When thousands of football fans pour into Cardiff's Principality Stadium on June 3 to watch the final match of the UEFA Champions League, few will be aware that their faces will have already been scanned, processed, and compared to a police database of some 500,000 "persons of interest". According to a government tender issued by South Wales Police, the system will be deployed during the day of the game in Cardiff's main train station, as well as in and around the Principality Stadium situated in the heart of Cardiff's central retail district. Cameras will potentially be scanning the faces of an estimated 170,000 visitors plus the many more thousands of people in the vicinity of the bustling Saturday evening city center on match day, June 3. Captured images will then be compared in real time to 500,000 custody images stored in the police information and records management system alerting police to any "persons of interest," according to the tender. The security operation will build on previous police use of Automated Facial Recognition, or AFR technology by London's Metropolitan Police during 2016's Notting Hill Carnival.

As banking organisations, financial services providers and brands predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the business development strategy for 2017 and beyond. AI is already around us and used everyday within payments, money management and for robo-advice, particularly in the area of intelligent digital assistants that handle regular customer service enquiries and tasks. It can process'big data' far more efficiently than humans and can recognise speech, images, text, patterns of online behaviour, for example to detect fraud as well as appropriate advertisements for upselling. Smart machines and technology can turn data into customer insights and enhance service provisions, bringing the digital experience closer to the human interaction for consumers. Santander announced it is to provide secure transactions using voice recognition via its banking app, while Royal Bank of Scotland has trialled'Luvo' AI customer service assistance to interact with staff and potentially serve customers in the future.

AI and Machine Learning was voted the most transformative analytics tool for insurance. In fact, 94% of respondents agreed that AI is going to have a medium or significant impact on analytics. AI is going to hit insurance big time – so you need to ensure you're prepared for the future. One way to do this is to check out our newly released "AI, Analytics and GDPR Survey 2017", where we quizzed 250 of the brightest minds in insurance. By reading it, you'll get the low-down on the latest trends in analytics, AI and GDPR and be able to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Add one more perk to Ikea's elegant, affordable selection of smart lighting products: you can soon control them with your voice. The Swedish furniture giant revealed Wednesday it will add support for digital voice assistants such as Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, and Apple's Siri via the Home app. The voice feature will roll out during the summer into early fall. Ikea launched the TRÅDFRI line of smart products last year in North America and Europe, billing it as a low-cost way to add to smart home tech. According to Ikea's website, a gateway kit featuring two bulbs, remote control, and a gateway to access broadband Internet costs $79.99, while dimming kits go for roughly $27.

In a timely reminder that we're pretty much living in a sci-fi future that writers from the 1950s could only have dreamed of, law enforcement officers in the UK are now turning to AI to predict future crime. But before you go daydreaming of Minority Report-style "precogs" swimming in vats of strange blue liquid, you should know that this system is a bit different than the one Tom Cruise was so adapt at utilizing. The system, called HART (short for Harm Assessment Risk Tool), is built specifically to form an opinion about current offenders and offer police a guess as to whether or not they're going to reoffend to become an even bigger problem down the road. It was built by a University of Cambridge professor in partnership with other agencies and institutions, and it uses a three-tiered "risk category" system to assign arrested suspects with either a high, medium, or low risk label. The advanced tool utilizes a total of 34 different predictors including age, IQ, and gender, and most notably does not factor race into account whatsoever.

The Middle East and North Africa's youthful, fast-urbanizing population are perfectly placed to embrace technology and reap the rewards of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Much has been written already about the arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the opportunity that the convergence of its new technologies offers in terms of building value into production systems and economies around the world. In one sense, the playing field could be levelled out. Localized production is being made more feasible for many small producers, setting developing communities on a path towards self-sufficiency, while falling costs could enable factories of all sizes to boost their productivity levels. However, on the opposite side of the equation, news headlines have been dominated by predictions that human workers will be substituted by robots, leading to widespread job losses and heightened societal challenges. Additionally, doubt has been shed on the ability of regions that are less industrialized, or those with fractured economies and infrastructure, to be able to respond to these disruptions and compete effectively in the future.

Children and adults alike share an often unconscious need to fiddle and fidget, and the market for toys and gadgets to tackle these temptations seems to have exploded in recent years. But the science behind exactly what causes our drive to distraction remains unclear. In an article with The Conversation, Harriet Dempsey-Jones, a postdoctoral researcher in clinical neurosciences from the University of Oxford, suggests some possible explanations. And she also warns that using these types of toys may give off the wrong impression to people we might be talking to while playing with them. The growing craze for fidget spinners (pictured), marketed as stress relievers, has led to them being banned in some schools.

Brightcrowd -- helps you find meaningful professional connections Capsule.ai Abi -- your virtual health assistant Ada -- can help if you're feeling unwell Airi -- personal health coach Alz.ai -- helps you care for loved ones with Alzheimer's Amélie -- chatbot for mental health Bitesnap -- food recognition from meal photos to help count calories doc.ai -- makes lab results easy to understand Gyan -- helps you go from symptoms to likely conditions Joy -- helps you track and improve your mental health Kiwi -- helps you to reduce and quit smoking Tess by X2AI-- therapist in your pocket Sleep.ai Amazon Echo / Alexa -- everyday personal assistant for in-home Apple Siri -- everyday personal assistant on iPhone and Mac Cortana-- everyday personal assistant on PC and Windows devices Facebook M -- competitors to Siri, Now and Cortana Focus -- helps you focus, get tasks done and prioritise your day Gatebox -- a holographic anime assistant in an espresso machine Google Assistant -- everyday personal assistant Hound -- everyday personal assistant Ling -- similar to Amazon Echo Mycroft -- is the world's first open source voice assistant Remi-- like Siri with an interface Spoken -- virtual assistant with an interface Viv -- like Siri but 10x better Clara -- meeting scheduling assistant Julie Desk -- meeting scheduling assistant (aimed at C-Suite) Kono -- meeting scheduling assistant Mimetic -- meeting scheduling assistant My Ally -- handles meeting scheduling and manages calendar SkipFlag -- automatically discover and organise your work Vesper -- virtual assistant aimed at C-Suite x.ai-- meeting scheduling assistant Zoom.ai -- personal assistant to help you at work Jottr -- content and news app that learns what you like and don't like News360 -- learns what you enjoy and finds stories you'll like Entrupy -- helps detect if high-end designer products are authentic Fify -- helps you shop for clothing GoFind -- helps you find clothing online by taking a photo Mode.ai -- helps you find clothing online Abe -- fast answers about your finances Andy -- a personal Tax Accountant Ara -- helps you budget Bond -- helps you achieve your financial goals Mylo -- rounds up your everyday purchases and invest the spare change Olivia -- helps you manage your finances Responsive-- institutional-grade active portfolio management Roger -- helps you pay bills easily Wallet -- AI for your daily finance decisions Xoe.ai -- AI lending chatbot Firedrop -- websites designed automatically, just add content and publish Hashley -- ironic hashtag and comment generator for your photos Millions.ai Aerial -- home activity, movement and identity sensor Bridge.ai Eli -- helps you learn a new language from conversations through your day Kick.ai

Microsoft executive Todd Holmdahl has led teams to invent profitable new computing hardware products before. His latest project is his first with a chance of hauling in a Nobel Prize in physics as well as new revenue if it succeeds. Holmdahl previously oversaw the hardware design of the Xbox and Xbox360 consoles, which rake in billions for Microsoft each year. Late last year he was appointed the leader of a swelling band of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers trying to add mighty computers powered by quantum physics to Microsoft's menu of cloud computing services. Holmdahl speaks about quantum computing like a tech executive would a new line of business, not a speculative physics or R&D project.

We introduce dropout compaction, a novel method for training feed-forward neural networks which realizes the performance gains of training a large model with dropout regularization, yet extracts a compact neural network for run-time efficiency. In the proposed method, we introduce a sparsity-inducing prior on the per unit dropout retention probability so that the optimizer can effectively prune hidden units during training. By changing the prior hyperparameters, we can control the size of the resulting network. We performed a systematic comparison of dropout compaction and competing methods on several real-world speech recognition tasks and found that dropout compaction achieved comparable accuracy with fewer than 50% of the hidden units, translating to a 2.5x speedup in run-time.