Amplyfi, a start-up that specialises in mining and interpreting data from the Deep Web using artificial intelligence, is to create forty new jobs in Cardiff following support from the Welsh Government. A £400,000 0% interest loan from the Welsh Government's Repayable Fund for SMEs will enable Amplyfi to take on more highly skilled staff to support and refine its business intelligence platform, DataVoyant. The funding follows an August 2016 investment by SME investors Finance Wales Group to accelerate the growth of high-potential businesses in Wales. Amplyfi moved to Cardiff in December 2015 where it has been developing and piloting DataVoyant their flagship product. DataVoyant combines Surface and Deep Web data mining, artificial intelligence and data visualisation in a single user-friendly platform - an industry first.

Shopping mall travel agency shops are so 1999 and online booking needs more interaction, right? Wouldn't you prefer to book after chatting to a virtual'bot' that has more cognitive power and destination intelligence than a human being? IBM is opening a new raft of UK cloud datacenters, but positive progress asside this is not necessarily news. Every weighty cloud player worth its salt is continuing to press ahead with datacenter expansion plans across the European mainland (Rackspace has just announced plans for a new German facility this week) and similar expansion is being seen in the Americas and the rest of the world. All of this (largely, it appears) irrespective of Brexit, the new US presidency and the current state of play on Dancing With The Stars and/or Strictly Come Dancing (delete as'transatlantically' appropriate).

Earlier in November, Careem launched Dubai's first female chauffeur service for women, called Ameera. When it comes to startup success stories in the UAE, ride-hailing service Careem is undoubtedly in the driving seat. Every week thousands of people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region download the Careem app to their phones and order a car for the first time. Last week, it announced a new partnership with Apple whereby app users can order rides through Siri, the voice command service on iOS. In just about four years, Careem has become a basic tool for those in need of transportation in 25 cities across 10 countries.

The forests of beech, oak, and ash trees that dot the Danish countryside erupt in shades of orange and gold each fall. As beautiful as it is to see from the forest floor, it's even more impressive from above. "When you look down, the colors are more dense," says Danish photographer Michael B. Rasmussen. "You see much more of them at once." Rasmussen discovered this in November, 2015, after his wife bought him a DJI Phantom III drone for his birthday. He took it for a spin in the woods near his home in Naestved, and snapped a few photos.

Organisations including the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions will be able to see UK citizen's entire internet browsing history in weeks. The Investigatory Powers Bill, which was all but passed into law this week, forces internet providers to keep a full list of Internet Connection Records (ICRs) for a year, and make them available to the government if it asks. Those ICRs effectively serve as a full list of every website that people have visited, not collecting which specific pages are visited or what's done on them but serving as a full list of every site that someone has visited and when. And those same ICRs will be made available to a wide range of government bodies. Those include expected law enforcement organisations like the police, the military and the secret service – but also contain bodies like the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, council bodies and the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust.

The boss of Reddit deleted comments from a Donald Trump-supporting community on his site, he has admitted. Steve Huffman, who co-founded the site and posts on it under the username spez, has said that he removed comments from Reddit's "The_Donald" community. That page has been one of the most prominent communities supporting Donald Trump online. In particular, he deleted comments that took issue with him. When users wrote "fuck u/spez", he changed the name to those of the managers of the subreddit – essentially meaning that any criticism was altered so that it lookde like it was being made towards the subreddit's own moderators.

I have been giving two talks recently on the machine learning workflow, discussing pain points within it and how we might address them. First one was at Spark Summit Europe at Brussels, the other one at MLConf at San Francisco. You can find videos and slides for each below. Main message is that the machine learning workflow is not that simple. That was a great event.

DeepMind, Google's UK-based AI subsidiary, has signed a new agreement with the NHS after the pair's February deal was scrutinized over the amount and type of patient data Google would have access to. An investigative report by the New Scientist revealed that Google would have access to a huge trove of patient data without the patients' express consent, a potential violation of NHS information governance principles. With the new announcement, DeepMind is taking care to avoid a repeat of that situation with a host of new data protections. The new agreement is a five-year partnership with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. It will be a deployment of DeepMind's Streams app, which helps doctors get information about their acute kidney failure patients – including blood tests– faster, which will enable faster diagnostics in situations where time is of the essence. Once the app gets through the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (similar to the United States' FDA), DeepMind plans to roll it out to NHS hospitals in early 2017.

Market Definition With the rise in customer service standards and customer expectations, the customer service market is growing fast around the world. According to Radiant Insights report, the Global Outsourced Customer Care Services market was valued USD 62.5 billion in 2014, with estimation of USD 84.7 billion by 2020, growing at 5.2% from 2014 to 2020. Out of this, the Customer Interaction Service market was USD 51.6 billion in 2014 and expected to reach USD 68.6 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 12.1%. These interactions include communication across different channels, like email, instant message, social media, telephone, and SMS. Currently, North America leads in the segment with the industry share of 55.1% in 2014.

"If you like me, why would you talk like this to me?" Ask Microsoft's Chinese chatbot Xiaoice about Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and that's how she responds. She also skirts around highly sensitive topics like the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests, Chinese President Xi Jinping or even President-elect Donald Trump. Xiaoice has become hugely popular since she was introduced in 2014. More than 40 million Chinese smartphone users chat with her on the social media platforms WeChat or Weibo every day, according to Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30). A quarter of them have declared their love for her.