The insurance industry has always used analytics and insights as a key competitive advantage, and there have been significant advances in growing analytics capabilities in recent years. However - analytics is set to take a huge leap forward. Machine learning and artificial intelligence has the potential to completely transform an entire insurance organization, but where and how can machine learning be practically applied by insurers? Insurance Nexus recently spoke with executive insurance leaders from AIG & Zurich Insurance to understand just that. Check out the full whitepaper, "Anything You Can Do, AI Can Do Better: Insurance Applications for Machine Learning" (1.fc-bi.com/LP

Inequality goes back to the Stone Age. Thirty thousand years ago, bands of hunter-gatherers in Russia buried some members in sumptuous graves replete with thousands of ivory beads, bracelets, jewels and art objects, while other members had to settle for a bare hole in the ground. Nevertheless, ancient hunter-gatherer groups were still more egalitarian than any subsequent human society, because they had very little property. Property is a pre-requisite for long-term inequality. Following the agricultural revolution, property multiplied and with it inequality.

Antwerp (Belgium) – May 16, 2017 – Today, at the imec technology forum (ITF2017), imec, the world-leading research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technologies, demonstrated the world's first self-learning neuromorphic chip. The brain-inspired chip, based on OxRAM technology, has the capability of self-learning and has been demonstrated to have the ability to compose music. The human brain is a dream for computer scientists: it has a huge computing power while consuming only a few tens of Watts. Imec researchers are combining state-of-the-art hardware and software to design chips that feature these desirable characteristics of a self-learning system. Imec's ultimate goal is to design the process technology and building blocks to make artificial intelligence to be energy efficient so that that it can be integrated into sensors.

Thousands of angry British Airways passengers on Sunday confronted long lines, confusion and canceled flights at London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports as the airline worked to fix computer systems crippled by a massive global IT failure. British Airways said Sunday that it was still working on the massive problem, which caused the airline to cancel all flights from the two London airports. "Work continues to restore all of our IT systems, but we expect some further disruption today," the airline said. The airline said that it hoped to operate a "near normal schedule" at Gatwick and the "majority of services" from Heathrow on Sunday. The airline offered to refund or rebook customers affected by the problem.

British Airways said Sunday that it was still working to restore its computer systems following a major system failure that caused the airline to cancel all flights from London airports. "Work continues to restore all of our IT systems but we expect some further disruption today," BA said in a statement. The airline offered to refund or rebook customers affected by the IT failure and said it hopes to operate at a "near normal schedule" at Gatwick and the "majority of services" from Heathrow on Sunday. British Airways flights from London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports were canceled Saturday because of global computer problems, resulting in mass confusion and chaos for tens of thousands of travelers on a busy holiday weekend. The airline said it was suffering a "major IT systems failure" around the world.

Exterion Media – the UK-based out-of-home (OOH) advertising outfit with some of the most lucrative contracts in Europe – is up for sale, with its US-based owners Platinum Equity reportedly asking for up to $1bn, according to...

Fighting your way through crowded aisles of shoppers can be a stressful experience, but Amazon is launching a service that could soon make this a thing of the past. AmazonFresh Pickup lets consumers order their groceries online and will have them ready to pick up in as little as 15 minutes. And to make the experience even less hassle, crew members from the retail firm will deliver the items directly to your car. The firm has just opened up two kiosks in Seattle with plans to expand the service if trials go well. Amazon has launched a Fresh Pickup service that will have your online grocery order ready to in collect in as little as 15 minutes.

Despite his aversion to jargon, Weiss was among the most optimistic of the group. In recent weeks, he's closely followed the developments of UK-based Alphabet company DeepMind, which taught computers to master an ancient game called Go. For Weiss, what mattered is how the computer "changed the way the game gets made" after thousands of years of humans playing it. He hopes that Google might somehow figure out ways to crack complex problems like obesity by understanding the biological factors that drive people to gain weight or put weight back on. The hope, he said, "is to be unbiased and let the data tell us how to do things."

This survey outlines a general and modular theory for proving approximation guarantees for equilibria of auctions in complex settings. This theory complements traditional economic techniques, which generally focus on exact and optimal solutions and are accordingly limited to relatively stylized settings. We highlight three user-friendly analytical tools: smoothness-type inequalities, which immediately yield approximation guarantees for many auction formats of interest in the special case of complete information and deterministic strategies; extension theorems, which extend such guarantees to randomized strategies, no-regret learning outcomes, and incomplete-information settings; and composition theorems, which extend such guarantees from simpler to more complex auctions.

This study seeks to validate a search protocol of ill health-related terms using Twitter data which can later be used to understand if, and how, Twitter can reveal information on the current health situation. We extracted conversations related to health and disease postings on Twitter using a set of pre-defined keywords, assessed the prevalence, frequency, and timing of such content in these conversations, and validated how this search protocol was able to detect relevant disease tweets. Classification and Regression Trees (CART) algorithm was used to train and test search protocols of disease and health hits comparing to those identified by our team. The accuracy of predictions showed a good validity with AUC beyond 0.8. Our study shows that monitoring of public sentiment on Twitter can be used as a real-time proxy for health events.