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.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said Monday that Americans have reaped significant benefits from the international architecture put in place after World War II and the United States would be making a serious mistake to retreat from its global leadership role. In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, Lew sought to counter arguments being advanced by Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates that Americans are losing badly in competition with China and other countries in the global economy. Lew said that the United States needs to embrace new players on the global economic stage and make sure they meet the standards of the trading system that the country helped create. "The worst possible outcome would be to step away from our leadership role and let others fill in behind us," he said. Lew's comments came in advance of global finance meetings later this week.

The Defense Department christened the Sea Hunter, a 132-foot robot ghost ship designed to seek out and track diesel-powered submarines across the ocean. The start of the test phase for the program on Thursday signals a new dawn for autonomous systems at sea, which, Pentagon officials say, will perform an ever-wider variety of jobs and could fundamentally change the way militaries operate on the water. The Sea Hunter is the first of a new type of ocean drone, called an Anti-submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV. The goal of the program: field an autonomous ship with the range and endurance to go anywhere in the world while avoiding collisions with other ships and obeying the rules of navigation. "Current unmanned surface vessel systems and concepts are operated as close-adjuncts to conventional manned ships – they are launched and recovered from manned ships, tele-operated from manned ships, and are limited to direct support of manned ship missions. The ACTUVsystem will be a first of its kind unmanned naval vessel that is designed and sized for theater or global independent deployment," reads the program's description from 2014.

You Might Have Heard: The Microsoft AI experiment with Tay, their machine learning Twitter bot, ended after a mere 24-hours. The company pulled the plug when she almost immediately turned into a sexist, racist Nazi. Tay was suppose to learn how to communicate like a human by engaging in conversations with Twitter users. "This gets to the underlying problem," Vice argues. "Microsoft's AI developers sent Tay to the internet to learn how to be human, but the internet is a terrible place to figure that out."

If you've ever whined that employing people means dealing with their personal messes, don't think hiring robots can make your life any better. Two restaurants in China have been forced to close after replacing their flesh-and-bone waitstaff with robots turned out to be a terrible mistake. According to the Worker's Daily (translated by Shanghaiist), the expensive droids were incapable of taking orders, carrying soup or pouring water. That means that a sophisticated artificial intelligence is being outdone by a 17-year-old on minimum wage with their head in a cloud of marijuana smoke.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station Sunday (April 10) to deliver vital supplies, science experiments and a prototype inflatable space habitat for the orbiting outpost and its six-person crew. Launched on Friday (April 8) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the Dragon pulled up to space station on this morning where it was captured by the orbital complex's Canadarm2 robotic arm. "It looks like we caught a Dragon," British astronaut Tim Peake of the European Space Agency radioed to Mission Control after snagging the spacecraft with the station's arm. Dragon was later attached to the Earth-facing port on the station's Harmony module at 9:57 a.m. EDT (1357 GMT) to begin its one-month stay. The Dragon's arrival marked the first time that two U.S. commercial spacecraft were berthed to the space station simultaneously.

Venture capital firm IvyCap Ventures has raised the first tranche of Rs 300 crore in its Rs 600-crore IvyCap Fund 2, which was launched last October. The fund saw the participation of five of the 15 existing institutional investors of IvyCap. As a part of the IvyCap Ventures Initiative, we will invest in 25-30 startups in the next two years, in sectors like healthtech, IoT, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, edtech and agritech." Last December, IvyCamp had partnered with Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), a business incubator of IIT Bombay. The objective was to leverage the IvyCamp Platform to connect and create value for entrepreneurs and innovators across the student and alumni community.

Today's Internet applications are required to be highly scalable and available in the face of rapidly changing, unpredictable workloads. Multi-tier architecture is commonly used to build Internet applications, with different tiers providing load balancing, application logic, and persistence. The advent of cloud computing has given rise to rapid horizontal scaling of applications hosted in virtual machines (VMs) in each of the tiers. Currently, this scaling is done by monitoring system-level metrics (e.g., CPU utilization) and determining whether to scale out or in based on a threshold. These threshold-based algorithms, however, do not capture the complex interaction among multiple tiers, and determining the right set of thresholds for multiple resources to achieve a particular service level objective (SLO) is difficult. In this paper, we present vScale, a horizontal scaling system that can automatically scale the number of VMs in a tier to meet end-to-end application SLOs.

Right now, the New Economic Summit (NEST) 2016 conference is going on in Tokyo, Japan. One of the keynote speakers is Andy Rubin. Rubin was in charge of Google's robotics program in 2013, when the company (now Alphabet) acquired a fistful of some of the most capable and interesting robotics companies in the world. One of those companies was SCHAFT, which originated at the JSK Robotics Laboratory at the University of Tokyo and is best known for winning the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials by an absurd amount. We haven't heard anything from SCHAFT over the past three years, and all we know is that they're now part of X, Alphabet's experimental technology lab.