Is TV advertising industry truly entitled? We keep hearing that TV advertising is not up to the mark in delivering results proportional to the media budget. A part of the problem lies in the gaps in TV performance analytics. The latest partnership between TVadSync and Unacast changes this dynamic, combining cutting-edge cross-screen media and transparent location data to measure footfall traffic and help advertisers fully quantify the impact of their combined TV and digital advertising. To better understand how TV advertising is set to change the multi-touch attribution model for advertising with data and analytics, we spoke to TVadSync's Head of Product, John McNicholas and Unacast CEO, Thomas Walle.

LONDON (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence (AI) will become the primary way banks interact with their customers within the next three years, according to three quarters of bankers surveyed by consultancy Accenture (ACN.N) in a new report. Four in five bankers believe AI will "revolutionise" the way in which banks gather information as well as how they interact with their clients, said the Accenture Banking Technology Vision 2017 report, which surveyed more than 600 top bankers and also consulted tech industry experts and academics. Artificial intelligence -- the technology behind driverless cars, drones and voice-recognition software -- is seen by the financial world as a key technology which, along with other "fintech" innovations such as blockchain, will change the face of banking in the coming years. More than three quarters of respondents to the survey believed that AI would enable more simple user interfaces, which would help banks create a more human-like customer experience. "The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we've seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized," said Alan McIntyre, head of the Accenture's banking practice and co-author of the report. "(It) will give people the impression that the bank knows them a lot better, and in many ways it will take banking back to the feeling that people had when there were more human interactions."

Analytics is evolving from big data, machine learning to artificial intelligence. Machine learning is the analysis of data at rest, artificial intelligence (AI) is the analysis of data in real-time. Machine learning is predictive; AI is cognitive. The requirements of a storage infrastructure supporting an AI environment are high bandwidth, low latency, elasticity in response to workload demands, and rapid response to multiple parallel analytic queries. Traditionally, most AI initiatives start as skunkworks projects often hosted in the cloud.

The European Commission, an executive of the European Union, has announced it will be more than doubling its investments in artificial intelligence (AI). The commission will increase spending on AI by 70%, reaching €1.5bn (US$1.81bn) by 2020, in a bid to compete with Asia and the US, which are both investing at least three time as much.

London-based aerospace engineering company Rolls-Royce has found a better solution to fix the engine issues of airplanes without tearing them apart. Together with engineers from the University of Nottingham and Harvard University, the company created robotics systems that are the size of bugs. The tiny robots, inspired by snakes and insects, are capable of crawling inside the plane's engine, making it easier to conduct diagnostics and repairs. The new tech is part of the company's IntelligentEngine project and was shown at the Farnborough International Airshow. "We are in the process of developing a number of miniature devices that enable us to get inside the jet engine to perform inspections or repairs," James Kell, a Rolls-Royce on-wing specialist, said in an interview.

New technology being introduced into the market to automate historically manual tasks, brings back our sense of fear. Do we want people to complete menial/labor intensive tasks or do we want to create competent/reliable machines to complete these tasks? These feelings of uncertainty are not new. In the 19 and 20 centuries there were also these concerns. The introduction of the car, electricity, and the telephone caused a lot of uproar.

Facebook said Friday it suspended a longtime partner that had used data from Facebook and other social networks to assist governments -- including Russia, Turkey, and the U.S. -- in monitoring public sentiment, a more cautious approach in the wake of a data privacy scandal. Facebook said it had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Boston-based company, Crimson Hexagon, but it was curtailing the company's access to its data while it investigated the matter. The preemptive move represents a shift for Facebook in the wake of the controversy over political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which Facebook said inappropriately collected the private profiles of more than 80 million Facebook users. The social network is under investigation from three different federal agencies over its work with Cambridge Analytica and, since the crisis erupted, has suspended more than 200 apps which had access to Facebook data. Crimson Hexagon, which primarily used public, aggregated data from people who made their profiles available for anyone to see, is the largest of this new wave of suspensions.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Can someone please teach me how to be that stylish? This week Rolls-Royce announced that they're working on small robots designed to inspect engines: What's getting a little bit lost in the announcement is that the robots themselves are based on (and perhaps, at this point, entirely identical to) Harvard's HAMR robot that we covered back in February: The Velodyne VLS-128 is the world's most advanced LiDAR sensor.

IBM yesterday announced that several new European clients have selected IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. New contracts signed with Spanish electricity grid operator Red Eléctrica de España, Italian elderly care provider Cooperativa Sole, Dutch telecommunications operator Tele2 and Israeli manufacturer of smart air conditioning Electra Group are examples of IBM's commitment to transforming business and improving operations with the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled, IBM Cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Red Eléctrica de España (http://www.ree.es/en), the sole transmission agent and operator of the national electricity system in Spain has selected IBM Watson IoT technologies as part of its Intelligent Asset Management initiative project. The electricity system operator's objective is to plan and optimize the maintenance and replacement activities of their strategic transmission assets (like substations and transmission lines) with the support of the IBM Watson IoT platform. With an IoT analytics solution that is designed specifically to help Energy and Utilities improve asset maintenance and utilization, a team from IBM Global Business Services (GBS) has begun implementation of the platform and is working in unison with REE to develop asset degradation models and design optimization plans specific to the electricity system operator's requirements.

The applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare are countless. For many pharmaceutical companies, machine learning is the most important aspect of AI, with the potential to allow machines to ultimately surpass the intelligence levels of humans. The success of AI in drug discovery is largely due to hardcore Research & Development in learning section of brain sciences, a field of machine learning that is built using artificial neural networks that model the way neurons in the human brain talk to each other. This technology can turn bots into dynamically agile than the human beings. The type of artificial intelligence (AI) which scares some of the greatest minds, like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, is called "general artificial intelligence" -- the one which can "think" pretty much like humans do, and which can quickly evolve into a dangerous "superintelligence". There is a notion that it might be invented in the nearest decades, but today we are definitely not there yet.