Will physical shops cease to exist? Have we reached the end of online shopping in its current form? Are new technologies such as robots, drones, virtual and augmented reality taking over the shopping experience? These are some of the many questions that gathered retailers at the 2017 RetailDetail Congress in Schelle (Belgium), the pinnacle of the retail industry calendar. This event definitely resulted in food for thought on what to consider as a retailer in the very near future.

Inc., doesn't spend much time schmoozing with investors. He takes just a handful of meetings with the fund managers who own Amazon's shares each year. And when he comes to the U.K., there's just one investor he regularly meets with: Baillie Gifford. The 109-year old asset management firm, which manages 159 billion pounds and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, isn't exactly a household name, even in the U.K. And yet in the past decade, Baillie Gifford has emerged as one of the world's most active technology investors, and one of a tiny number of European investment houses that matter in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen.

Artificial Intelligence is one of those elusive tech concepts that we've been hearing about for the majority of our lives. Scientists and companies constantly come out saying'Now we'll bring you real AI'… But these days, Artificial Intelligence is no longer a thing from The Matrix, it's a part of our lives. If you think that there is no AI in your life, then you're most likely wrong. Task-specific AI has been with us for a while now. What we're still waiting for is Artificial General Intelligence.

The Google Home smart speaker has finally made it to the UK, bringing the company's always-listening voice assistant into direct competition with the incumbent Amazon Echo and its own assistant, Alexa. But is Google's best worth buying? Artificially intelligent voice assistants are the new battleground between the big US tech companies and while Google is no stranger with voice search and Google Now being available on Android smartphones for years, it was beaten into US and then UK households by Amazon and its hit Echo speaker. Google Home is a wifi-connected, voice-controlled smart speaker capable of playing music, answering questions and controlling other devices about the home. Inside awaits Assistant – Google's virtual assistant – the same Google Assistant present in many Android smartphones, including the Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S8 and others.

We are looking for a Software Engineer with Machine Learning experience to work alongside our technical team on internal and customer projects. This is a full-time permanent position based in Vienna, Austria. We follow a project-centric, structured, Scrum-inspired approach to all these activities. Our working environment is relaxed and diverse, with a pleasant office and flexible working arrangements - and probably the best Espresso machine in central Europe. If you feel comfortable in such a setting and are interested in the domain of natural language processing and the technologies we use, then we would love to hear from you! Please contact Sylvia Selwood at s.selwood@cortical.io to apply.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning is today's hot topic in nearly every profession. Unfortunately, the discussion has been centered on how artificial intelligence or AI will displace or outright eliminate entire professions. While it will not be easy, and many professionals may not succeed, AI is likely to transform and dramatically improve consumer-facing professions. Ironically, robots will help us be more human. Two Oxford University researchers, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, published a seminal exploratory study assessing how susceptible selected jobs in the U.S. may be to computerization.

The main task in oil and gas exploration is to gain an understanding of the distribution and nature of rocks and fluids in the subsurface. Well logs are records of petro-physical data acquired along a borehole, providing direct information about what is in the subsurface. The data collected by logging wells can have significant economic consequences, due to the costs inherent to drilling wells, and the potential return of oil deposits. In this paper, we describe preliminary work aimed at building a general framework for well log prediction. First, we perform a descriptive and exploratory analysis of the gaps in the neutron porosity logs of more than a thousand wells in the North Sea. Then, we generate artificial gaps in the neutron logs that reflect the statistics collected before. Finally, we compare Artificial Neural Networks, Random Forests, and three algorithms of Linear Regression in the prediction of missing gaps on a well-by-well basis.

The next time you go under the knife for retinal surgery, it may not be a human hand holding the blade. That's because a revolutionary surgical system developed University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, which just passed its first set of clinical trials, is able to perform these intricate operations better than even the steadiest surgeon. The problem lies in the pulse. Retinal surgeries rely on creating miniscule holes in the eye to gain access to the retina itself, a 10 micron thick flap of membrane that converts light into electrical signals that the brain can interpret. In the case of issues like an epiretinal membrane, essentially a scar on the retina caused by anything from injury to disease to just growing old, even the flow of blood through a surgeon's hands is enough to throw off their accuracy, raising the odds that they'll cut too deeply and make matters worse.

You've probably been hearing a lot of marketing buzz recently about "machine learning." More and more companies are using this new set of technologies that combine data mining and predictive analytics to automatically discover patterns in the data and to learn from those discoveries. For example, the first time you shop on a retail ecommerce site, you purchase a home brewing kit. The algorithms behind the scenes learn that you enjoy making your own beer. But they also have a ton of other customer data to pull from--in some cases, millions of customer profiles--many of whom also enjoy home brewing.

Monday, May 8th, London, UK - The Chief Science Officer of the Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF) will present new research on artificial intelligence for drug discovery at the NVIDIA Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) at the San Jose Convention Center, on Wednesday, May 10, 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM alongside two AI scientists from the BGRF and Insilico Medicine, where they will deliver a presentation titled "Applications of Generative Adversarial Networks to Drug Discovery in Oncology and Infectious Diseases". NVIDIA is the leader in computational hardware optimized for deep learning-based applications, and they are on the forefront of supporting research companies and institutions applying deep learning to grand unsolved problems, with the application of deep learning to drug discovery and development being no exception, as they described in detail in their article "Creating New Drugs, Faster: How AI Promises to Speed Drug Development". "The application of deep learning to ageing research is poised to make rapid progress on many fronts in the years to come. Foremost among these are the application of deep learning to the characterization of quantifiable and practically-measurable biomarkers of ageing (a necessity for the eventual regulatory evaluation and approval of healthspan-extending therapies) and the acceleration of drug discovery and development timelines by using deep learning to characterize drug candidates according to likely efficacy and safety prior to preclinical and clinical trials. AI, machine learning and deep learning have disrupted many industries and areas of activity that were previously the exclusive arena of human cognition, and in the coming years it seems likely that the pharmaceutical industry and the process of drug discovery and development will come to be radically disrupted by AI and deep learning-based approaches as well" said Franco Cortese, Deputy Director & Trustee of the Biogerontology Research Foundation.