President Vladimir Putin was interrupted by a robot in a bizarre incident at a Russian technology show. The leader shook hands with a robot during a visit to a technology firm after it recognised him and introduced itself. Putin, 64, was photographed shaking hands with the black and white robot during a visit to a technology firm in the city of Perm in central Russia's Perm Krai region. While the Russian leader was talking to the machine's creator, the robot recognised Putin's face and said hello The robot features a facial recognition feature and saw the Russian President. It then interrupted his creator who was speaking to Putin and introduced itself. The robot said: 'Hello Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin's full name, used to address him politely].

There are always risks when implementing new inventions and technologies, especially in highly regulated or particularly sensitive markets. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has an overall objective to ensure that financial markets work well -- maintaining consumer protection and overall market integrity. However, the FCA is also eager to promote competition in the interest of consumers, something that many new financial technology -- or FinTech -- innovations can provide. Traditional financial organisations can be hesitant to embrace new technology. However, it is important that the industry understands how this innovation brings positive market disruption by forcing adaptive thinking and processes.

AI startup DigitalBridge has created an app, which is designed to help people visualise how their home would look with a new lick of paint or some new furniture before making a decision they might later regret. The idea for the app came from David Levine and his wife, who wanted to redecorate the dining room in their Manchester (UK) home, but couldn't picture how any of the designs would look on their walls. The technology uses GPU-accelerated machine learning and computer vision to let people visualise how wallpaper, a coat of paint, new furniture and other home decor would look in their own rooms. "I figured I wasn't the only person who couldn't imagine what wallpaper would look like in a room," Levine said. In an independent survey conducted for DigitalBridge, about a third of shoppers said they'd delayed or cancelled decorating projects because they couldn't picture how items would look in their own homes.

Level 4 autonomous technology designed to allow drivers to take their minds off the road is to be tested in cars on French motorways later this year. Carmaker Groupe PSA has announced a partnership with Hungarian automotive software developer AImotive, to test a pilot programme at highway cruising speeds of up to 130 kilometres per hour, on 300km dedicated motorway sections. The project will test AI-based technologies including adaptive cruise control, fully automated lane changing, autonomous over-taking and collision avoidance, according to Adam Kotai, control engineer at AImotive. "We are testing our recognition capabilities, so recognising things like other cars, people and road lanes, as well as our capabilities for controlling the car, such as lane keeping," he said. The partnership is designed to demonstrate the potential of AI technology for so-called Level 4 capabilities, or highly autonomous vehicles, capable of driving safely even if the driver chooses not to intervene.

In France it is termed "Industrie du Futur", in Japan "Society 5.0 and Connected Industries", while in Canada it is called "Innovation and Skills Plan", and the European Union launched in 2016 "Digitising European Industry – Reaping the full benefits of a Digital Single Market", but the most commonly used term globally is the German "Industrie 4.0". However, the different approaches to this development give indications on the complexity of the phenomenon. Basically it is directed on the digital transformation of the society and its consequences with special focus on developments in robotics, the industrial application of artificial intelligence, 3D printing technologies and real-time big data analytics. When the Italian presidency of G7 calling to the first meeting September 25-26 it is these questions that are on the table with focus on innovation within the field. Small- and medium-sized businesses are seen as key-players in this development, and the necessary collaboration with bigger business and higher education requires openness concerning free flow of data and information, interoperability of systems, access to enabling digital infrastructures.

With recent advances in science and technology, particularly in machine learning, organizations need to adopt more comprehensive analytics strategies rather than basic analytics as large volumes of data is needed to be analyzed. Predictive learning is a technique of machine learning which aims to build a model that makes predictions based on evidence in the presence of uncertainty. It can be called as an attempt to learn with a minimum of pre-existing mental structure. Predictive learning helps in solving real world's problems in economics, business and government sector. Apart from this, it can be applied to a range of businesses to influence the future strategies including BFSI companies on account of escalating incidences of defaulters and stringent regulations for ensuring compliance with banking principles.

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As we prepare for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017, it seems like many clients have questions about artificial intelligence (AI). With AI as a theme for the event and a few sessions planned with CIOs in mind, Smarter With Gartner reached out to a few of our AI experts to learn what clients are concerned about when it comes to this technology. Client concerns about AI vary considerably. Many are focused on understanding how to apply AI to their business needs or what are the use cases for AI. Others are concerned about the lack of a documented explanation for the output of models created using deep neural networks.

In order to maximize the lifetime value of a customer, you have to be proactive to attract repeat business. This means you need to explore the ways to improve your customer experiences – in the short term and the long term. This blog explores three ways you can future proof your customer experiences. There is a big disconnect between what customers want and what organizations provide at key touch points in a customer's journey. Customers want your organization to understand what they want and adjust to their unique needs.

We consider the exploration/exploitation problem in reinforcement learning. For exploitation, it is well known that the Bellman equation connects the value at any time-step to the expected value at subsequent time-steps. In this paper we consider a similar uncertainty Bellman equation (UBE), which connects the uncertainty at any time-step to the expected uncertainties at subsequent time-steps, thereby extending the potential exploratory benefit of a policy beyond individual time-steps. We prove that the unique fixed point of the UBE yields an upper bound on the variance of the estimated value of any fixed policy. This bound can be much tighter than traditional count-based bonuses that compound standard deviation rather than variance. Importantly, and unlike several existing approaches to optimism, this method scales naturally to large systems with complex generalization. Substituting our UBE-exploration strategy for $\epsilon$-greedy improves DQN performance on 51 out of 57 games in the Atari suite.