Last week this space saw much of the largest fintech funding rounds taking place outside the U.S. That trend continues this week, with some San Francisco-grown AI thrown into the mix. This week we witnessed a major push forward in the process of collaboration between financial institutions (FIs) and startups. This week's top fundraising company was part of a startup accelerator based in Hong Kong. We also found a company creating artificial intelligence capable of accurately and reliably predicting stock market trends.

NATO-led mission in Afghanistan has confirmed that the US military will investigate into the US drone strikes in southeastern Afghanistan that killed 17 people last week. Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, spokesman for the US-led coalition, told Al Jazeera on Monday, that they will conduct an investigation into the air strikes carried out in the Paktika province. "Currently there is no evidence of civilian casualties, however, we are conducting a thorough investigation into the strikes," Cleveland, who is part of the Operation Resolute Support, said. Relatives and tribal elders demanded for an investigation on Saturday claiming that the air raids hit civilians, not members of armed groups. However, Afghan officials told Al Jazeera that the people killed in the attack had links to the Taliban.

Artificial intelligence has more than a few practical uses. Whether this impressive technological breakthrough is convincingly explaining the meaning of life or plotting the untimely end of the world, making a robot that can think like a human has been man's greatest achievement… along with the Internet and Nutella-flavored ice cream. And one Taiwanese startup is looking to cash in on this technology by using it to create videos out of nothing more than an article's URL. GliaStudio, based out of Taipei, Taiwan, was launched in 2015. Their goal was to corner the market on the new necessity in media production and content development: video.

Imagine that you are searching for a brown leather sandal online. You know what it should look like, but don't know how to describe it. You search "brown sandal" in Google, which serves up many results--but none of them are it. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing.

Twenty six hundred years ago, a band of Judahite soldiers kept watch on their kingdom's southern border in the final days before Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar. They left behind numerous inscriptions--and now, a groundbreaking digital analysis has revealed how many writers penned them. The research and innovative technology behind it stand to teach us about the origins of the Bible itself. "It's well understood that the Bible was not composed in real time but was probably written and edited later," Arie Shaus, a mathematician at Tel Aviv University told Gizmodo. "The question is, when exactly?" Shaus is one of several mathematicians and archaeologists trying to broach that question in a radical manner: by using machine learning tools to determine how many people were literate in ancient times.

Seven weeks ago, Google made waves in the robotics world with a human-like robot that could walk on uneven terrain, lift boxes and get back up after falling. Such abilities hadn't been seen in one robot. Now Google (formally known as Alphabet) is at it again. Another robot has emerged from X, the company's experimental labs, roaming outdoors on two legs, according to a new video that surfaced from a conference in Japan. While experts call it an impressive demonstration of balance and two-legged walking, it remains unclear what real-world uses Google or anyone could have with a legged robot in the near term. "It will still be awhile before we see these robots in a context outside a very compelling demonstration video," said Brian Gerkey, chief executive of the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

SpaceX made history on Friday after successfully landing its Falcon 9 rocket on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. Images of the tall, narrow rocket gliding down onto a droneship sparked applause and screams of joy at SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, California. It was its fifth attempt at landing the rocket upright - a feat that the company says could pave the way for cheaper space travel. Now, new footage from an onboard camera released by founder Elon Musk shows the near-perfect landing in stunning detail. After four failed bids SpaceX finally stuck the landing Friday in the Atlantic Ocean. Now, new footage from an onboard camera released by founder Elon Musk shows the near-perfect landing in stunning detail. Primary school teacher sacked over this'inappropriate' dance SNL has fun with Clinton's subway gaffe earlier this week'What the f***?': Terrified boy haunted by ghost in bedroom The liftoff at 4:43 p.m. from Cape Canaveral was the first time that SpaceX has resupplied the ISS since the company's last cargo mission in June, which ended in disaster.

Top Machine Learning & Data Mining Books - in this post, we have scraped various signals (e.g. We have combined all signals to compute the Quality Score for each book and publish the list of top Machine Learning and Data Mining books. The readers will love the list because it is data-driven & objective. This book is very well rated on Amazon website and is written by three professors from USC, Stanford and University of Washington. The three authors: Gareth James, Daniela Witten, & Trevor Hastie all have backgrounds in statistics.

I saw a news article recently about how high frequency trading firms are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their trading performance and profit. Two large companies were mentioned with each having a slightly different approach. This May, Nomura Securities are releasing a new stock trading system, built around analyzing and assessing vast price and trading data resources. The system aims to simulate the insights of experienced (human) traders and make predictions based on historical market conditions and the correlation to current asset prices. Nothing particularly new about that, but the difference is they will be using AI tools to enable the system to enhance its price prediction ability as it gains more experience.

I have been studying Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Capital Markets for ten months now and I am shocked everyday by the speed of evolution of this technology. When I started researching this last year I was looking for the Holy Grail trading tools and could not find them, hence I settled for other parts of the trade lifecycle where AI solutions already existed. Yesterday, as I was preparing for a speech on AI at a conference, one of my colleagues in Tokyo forwarded me an Asian newswire mentioning that Nomura securities, after two years of research, would be launching an AI enabled HFT equity tool for its brokerage institutional clients in May – here it is: the Holy Grail exists, and not only at Nomura. Other brokers have been shyly speaking about their customizable smart brokerage, e.g. Some IBs are working on that, they just don't publicly talk about it.