Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) in the re/insurance industry in 2017, such as the alleged job losses at Fukoku Life Mutual and the rise of AI in the insurtech space, has sparked a series of discussions surrounding both the potential and concerns arising from this phenomenon. Many studies reach similar conclusions around the automation of jobs, with around 47 percent of total US employment is at risk of computerisation, based on a report from the Oxford University. A Bank of England study published in 2015, Labour's Share, suggested that up to 15 million jobs were at risk of being replaced by a robot. Intelligent Insurer spoke with an AI specialist at PwC, Anand Rao, who examined some of the potential that this medium has in the industry in terms of presenting new possibilities and sophistication as the more manual tasks in risk transfer could be automated in the future. While he was very positive about the use of AI as a tool for the industry, he said: "There are a few concerns surrounding security--privacy, confidentiality of individual-level and company-level data--and also any bias behind the decision-making of the machine itself," Furthermore, Intelligent Insurer also sent out a survey on AI, asking whether its readers see it as an opportunity or threat to their job or business.

The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 has been the subject of countless rumours over recent months, but the latest leaks all but confirm an unusual design choice that could be cause for concern. Thanks to the handset's enlarged screen, Samsung has decided to completely drop the home button and move the fingerprint scanner to the back of the phone. However, Samsung appears to have taken a very different approach to rival smartphone manufacturers that have also embraced the rear-mounted sensor. Schematics released by Cnet Korea suggest that the Galaxy S8's fingerprint scanner will sit right beside the camera sensor, rather than a couple of centimetres below it. Users will inevitably end up inadvertently fingering the larger camera lens instead of the fingerprint scanner, which will need wiping down if enough dirt builds up over its surface.

From left, Dr Michael Tompsett (UK), Professor Eric Fossum (USA) and Professor Nobukazu Teranishi (Japan) are announced as the winners of the 2017 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering at Carlton House Terrace on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017 in London. Taking a selfie is one of the easiest and quickest things you can do on your smartphone. But as with any landmark invention, it took decades and plenty of graft to develop the camera technology that lives in your pocket. A trio of engineers behind the invention of the image-sensing technology found in billions of smartphones, camera phones, PCs and hospital scanning technology, won the £1 million ($1.3 million) Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering on Wednesday, and spoke about where the image-sensor technology they developed should go in the future. "I feel gobsmacked and very thankful to the Queen Elizabeth prize for this honor," said one of the engineers, Eric Fossum.

The face of homebrew, remote-controlled military robotics in Iraq is a man named Ali Hashem al-Daraji, better known by the nickname Abu Ali. In 2014 he was a policeman for Iraq's interior ministry, but in June of that year, when the Iraqi Security Forces collapsed as ISIS took over Mosul, Abu Ali hooked up with the Hashd al Shaabi, or "Popular Mobilization Units," an umbrella organization of anti-ISIS militias, some of which had also fought against US forces during the Iraq War. Before eventually returning to the Iraqi Federal Police last November, Abu Ali fought with a couple of militia organizations across Iraq, was injured by an improvised explosive device in Fallujah, and took a selfie with Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran's covert-action Qods Force, in charge of Tehran's wars in Iraq and Syria and a sworn enemy of the US. "My purpose was to help the Hashd with minimal casualties," he says. Abu Ali produces little wheeled robots designed to allow troops to fire from behind cover.

Recently, I've been learning about Gradient Descent. It's a really beautiful algorithm that helps find the optimal solution to a function, and forms the foundations of how we train intelligent systems today. It's based off a very simple idea -- rather than figuring out the best solution to a problem immediately, it guesses an initial solution and steps it in a direction that's closer to a better solution. The algorithm is to repeat this procedure, until the solution is good enough. My theory is that this is the way we humans work.

The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) invites applications for a postdoctoral Research Associate for the project'Policy, Responsible Innovation and the Future of AI'. The appointment will be for 3 years, and is based in Cambridge. CFI is an exciting new interdisciplinary research centre addressing the challenges and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence (AI). Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, CFI is based at the University of Cambridge, with partners in the University of Oxford, Imperial College, and UC Berkeley, and close links with industry partners and policymakers. This project examines the prospects for a robust safety and benefits culture within the AI industry, in anticipation of the development of increasingly powerful AI systems that will present ever-greater real-world opportunities and challenges.

WikiLeaks has turned its focus to the upcoming French presidential election, revealing that its archives contain thousands of potentially sensitive documents on three candidates. A series of posts on its Twitter account targeted Republican Francois Fillon, far-right leader Marine Le Pen and independent candidate Emmanuel Macron. WikiLeaks claims to have over 3,000 files on Fillon, whose popularity has dropped amid allegations that he paid his wife close to €1 million of public money with little evidence of work. Fillon denies any wrongdoing, but calls for him to drop out of the presidential race are mounting. Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls according to the latest numbers from Elabe, is the subject of a further 1,138 WikiLeaks documents.

Among the employees in highest demand are what Paul Kent calls "analytically creative problem-solvers." Almost every company has mounds of data, but it's these creative problem-solvers who use it to make profit-oriented decisions, like which product to make, what price to charge, or when to send someone a coupon. Paul Kent thinks about these star employees because, as vice president of big data initiatives in the R&D group at SAS Institute, his job is to look down the road and anticipate which kinds of creative problems to solve next with all that data. Kent sees big opportunities in two broad areas: speed and the cloud. Companies have spent the past few years gathering their data into one place.

It's a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions like Asperger's, this can make social situations extremely stressful. But what if there was a more objective way to measure and understand our interactions? Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say that they've gotten closer to a potential solution: an artificially intelligent wearable system that can predict if a conversation is happy, sad or neutral based on a person's speech patterns and vitals. "Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious," says graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a related paper with PhD candidate Mohammad Ghassemi that they will present at next week's Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in San Francisco.

Facebook is celebrating "Friends Day" around the world, showing a video to more than a billion people. The company has celebrated the made up holiday – ostensibly to celebrate "the importance of connecting" – the last two years. But in 2015 and 2016 it was celebrated on 4 February, which Facebook said at the time was also its birthday, and comes two days after it is being celebrated this year. It isn't clear how the day came about, how it is intended to help its users or what it's actually for. Facebook is celebrating by showing a video to every one of the more than a billion people who log into it each day, in which a person made up of tiny pictures of a users' friends is shown dancing around.