The 5 minute read by Conor McMahon, Reporter at FORA - Automated financial advice is expected to shake up the wealth management sector. "SO-CALLED'ROBO-ADVISORS' already manage billions of dollars in the US, but they have yet to make their way to these shores. Traditional wealth management has been largely untouched by the march of digital on this side of the Atlantic, and the sector is still overwhelmingly burdened by paper and admin work. Automated financial advice is already making waves in the UK, and Ireland could see a surge of robo-advice firms setting up shop in a bid to access investors in Europe. Fora spoke to fintech expert Peter Oakes, founder of Fintech Ireland and a former director at the Central Bank, to get the lowdown on what exactly robo-advisors do and how they might shake things up in 2017"

To mark this festive time of year Speechmatics is delighted to announce the immediate availability of our Finnish language capability, in case any visitors from Lapland get lost and need to send an email via speech-to-text, especially late at night on Christmas eve. It's easier to speak than it is to type when wearing thick winter gloves and riding in a sleigh. It has been a momentous year for Speechmatics. Our world-leading Speech Recognition platform continues to stay ahead both in accuracy and efficiency, and with our AutoAuto language creation framework we have now released 18 languages, with more to come. Speechmatics wish everyone a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Could 2017 be any more turbulent than 2016? Some would argue that because of last year's unprecedented surprises, fluctuating markets and politics and real-world events, this year couldn't possibly offer any more shocks. In the midst of all of this, the technology world continues unabated, with the FinTech sector holding some exciting new developments for the year ahead. For too long, consumers have had to bear the "Your call is very important to us, please continue to hold" banality, but 2017 could be the year where this unintelligent automation disappears. The advances in artificial intelligence have caused a small explosion of sorts in the FinTech sector, but this small bang could expand with the mainstream introduction of chatbots and smartbots, with human help only required for the really tricky questions.

Chatbots are automated text conversation computer programs that use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to talk to customers/users. Want to disappear from a fleeting relationship? Ghostbot is a burner text messaging bot that will ghost you away. Need something to do to pass the time? Send a text to the Casper mattress company's chatbot and talk about anything and everything.

Galileo viewed nature as a book written in the language of mathematics and decipherable through physics. His metaphor may have been a stretch for his milieu, but not for ours. Ours is a world of digits that must be read through computer science. It is a world in which artificial-intelligence (AI) applications perform many tasks better than we can. Like fish in water, digital technologies are our infosphere's true natives, while we analogue organisms try to adapt to a new habitat, one that has come to include a mix of analogue and digital components.

Ten years of Paris hospital admissions data, plus external information including weather, patterns of flu infection and public holidays, was ingested and analyzed by the Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP). Four of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) are trialing the new predictive system aimed at reducing hospital waiting times. TAP is an open-source analysis platform that uses machine learning to create tools and services across a range of industries. The AP-HP project is the first to use open source time series analysis, and the TAP engineers that worked on the system had to build new sets of code. If the project is successful, plans are to implement the prediction system through the entirety of the 44 hospitals in the AP-HP group.

The partnership between car brands and their timepiece counterparts extends longer than you and I can even imagine. We've seen these partnerships manifest themselves in one form or another, with some even taking the form of obscenely expensive, limited edition watches. If there ever was a new frontier for the partnership between these two industries, Swiss watchmaker Swatch may have opened that door. A report from watch-dedicated website TwentyTwoTen revealed Read More ... Places: Americas North America United States The two models posed near their flashy cars as they reunited for the sexy photo op. Both Chyna and Amber posted the three photos to their Instagram accounts as they showed off their curves and cars.

Google's artificial intelligence projects have created a lot of headlines in recent months. From their DeepMind project beating champions of Alpha Go at their own game, to recent announcements Magneta and Springboard, not to mention driverless cars, its clear that AI and Machine Learning are central to Google's strategy across its vast portfolio. This week the company also announced the opening of a new Machine Learning R&D Centre in Europe. In a recent interview with Hollywood Reporter, Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt played down the fears that surround advancements in AI: 'To be clear, we're not talking about consciousness, we're not talking about souls, we're not talking about independent creativity." However, being acutely aware of the concerns around intelligent technology, the company's AI research division Google Brain recently published an AI Precision Safety whitepaper.

An unusual fleet of self-driving cars will take to the road in coming months. Unlike most automated vehicles, which are programmed to deal with the situations they may encounter, these cars will have taught themselves, in simulation, how to handle tricky scenarios safely. The cars will learn to navigate busy intersections, crowded highways, and packed rotaries using reinforcement learning, an approach inspired by the way animals learn to associate a reward with the behavior that led to it. Mobileye, an Israeli company that provides vehicle safety systems to many carmakers, announced at CES in Las Vegas last week that it will test the approach on the road, in collaboration with the German automaker BMW and the chip company Intel, in the second half of this year. In reinforcement learning, a computer is not hand-coded, or given specific examples to learn from; instead, it experiments, altering its own programming in light of the behavior that most reliably leads to a certain result.

LAS VEGAS – Professor Einstein can roll his eyes, stick out his tongue and give a simple explanation of the theory of relativity. With his lifelike rubbery "skin" and bushy mustache, he can almost make you forget he is a robot. The Einstein robot is among dozens roaming the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that can be your companion or educator or baby-sit your children. Japan's SoftBank Robotics meanwhile announced a partnership that will allow its humanoid robot Pepper to travel onboard state-owned SNCF trains in France to assist travelers. While robots have been around for years, advances in technology and artificial intelligence have allowed developers to give them traits that enable the devices to be seen as members of the family.