The Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) has announced a partnership with IBM's AI platform Watson to introduce a virtual advisory service named Luvo. The pilot project, which is currently being rolled out to a select group of customers, employs Watson's Conversation technology to deliver a cloud-based chatbot service. The solution is expected to reach approximately 10% of RBS customers in Scotland by December this year, before rolling out to NatWest customers in England and Wales. Using the virtual advisory platform, customers will be able to deal with certain financial queries online – such as notifying the bank that they will be travelling abroad or updating address information. According to IBM's press release, Luvo will be able to manage these requests in seconds and direct any complex questions to a human operator.

SEB in Sweden is the first bank to use IPsoft's cognitive technology for customer services after the software robot proved successful in an internal IT service desk project. A collection of our most popular articles for IT leaders from the first few months of 2016, including: - Corporate giants recruit digitally-minded outsiders to drive transformation - Analytics platforms to drive strategy in 2016 - Next generation: The changing role of IT leaders. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers.

Star Trek got it right: In the future, we'll use computers by talking to them. Artificial intelligence will open the door to ever-more devastating attacks - but the most effective ones may be the most subtle, Darktrace's Dave Palmer says.China Photos/Getty Images Computational sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research field with the overarching goal of developing computational models, methods, and tools to help manage the balance between environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future. I will provide examples of computational sustainability problems, ranging from wildlife conservation and biodiversity, to poverty mitigation, to materials discovery for renewable energy materials. Technology # In the AI wars, Google wants to change the world one'Pixel' at a time By ECONOMICTIMES.COM Updated: 8 Oct, 2016, 11:50 hrs IST VIEW IN APP Hardware devices launched by Google are beads of pearl strung together by their A.I. powered technology running on clouds. By Sreeraman Thiagarajan Since Steve Jobs' version of Macintosh the one that was'the computer for the rest of us', to today's iPhone7, hardware devices are the strategy and cloud is a tactic at App...

Virtual assistants are transforming the customer service industry and the deployment of these virtual staff at RBS, Natwest and SEB banks is testament to this. The web-based Luvo software will be able to engage humans in real time by answering simple banking queries. "Virtual assistants (VAs) are transforming how consumers interact with businesses – especially in customer services. Many forward-thinking banks are now incorporating VAs into their offering to respond to simpler customer queries quicker," said Sebastian Reeve, director product management, Nuance Communications. Virtual voice detection has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years and technology like Luvo and Siri can understand human diction at 90%.

A study by Deloitte has suggested that technology is already leading to job losses in the UK legal sector, and some 114,000 jobs could be automated within 20 years. Professor Richard Susskind, a technology consultant and co-author of The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, predicts unprecedented upheaval in a profession where the working practices of some lawyers and judges have changed little since the time of Charles Dickens. "One question lurking in all this is whether someone can come in and do to law what Amazon did to bookselling," he says. "We won't see anything as dramatic, but we will see incremental transformations in areas like the way documents are reviewed and the way legal risk is assessed." Big law firms are pouring money into AI as a way of automating tasks traditionally undertaken by junior lawyers.

BERGSHAMRA, Sweden – Emelie Eriksson has a bond with her son that hardly seems possible: She and her son were born from the same womb. Eriksson was the first woman to have a baby after receiving a uterus from her mother, in a revolutionary operation that links three generations of their family. "It's like science fiction," Eriksson, 30, told the Associated Press in an exclusive interview at her home just north of Stockholm. "This is something that you read in history books and now in the future when you read about this, it's about me." She agreed to share her story with the AP because she hopes other women who need help having a child will be encouraged and inspired by her family's extraordinary womb transplantation experience.

Neural networking with advanced parallel processing is beginning to take root in a number of markets ranging from predicting earthquakes and hurricanes to parsing MRI image datasets in order to identify and classify tumors. As this approach gets implemented in more places, it is being customized and parsed in ways that many experts never envisioned. And it is driving new research into how else these kinds of compute architectures can be applied. Fjodor van Veen, deep learning researcher at The Asimov Institute in the Netherlands, has identified 27 distinct neural net architecture types. The differences are largely application-specific. Neural networking is based on the concept of threshold logic algorithms, which were first proposed in 1943 by Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist, and Walter Pitts, a logician.

Last year, smart homes were set to be the next big thing, and our attention was focused on finding new ways to integrate technology into our homes. One year on, the focus has shifted. We are less concerned with what we can move in, and more focused on what can help us move out. Real estate may not be the first industry that springs to mind when we consider the transformative potential of drones and artificial intelligence. However, with technology advancing at such pace, new commercial applications are being unveiled all the time, and the property retail and management sectors both stand to benefit.

The "creepy clown crisis" is a case study in the science of the heebie-jeebies. Clowns are creeping across America, lurking in the woods and generally freaking out the general public. Over the past few months, "clown sightings" have become a thing, occupying a dark crevice in the popular imagination that was once filled by UFO or Slender Man sightings. And like all viral trends, this one is spreading, with creepy-clown alerts popping up in England, Australia, Canada, and Scotland. Whether they're teenage pranksters, a movie-marketing ploy, figments of the imagination, or really out to do harm (all possibly true in some cases), the clowns are universally described with one word: creepy.

Last week at RoboBusiness, I was fortunate to hear James Kuffner, CTO of Toyota's Research Institute (TRI), present his vision of a million connected robots. If this premise sounds scary, I'm sorry. Halloween is just around the corner. Seriously, it is worth digging into in greater detail. According to Kuffner, connectivity speeds are as important to cloud robotics as the growth of processing speeds or Moore's Law.