Banking is perceived to be a conservative industry, but necessity is now forcing the sector to seriously consider the opportunities presented by artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making. On one level, the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority's Open Banking revolution is really forcing banks to rethink how they use new technologies to engage with customers and has created a far more competitive banking and lending market. On another, younger generations (the under 35s) are also presenting new challenges for banks. This digital generation expects seamless, flexible multi-channel platforms. They want fast responses and effective solutions to their problems, right now.

The third edition of Drivers for Deploying Speech Analytics 2018, an annual survey commissioned by Uniphore Software Systems, was released today. The survey revealed that 60% of Indian companies deploy speech analytics for marketing initiative support and quick identification of customer intent, equally. This is in line with the finding of the previous year's survey underlining the growing relevance of speech analytics in increasing sales and delivering superior customer experience. Root cause remediation of customer experience failures came a close second with 58%. In North America and South East Asia, the top driver for deploying speech analytics was quick identification of customer intent.

Nothing is as remote as yesterday's utopias. From the 1990s until the end of the last decade, the explosion in computing power was seen by wide-eyed optimists as a force for liberation that would lay low unaccountable authority. Their eyes have narrowed now. Democracy, justice, our very ability to earn a living, feel precarious. "All that is solid melts into air," said Marx of 19th-century capitalism.

When it comes to our health, especially in matters of life and death, the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve outcomes is very intriguing. While there is still much to overcome to achieve AI-dependent health care, most notably data privacy concerns and fears of mismanaged care due to machine error and lack of human oversight, there is sufficient potential that governments, tech companies, and healthcare providers are willing to invest and test out AI-powered tools and solutions. Here are five of the AI advances in healthcare that appear to have the most potential. With an estimated value of $40 billion to healthcare, robots can analyze data from pre-op medical records to guide a surgeon's instrument during surgery, which can lead to a 21% reduction in a patient's hospital stay. Robot-assisted surgery is considered "minimally invasive" so patients won't need to heal from large incisions.

I very well remember the cold sweat on my forehead when I opened our client's analytics reports in May 2012. I was working for an SEO agency in Germany and traffic of a few of our clients had dropped sharply. It was about a week after Google had rolled out "Penguin". Back then, it was perfectly normal to buy some backlinks as part of your SEO strategy. Instead, we start with keyword research, trying to understand user intent, screen the existing content, and… do a technical SEO audit. The latter has become a stable part of every SEO strategy.

In mid-September the European Union threatened to fine the Big Tech companies if they did not remove terrorist content within one hour of appearing online. The change came because rising tensions are now developing and being played out on social media platforms. Social conflicts that once built up in backroom meetings and came to a head on city streets, are now building momentum on social media platforms before spilling over into real life. In the past, governments tended to control traditional media, with little to no possibility for individuals to broadcast hate. The digital revolution has altered everything.

PARIS (AFP) - Robots will handle 52 per cent of current work tasks by 2025, almost twice as many as now, a World Economic Forum (WEF) study said Monday (Sept 17). The sharp increase could also see a net gain in "new roles" for humans, who will have to revamp skills to keep pace with the "seismic shift" in how we work with machines and computer programmes, the forum estimated. "By 2025 more than half of all current workplace tasks will be performed by machines as opposed to 29 per cent today," a statement by the Swiss non-profit organisation said. Simultaneously, rapid changes in machines and algorithms, or computer processes that are designed to solve problems, "could create 133 million new roles in place of 75 million that will be displaced between now and 2022," the group forecast. Based near Geneva, the WEF is known for the annual pow-wow of wealthy individuals, politicians and business leaders that it organises in Davos, Switzerland.

PARIS (AFP) - Robots will handle 52 per cent of current work tasks by 2025, almost twice as many as now, a World Economic Forum (WEF) study said Monday (Sept 17). The sharp increase could also see a net gain in "new roles" for humans, who will have to revamp skills to keep pace with the "seismic shift" in how we work with machines and computer programmes, the forum estimated. "By 2025 more than half of all current workplace tasks will be performed by machines as opposed to 29 per cent today," a statement by the Swiss non-profit organisation said. Simultaneously, rapid changes in machines and algorithms, or computer processes that are designed to solve problems, "could create 133 million new roles in place of 75 million that will be displaced between now and 2022," the group forecast. Based near Geneva, the WEF is known for the annual pow-wow of wealthy individuals, politicians and business leaders that it organises in Davos, Switzerland.

Their technical forebears are, obviously, helicopters. But helicopters are "too noisy, inefficient, polluting and expensive for mass-scale use," says the white paper for UberAir, the company's aeromobile arm. "VTOL aircraft will make use of electric propulsion so they have zero operational emissions and will likely be quiet enough to operate in cities without disturbing the neighbors." Your weekly look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. Tap here to get it delivered to your inbox.

Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating on-line and off-line optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse. However, deciding when to stop optimizing and collect new trajectories is non-trivial as it requires to account for the variance of the objective function estimate. In this paper, we propose a novel model-free policy search algorithm, POIS, applicable in both control-based and parameter-based settings. We first derive a high-confidence bound for importance sampling estimation and then we define a surrogate objective function which is optimized off-line using a batch of trajectories. Finally, the algorithm is tested on a selection of continuous control tasks, with both linear and deep policies, and compared with the state-of-the-art policy optimization methods.