With the advent of Chatbots, personal assistants and robo-advisors, it may not be too hard to imagine that the next wave of technology could revolutionize the traditional style of banking. An Accenture report recently indicated that within the next three years, banks will deploy Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) as their primary method to interact with customers. In early 2016, Swedish-speaking Amelia became the first non-English deployment of IPsoft's AI platform at SEB, one of Sweden's largest bank. The bank adopted "digital employee" Amelia to integrate into its front-office. The cognitive agent solves problems just like humans "but in a fraction of the time", interacts just like humans and even senses emotions.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to fundamentally change the way a wide range of industries approach the procurement, processing, and distribution of raw materials and finished products. New efficiencies based on the introduction of intelligent sensors, mission-critical communications, automation, and robotics will optimize industries ranging from mining and shipping to manufacturing verticals including electronics, automotive and petrochemical products. This emerging megatrend is alternatively called the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Industry 4.0, although these aren't interchangeable terms. Let's take a look at both. The First Industrial Revolution, which started in Britain around 1760 and ran until between 1820 and 1840, saw the mechanization of the textile industry via a transition from hand tools to machine tools.

In the hope of making Alexa as life-like as possible, Amazon has introduced new updates to its AI assistant's voice. Alexa can now whisper, bleep out swear-words, add emphasis to words and even be programmed to say regional-specific phrases. The update has been rolled out to devices in the US, UK, and Germany. Amazon's Alexa can now whisper, bleep out swear-words, add emphasis to words and even be programmed to say regional-specific phrases. The changes are to Amazon's Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) – a standardised markup language that allows developers to control pronunciation, intonation, timing and emotion.

Amazon is expanding its R&D facilities in Cambridge, UK, with a plan to move into a new 60,000 sq ft site in the city with capacity for more than 400 staff. Cambridge University, one of the UK's top tier academic institutions, has a strong focus on science -- explaining why a raft of tech firms (not just Amazon) have chosen to site R&D efforts there. Announcing the expansion of its Cambridge development operations yesterday, Amazon said staff at the site will include machine learning scientists, knowledge engineers, data scientists, mathematical modellers, speech scientists and software engineers, with teams set to work on programs including its drone delivery effort, Prime Air; Amazon devices; and Alexa, its AI voice assistant tech. It said its existing development building in the city, at Castle Hill, will be used primarily for research and development related to its drone delivery efforts, once the new One The Square R&D facility opens this fall. The new R&D building is located in the business district adjacent to Cambridge train station, putting it less than an hour by rail from London.

Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious--and quite possibly crackpot--theory about the quantum origins of consciousness. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant ("One of the very few people I've met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius," physicist Lee Smolin has said), we'd be foolish to dismiss their theory out of hand. Penrose, 85, is a mathematical physicist who made his name decades ago with groundbreaking work in general relativity and then, working with Stephen Hawking, helped conceptualize black holes and gravitational singularities, a point of infinite density out of which the universe may have formed. He also invented "twistor theory," a new way to connect quantum mechanics with the structure of spacetime. His discovery of certain geometric forms known as "Penrose tiles"--an ingenious design of non-repeating patterns--led to new directions of study in mathematics and crystallography. The breadth of Penrose's interests is extraordinary, which is evident in his recent book Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe--a dense 500-page tome that challenges some of the trendiest but still unproven theories in physics, from the multiple dimensions of string theory to cosmic inflation in the first moment of the Big Bang. He considers these theories to be fanciful and implausible.

Most neuroscientists believe that the brain learns by rewiring itself--by changing the strength of connections between brain cells, or neurons. But experimental results published a few years ago, from a lab at Lund University in Sweden, hint that we need to change our approach. They suggest the brain learns in a way more analogous to that of a computer: It encodes information into molecules inside neurons and reads out that information for use in computational operations. With a computer scientist, Adam King, I co-authored a book, Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience. We argued that well-established results in cognitive science and computer science imply that computation in the brain must resemble computation in a computer in just this way.

Silke Pan of Team PolyWalk EPFL in the powered exoskeleton race. Most physical competitions are based around the idea of participants pushing themselves physically, demonstrating to the world that they are the fastest, strongest, or otherwise physically gifted. For those with significant physical disabilities or injuries, however, simply accomplishing basic everyday tasks can be an Olympic-level feat. That's where Cybathlon, a new competition designed to promote innovative assistive devices, may accomplish two goals: providing a competitive forum for disabled athletes, and highlighting the specific advances that are being made in robotic assistive aids designed to help those with significant physical disabilities. Conceived and developed by Switzerland's ETH Zurich (a science and research university) and National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics professor Robert Riener, the first iteration of Cybathlon took place last October in Zurich.

On this cheerful Tuesday morning, Angela Merkel is at peace with herself and her country. She is standing in a factory loft in central Berlin and listening to Rami Rihawi, a refugee from Syria, who, in his blue suit and only slightly accented German, looks as though he has just jumped out of a glossy brochure on successful integration. After fleeing his homeland to Germany, Rihawi attended a school for computer experts, the site of Merkel's visit. He then received an internship at steel retailer Klöckner before being offered a fulltime job at the company. "We were extremely happy that Rami accepted our job offer," says Klöckner CEO Gisbert Rühl, who is standing proudly next to Rihawi.

It's time to speak about experience design in banking. In an industry with notoriously strict regulations, it has always been slow progress to deliver risk-averse change for banking users! That said, UX is increasingly edging it's way front and centre in business, so we are meeting with some of the practitioners on the ground and exploring the past, present and future of the'user' in banking. To attend our events, we require you to buy an advanced ticket – Please make sure you purchased a ticket to secure your place! Price includes entry to the event, plus drinks (Beers, Wines, Soft Drinks) and food!! Important lease note - tickets are NON-REFUNDABLE, please do not purchase a ticket if you are unable to come as we have limited seating and have to purchase the correct amount of food and drink.

Cancer cells are to be detected and classified more efficiently and accurately, using ground-breaking artificial intelligence – thanks to a new collaboration between the University of Warwick, Intel Corporation, the Alan Turing Institute and University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust (UHCW). Scientists at the University of Warwick's Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) Laboratory--led by Professor Nasir Rajpoot from the Department of Computer Science--are creating a large, digital repository of a variety of tumour and immune cells found in thousands of human tissue samples, and are developing algorithms to recognize these cells automatically. "We are very excited about working with Intel under the auspices of the strategic relationship between Intel and the Alan Turing Institute," said Professor Rajpoot, who is also an Honorary Scientist at University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust (UHCW). "The collaboration will enable us to benefit from world-class computer science expertise at Intel with the aim of optimising our digital pathology image analysis software pipeline and deploying some of the latest cutting-edge technologies developed in our lab for computer-assisted diagnosis and grading of cancer." The digital pathology imaging solution aims to enable pathologists to increase their accuracy and reliability in analysing cancerous tissue specimens over what can be achieved with existing methods.