New Zealanders are used to the idea of automation and industrial robots in manufacturing and some homes have those disc shaped vacuum cleaners roaming the house of their own volition in order to keep everything spick and span. Many people have exchanged messages with chat bots online in order to get a few questions answered. But a New Zealand company, Soul Machines, has taken the chat bot idea to the next level and developed so called "digital humans." Just over a month ago, the Natwest Bank in the UK started testing an artificial intelligence-powered "digital human" called Cora who will converse with customers from a terminal in bank branches, with the aim of cutting down on waiting times. The bank hopes Cora's artificial intelligence will eventually expand to answering hundreds of different questions, but at the same time insists the avatar is there to complement, not replace humans.

How many people does it take to drive a driverless car? It is, to be fair, barely even a prototype. The autonomous car unveiled in Milton Keynes last week is bleeding-edge engineering, Britain's entry in a global race to get the first driverless car on the road. The converted Range Rover Sport can steer itself, speed up and slow down, stop at red lights and move off when they turn green. It can even cope with roundabouts, a fundamental skill in Milton Keynes.

String kernels are attractive data analysis tools for analyzing string data. Among them, alignment kernels are known for their high prediction accuracies in string classifications when tested in combination with SVMs in various applications. However, alignment kernels have a crucial drawback in that they scale poorly due to their quadratic computation complexity in the number of input strings, which limits large-scale applications in practice. We present the first approximation named ESP+SFM for alignment kernels by leveraging a metric embedding named edit-sensitive parsing (ESP) and space-efficient feature maps (SFM) for random Fourier features (RFF) for large-scale string analyses. Input strings are projected into vectors of RFF by leveraging ESP and SFM. Then, SVMs are trained on the projected vectors, which enables to significantly improve the scalability of alignment kernels while preserving their prediction accuracies. We experimentally test ESP+ SFM on its ability to learn SVMs for large-scale string classifications with various massive string data, and we demonstrate the superior performance of ESP+SFM with respect to prediction accuracy, scalability and computation efficiency.

Note: Whilst the campaign is labelled as EIS eligible the Company has £150,000 remaining of its SEIS limit. We will, therefore, be looking to seek SEIS relief on the first £150,000 invested into the campaign and EIS relief on the balance. Any tax relief is dependent on personal circumstances and may be subject to change in the future. Development Bank of Wales will not be claiming tax relief on their investment. We built IntelAgent to fix customer services!

Demolition teams have been working to tear down five homes in Hemsby, Norfolk, after coastal erosion left them on a cliff-edge.

Renowned British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018. The news generated an online view rate of nearly 500 million in China. At the same time, almost 250,000 viewers responded to the news with comments and messages. According to Agence France-Presse, Stephen Hawking opened a Sina Weibo account two years ago and started posting messages in English and Chinese. These were well received by the Chinese followers, as Hawking wanted to engage fully with his Chinese audience and learn from them.

Cognitive computing and artifical intelligence (AI) will see global spend reach $19.1bn in 2018, with retail overtaking banking as the primary sector driving growth, according to market watcher IDC. IDC's research director of cognitive/AI David Schubmehl, said: "Interest and awareness of AI is at fever pitch. Every industry and every organization should be evaluating AI to see how it will affect their business processes and go-to-market efficiencies." Retail firms will invest $3.4bn this year on AI use cases, including automated customer service agents, expert shopping advisors and product recommendations, and merchandising for omni-channel operations. Banking, meanwhile, will spend $3.3bn, largely on automated threat intelligence and prevention systems, fraud analysis and investigation, and program advisors and recommendation systems.

The British Royal Air Force had a problem. It was 1943, and the Brits were using radar equipment to spot German submarines sneaking around off the western coast of France. The young men sitting in planes circling over the Bay of Biscay had more than enough motivation to keep a watchful eye for the telltale blips on the screens in front of them. Yet they had a worrying tendency to miss the signals they'd been trained to spot. The longer they spent looking at the screen, the less reliable they became.

A simple website may only include 8 top level pages, 50 secondary and perhaps only 300 tertiary labelled (taxonomy) navigation elements, that's only 358 entities. However, Information Architecture tends to be associated with the structure and classification of websites, intranets and software that accesses in excess of 100,000 separate entities to be classified. I have worked on several huge taxonomies for Government, Publishers, Colleges, Universities, Insurance Companies and Banks involved in trading that involve between 1,000,000 and 25,000,000 entities. An Information Architect embarking on a new project will investigate if there is a standardised ontology for the project domain and conduct a content audit. An ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or fundamentally exist for a particular domain.

A few days ago we ran a story about a new smart speaker named I•VIE with Watson Assistant. Originally we reported that the smart speaker was an IBM product and our wording made it sound as if I•VIE and Watson Assistant were the same. Well, it turns out, we got some information turned upside down. Watson Assistant is indeed an IBM product but its intent isn't consumer facing. Furthermore, I•VIE is a product made by Chameleon Technology who are using Watson Assistant to power the smart speaker.