These venture bets on startups that "returned the fund," making firms and careers, were the result of research, strong convictions, and patient follow-through. Here are the stories behind the biggest VC home runs of all time. In venture capital, returns follow the Pareto principle -- 80% of the wins come from 20% of the deals. Great venture capitalists invest knowing they're going to take a lot of losses in order to hit those wins. Chris Dixon of top venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has referred to this as the "Babe Ruth effect," in reference to the legendary 1920s-era baseball player. Babe Ruth would strike out a lot, but also made slugging records. Likewise, VCs swing hard, and occasionally hit a home run. Those wins often make up for all the losses and then some -- they "return the fund." "If you do the math around our goal of returning the fund with our high impact companies, you will notice that we need these companies to exit at a billion dollars or more," he wrote.

Europe is ahead in the digital game, says Tata's Consultancy Services COO. But businesses and governments will need to utilise Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to improve services and the quality of life of customers. N. Ganapathy Subramaniam is the Chief Operating Officer of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an Indian multinational IT service, consulting and business solutions company headquartered in Mumbai. He spoke to EURACTIV's Alexandra Brzozowski on the sidelines of the European Business Summit in Brussels. How could digital economy improve business and public-sector performance?

At the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, automation and digitization are turning the job market upside down. Many fear that robots, A.I., and automation, in general, will take their jobs without alternatives. The same anxieties emerged in healthcare about artificial intelligence taking the place of radiologists, robots surpassing the skills of surgeons, or taking jobs in pharma. A renowned voice in tech, Kai-Fu Lee, founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures told CNBC that A.I. will be bigger than all other tech revolutions, and robots are likely to replace 50 percent of all jobs in the next decade. Silicon Valley-investor Vinod Khosla even said that machines will substitute 80 percent of doctors in the future in a healthcare scene driven by entrepreneurs, not medical professionals.

The European Union is set to invest USD$24 billion into artificial intelligence (AI) by 2020, seeking to catch up with Asia and the United States, which each currently invest more than three times that of Europe. Of the sectors that stand to benefit the most from a boost in AI development is healthcare--a sector becoming increasingly reliant upon what's known as big data. As regions like Asia, the EU, and North America invest more heavily in AI and cloud services to handle big data, the investments move downstream towards developers of innovative applications of healthcare-related big data. According a recent report from BIS Research, the global big data in healthcare market is set to reach $68.75 billion by 2025--growing at a rapid CAGR of 22.3% between 2017-2025. The report came out prior to the EU's $24 billion AI investment announcement; therefore, those expected healthcare-related numbers could even be higher.

Big pharma companies are partnering with artificial intelligence firms to improve key aspects of the healthcare industry such as drug discovery, which will ultimately save time and reduce research and development costs, a report from UK-based data analytics consultancy firm Global Data showed. For several pharma companies, machine learning is the most important aspect of AI, which has the potential to allow machines to surpass human intelligence levels, the report added. Increasing investments in AI for drug discovery allow big pharma firms to apply machine learning to identify and screen potential drug candidates, it explained. "The success of AI in drug discovery is largely due to deep learning, 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 train systems to analyze large sets of chemical and biological data to identify drug candidates with high success rates much faster than humans," Alexandra Annis, senior immunology analyst at Global Data, said.

The world of tabletop gaming was once the preserve of nervous teenage boys holed up in dark basements and bedrooms. But as shows like Stranger Things tap into the rose-tinted nostalgia of afternoons spent playing Dungeons & Dragons, could it be that the geeks have inherited more than Middle Earth? In a craft beer bar lit with bare bulbs, a cluster of tattooed and bearded punters gather. On first glance this branch of BrewDog in Nottingham might seem like your typical hipster hangout, but one thing gives it a slightly different air: numerous hand-drawn maps, some character sheets, and voluminous bags of 20-sided dice. It's the bar's monthly tabletop gaming night - and regulars love it. "I think the escapism is the best bit," says 27-year-old gamer Hannah Yeates.

The future of transportation in waterway-rich cities such as Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Venice -- where canals run alongside and under bustling streets and bridges -- may include autonomous boats that ferry goods and people, helping clear up road congestion. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), have taken a step toward that future by designing a fleet of autonomous boats that offer high maneuverability and precise control. The boats can also be rapidly 3-D printed using a low-cost printer, making mass manufacturing more feasible. The boats could be used to taxi people around and to deliver goods, easing street traffic. In the future, the researchers also envision the driverless boats being adapted to perform city services overnight, instead of during busy daylight hours, further reducing congestion on both roads and canals.

This week Dezeen released Elevation, an 18-minute documentary that explores the impact drones will have on our lives. Here, we take a look at 10 innovative ways drones will change the world. Customers of supermarket giant Walmart may soon be able to summon assistance from unmanned aerial vehicles using mobile electronic devices. The vehicles will help locate products in store and advise on prices by crosscheck information stored on the store's central databases. PriestmanGoode's fleet of urban delivery drones, called Dragonfly, are featured in Dezeen's documentary.

Spanish treasure fleets that traversed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and back were a 16th-century invention as important as free two-day shipping. Organized 70 years after Columbus's first voyage, the fleet was made up of several specialized ships with one primary goal: Exploiting the riches of the New World as efficiently as possible. The San José, the largest galleon and the flagship of one group of Spanish ships that started sailing in the 16th century, was big and -- thanks to 62 bronze cannons engraved with dolphins -- deadly enough to deter or destroy ships, whether pirates or rival nations. On June 8, 1708, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the San José's gunpowder ignited during a battle with British ships, sending 600 sailors to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean -- along with gold, silver and emeralds from mines in Peru, a total haul valued at some $17 billion in today's dollars. It stands as one of the most expensive maritime losses in history.

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is an important and challenging area within music information retrieval, the accurate detection of music symbols in digital images is a core functionality of any OMR pipeline. In this paper, we introduce a novel object detection method, based on synthetic energy maps and the watershed transform, called Deep Watershed Detector (DWD). Our method is specifically tailored to deal with high resolution images that contain a large number of very small objects and is therefore able to process full pages of written music. We present state-of-the-art detection results of common music symbols and show DWD's ability to work with synthetic scores equally well as on handwritten music.