In studying the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow concluded that conventional engineering approaches to ensuring safety – building-in more warnings and safeguards – will always fail in the face of increasing system complexity. He called the nuclear accident a "normal accident." Similarly, the Chernobyl accident in 1986, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, the 2008 financial crisis and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 are, in fact, perfectly normal. We just don't know when or how a black swan will show up.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will "significantly transform" the insurance industry in the next three years, with insurers investing in AI to empower agents, brokers and employees to enhance the customer experience with automated personalized services, faster claims handling and individual risk-based underwriting processes, according to a new report from Accenture. The Technology Vision for Insurance 2017 report, called Technology for People, released on Wednesday by the global professional services company, found that while the technology will be empowering, insurers face challenges integrating AI into their existing technology. Insurers cite issues such as data quality, privacy and infrastructure compatibility. The report is based on the insights of a technology advisory board, interviews with industry technologists and a survey of more than 550 insurance executives across 31 countries in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and South America, Accenture noted in a press release. The goal of the survey was to identify the key issues and priorities for technology adoption and investment.

How many virtual assistants can you fit in one smartphone? European network operator Orange is hoping there's room to squeeze in one more. With the right apps, you can already talk to Alexa, Cortana and Google through your smartphone -- and maybe also to Siri or Bixby if you went with one of the big brands. Djingo will be able to answer questions, send text messages, place calls, play music and video from Orange's set-top box, and control smart home devices. It draws on the company's research into linguistics and artificial intelligence, and will even offer financial advice in conjunction with a new banking service Orange is launching, the company said.

A year ago, Bertrand Vallage took a submarine to the bottom of the French Mediterranean to fix instruments his team had installed there for a physics experiment. Some cables had fallen loose from their connections, and Vallage and his submarine crew were there to plug them back in so the experiment could get back to work detecting tiny particles called neutrinos. In principle, they could reconnect each cable in five minutes using two clumsy metal arms connected to the submarine. But as they maneuvered the joysticks that controlled the arms, they kept dropping the cables, kicking up dust from the seabed. Each time, they had to bring the cable inside the submarine and clean it, over and over again.

Among the big fields, A.I. will have a substantial impact on its logistics, and no industry knows how to manage these better than the retail industry. Below is an interesting article showing what a major German retail company is doing in terms of logistics, leading the field and exemplifying real-world A.I. applications. A GLIMPSE into the future of retailing is available in a smallish office in Hamburg. From there, Otto, a German e-commerce merchant, is using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its activities. The firm is already deploying the technology to make decisions at a scale, speed and accuracy that surpass the capabilities of its human employees.

Dogs have been found to ease loneliness among the elderly, but the responsibility of caring for'man's best friend' can be too demanding for some. Now, researchers have created a'emotional' robotic pub that could solve this issue. Dubbed MiRo, the biomimetic robot that enjoys human interaction and could make a good companion for the elderly, according to its designers. MiRo is a biomimetic robot that enjoys human interaction and could make a good companion for the elderly. This robot pup MiRo is fitted with various sensors that mean it can'feel' a stroke on its head or back, and even wags its tail when it's feeling happy.

At the end of April Vienna will introduce not only deep discussions, but also execution some of the hottest ideas on topics like chatbots and AI. With numerous events every month, an "un-conference" BotBarCamp Vienna will be held on the 29 – 30 of April at the ImpactHub Vienna. A BarCamp is an event of user-generated talks, primarily focused around one particular topic per gathering. "With the Chatbot Conference in October, the chatbot incubator Lemmings twice a year, the new chatbot accelerator Elevate and our monthly BotsHub meetups, the BotBarCamp in Spring is the natural sequence, that simply came to my mind" – says Barbara Ondrisek, co-organiser of the event. The topics of the upcoming days will be chatbots, AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech-To-Text and others.

Amazon is the exception to nearly every rule in business. Rising from humble beginnings as a Seattle-based internet bookstore, Amazon has grown into a propulsive force in at least five different giant industries: retail, logistics, consumer technology, cloud computing, and most recently, media and entertainment. The company has had its share of missteps -- the expensive Fire phone flop comes to mind -- but is also rightly known for strokes of strategic genius that have put it ahead of competitors in promising new industries. This was the case with the launch of cloud business AWS in the mid-2000s, and more recently the surprising consumer hit in the Echo device and its Alexa AI assistant. Today's Amazon is far more than just an "everything store," it's a leader in consumer-facing AI and enterprise cloud services. And its insatiable appetite for new markets mean competitors must always be on guard against its next moves.

When it comes to robotics, the animal kingdom is always a source of inspiration and biomimicry is an extremely common phenomenon. After making robot versions of animals as varied as an octopus, an African primate called galago and a bat in the past 11 months alone -- always with the purpose of fine-tuning our machines -- researchers have now turned to the world's fastest land animal, the cheetah. Geert Folkertsma from the University of Twente in the Netherlands built a scaled-down version of the cheetah for his doctoral thesis. Adjusting for scale, the robot uses about 15 percent more energy than a real cheetah, which is very efficient, energy-wise. It weighs about 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) and measures about 30 centimeters (one foot) long, and can travel at the speed of 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) an hour.

The words we use and our writing styles can reveal information about our preferences, thoughts, emotions and behaviours. Using this information, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland has developed machine learning models that can detect antisocial behaviours, such as hate speech and indications of violence, from texts. Historically, most attempts to address antisocial behaviour have been done from education, social and psychological points of view. This new study has, however, demonstrated the potential of using natural language processing techniques to develop state-of-the-art solutions to combat antisocial behaviour in written communication. The study created solutions that can be integrated in web forums or social media websites to automatically or semi-automatically detect potential incidences of antisocial behaviour with high accuracies, allowing for fast and reliable warnings and interventions to be made before the possible acts of violence are committed. One of the great challenges in detecting antisocial behaviour is first defining what precisely counts as antisocial behaviour and then determining how to detect such phenomena.