Chinese market is a key component of its overall strategy going forward, Moorhead said.

The new work, which the researchers are presenting this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, builds on a long sequence of papers on origami robots from the research group of Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "It's really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care," says Rus, who also directs MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It's really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether." Joining Rus on the paper are first author Shuhei Miyashita, who was a postdoc at CSAIL when the work was done and is now a lecturer in electronics at the University of York, in England; Steven Guitron, a graduate student in mechanical engineering; Shuguang Li, a CSAIL postdoc; Kazuhiro Yoshida of Tokyo Institute of Technology, who was visiting MIT on sabbatical when the work was done; and Dana Damian of the University of Sheffield, in England.

A pill that unfolds into a little robot could one day give parents everywhere a little more peace of mind. Once swallowed, it can open up inside a person's stomach, crawling across the stomach wall to retrieve a single-cell button battery, and even patch wounds. This is no small thing. In the US every year, over 3,500 incidents of swallowed button batteries are reported in the US, and most cases of battery swallowing involve toddlers. Although most of these batteries are safely digested, sometimes they can leak and cause tissue burns, bleeding, and death.

Futurist, inventor and Google Inc. director of engineering Ray Kurzweil has some high praise -- and a friendly dig -- for the Waterloo region. Kurzweil said he visits many communities and gives many speeches like the one he delivered Thursday at the Tech Leadership Conference, hosted by the innovation hub Communitech. Wherever he goes, people tell him he's visiting the region's equivalent of Silicon Valley: "Our community is the Silicon Valley of the Left Bank of Paris, our community is the Silicon Valley of Tel Aviv." "Kitchener-Waterloo and the Toronto area really are a Silicon Valley, second only maybe to the actual Silicon Valley. A place that celebrates the idea that failure is something to be, if not encouraged, at least accepted," he said. "We have a word for failure. The only way to make these innovations in the world is to accept these frustrations and setbacks."