Accenture Uses Artificial Intelligence to Help the Elderly Better Navigate Their Care and Improve Their Well-Being LAS VEGAS and LONDON; Nov. 28, 2017 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has completed a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and the ease of voice to help older people manage the daunting challenges of navigating their care delivery and well-being. The Accenture Liquid Studio in London developed an AI-powered platform (the Accenture Platform) that can learn user behaviors and preferences and suggest activities to support the overall physical and mental health of individuals ages 70 and older. The Accenture platform, which runs on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, includes a'Family and Carer' portal that lets family and caregivers check on the individual's daily activities, such as whether they have taken their medication or made new requests for caregivers. The Accenture platform can also spot abnormalities in behavior and alert family or friends, based on user defined permissions. Elder Care Pilot: Accenture Uses AI to Help Navigate Elder Care Other services provided by the Accenture platform helped participants find local events as well as potential new friends, encouraging them to become more active and social.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German luxury automaker BMW said on Friday it will spend over 100 million euros ($118 million) on a test track for self-driving and electric cars in the Czech Republic, as it expands its foray into alternative driving technologies.

For the Winter '17 cohort in collaboration with Macquarie Group, over 800 companies were vetted and 10 were accepted. The selected scaleups cover a range of technology verticals applicable to all enterprise. Collectively, the scaleups have raised £40m to date, have between 10 and 40 employees each and have an incredible breadth of enterprise clients -- ranging from Airbnb to Aston Martin to Barclays to Compass Group to L'Oreal to Wells Fargo. Collecting leads at events is a broken process. We're here to fix it.

Robot investigators could be widely used in future to examine documents in complex cases, the head of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has suggested. David Green said he would like to see the possibility of employing artificial intelligence "carefully examined" after using technology to sift through a cache of 30 million documents disclosed by Rolls-Royce during a major investigation. He also said it was now "pretty clear" that his agency would continue as an independent body after the government dropped plans to have it taken into the National Crime Agency. The SFO director set out how the Rolls-Royce documents had been examined by a computer algorithm which had the ability to learn as it went along. The technology was trying to find legally privileged documents which could not be used in the case, but Mr Green suggested that in future similar methods could be used to identify useful evidence in investigations.

Event coordinators will soon have a better way of gauging the success of their programs, thanks to a revolutionary smart floor developed by Swiss startup Technis. The innovative technology, which is based on research conducted at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, is designed to monitor the people's direction and keep track of their walking trajectories. The new smart floor uses machine learning techniques to produce powerful algorithms, which in turn learn from the data that the system obtains. The algorithms are now equipped to distinguish various ways of walking, identify objects with wheels and detect a person that fell. The data collected are then translated into tables and charts that can be accessed real time through computers and mobile devices.

We are creating an intelligence that is external to humans and housed in the virtual economy. This is bringing us into a new economic era--a distributive one--where different rules apply. A year ago in Oslo Airport I checked in to an SAS flight. One airline kiosk issued a boarding pass, another punched out a luggage tag, then a computer screen showed me how to attach it and another where I should set the luggage on a conveyor. I encountered no single human being. The incident wasn't important but it left me feeling oddly that I was out of human care, that something in our world had shifted. That shift of course has been going on for a long time. It's been driven by a succession of technologies--the Internet, the cloud, big data, robotics, machine learning, and now artificial intelligence--together powerful enough that economists agree we are in the midst of a digital economic revolution. But there is less agreement on how exactly the new technologies are changing the economy and whether the changes are deep. Robert Gordon of Northwestern University tells us the computer revolution "reached its climax in the dot-com era of the 1990s."

The scope for facial detection to be used for large-scale surveillance is only just beginning to be realised. In September this year, Moscow hooked up its CCTV network to a facial-recognition system. New York is planning to roll out facial detection across bridges and tunnels. London's facial-recognition database has been criticised for going "far beyond custody purposes", and China is taking all of this to a whole new level of total state surveillance. But the invention of the ship also led to the invention of the pirate.

The internet of things (IoT) promises many advantages - smart cities with integrated transport systems, for instance - but it comes with a significantly increased cybersecurity risk. So how should we be tackling this new threat? Christoph Brandstatter is managing director of the four-star Seehotel, Jagerwirt, in Austria's Alps. His hotel's electronic door locks and other systems were hacked for ransom four times, between December 2016 and January 2017. "We got a ransomware mail which was hidden in a bill from Telekom Austria," says Mr Brandstatter.

I work for SAP as an IoT Evangelist. It's my job to go around and speak about how the Internet of Things is changing the way we live, work, and run our businesses. IoT Evangelist is a job title that didn't exist 5 or 10 years ago – mainly because the Internet of Things wasn't a "thing" 5 or 10 years ago. Today it is, so here I am. The fact is, technological change has a tremendous impact on the way we spend our working lives.

We introduce weighted atom-centered symmetry functions (wACSFs) as descriptors of a chemical system's geometry for use in the prediction of chemical properties such as enthalpies or potential energies via machine learning. The wACSFs are based on conventional atom-centered symmetry functions (ACSFs) but overcome the undesirable scaling of the latter with increasing number of different elements in a chemical system. The performance of these two descriptors is compared using them as inputs in high-dimensional neural network potentials (HDNNPs), employing the molecular structures and associated enthalpies of the 133855 molecules containing up to five different elements reported in the QM9 database as reference data. A substantially smaller number of wACSFs than ACSFs is needed to obtain a comparable spatial resolution of the molecular structures. At the same time, this smaller set of wACSFs leads to significantly better generalization performance in the machine learning potential than the large set of conventional ACSFs. Furthermore, we show that the intrinsic parameters of the descriptors can in principle be optimized with a genetic algorithm in a highly automated manner. For the wACSFs employed here, we find however that using a simple empirical parametrization scheme is sufficient in order to obtain HDNNPs with high accuracy.