CHENNAI: Societe Generale's 10-week accelerator programme Catalyst has eight Indian startups working on various themes and three of them -Uniphore Software Systems, FixNix and Gavs Technologies are from Chennai, working on various risk and analytics tools that may be used by SocGen in future. FixNix, founded by Shanmugavel Sankaran, is trying to develop an early prediction based warning system for employee retention and proactive management of employee expectations. "We have a three-member team working on risk analytics in the accelerator. FixNix is getting aggressively into security and risk analytics for Indian and international banks, including Societe Generale, UBS," said Sankaran. The SaaS based governance, risk and compliance (GRC) startup has funding from ex-CIO of Tesla Jay Vijayan and other angel investors.

Renewable power sources such as wind now provide about one-third of Germany's electricity. The rows of towering wind turbines and legions of glistening solar panels spread across Germany's landscape are striking emblems of the country's shift to non-nuclear, low-carbon power. But although Germany is the world's poster child for renewable energy, its grids cannot yet cope with the erratic nature of wind and solar power. In June, German meteorologists, engineers and utility firms began to test whether big data and machine learning can make these power sources more grid-friendly. "To operate the grid more efficiently and keep fossil reserves at a minimum, operators need to have a better idea of how much wind and solar power to expect at any given time," says Malte Siefert, a physicist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology in Kassel, Germany, and a leader on the project, called EWeLiNE.

The future of industry is digital. GE and BI Studios have co-created Digital Industry Insider, dedicated to bringing you what you need to know about digital industrial news and events. The reality is somewhere in between. In 2016, hulking machines are still executing heavy duty tasks, but humanoid types are increasingly working alongside humans on assembly lines. Manufacturing isn't that different from everyday life-smart robots are showing up in factories just as they're invading our homes.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years since the first crops were planted and animals began being domesticated during the Mesolithic era. But technology could soon be squeezing us out of our traditional roles as farmers, as robots take to the fields. A robot that is capable of herding cattle and pulling trailers through the mud has gone on trial at a farm in Australia while another capable of pick broccoli six times faster than humans is being tested in Britain. SwagBot, an Australian farming machine, can herd cattle and pull trailers through mud, is being developed at the University of Sydney. At the same time, the University of Lincoln is building and testing a robot that can pick broccoli six times faster than humans. It can identify broccoli in fields with up to 95 per cent accuracy, the researchers say.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Douglas Hines started out with what sounded like a nice idea. In the early 2000s, the former Bell Labs engineer was busy caring for his elderly father and building his own technology business. That's when he first came up with the idea for a companion robot: a machine that could look after his dad and keep him in touch with the outside world via webcam. Hines started working on a prototype, but ran into trouble finding financial and legal support for the project. So he gave up, and instead turned his attentions to Roxxxy, a life-size sexbot dressed in filmy black lingerie ("always turned on and ready to talk or play!").

Everywhere you look today, there are examples cropping up of how machine learning is revolutionising different industries. In media and entertainment, Spotify and Netflix sort through billions of data points to find patterns in music, films and television that consumers have enjoyed -- and then make suggestions based on their tastes. In retail, Amazon prompts consumers to buy everything from nappies to office chairs based on shoppers' previous purchases. In finance, machine learning is helping investors anticipate market trends and powering innovations underlying everything from self-driving cars to voice-assistant applications. In the payments industry, machine learning is similarly becoming an increasingly important tool to help businesses combat fraud.

Technology that can mine the clinical patient data that already exists is finally available - now is the time to speculate to accumulate. The intersection of technology and health has thrown up almost as many questions as it has solutions. "Innovation through collaboration: Bringing disruption to the patient" was the title of the recent Financial Times Digital Health Summit Europe, which took place in London in June. Speaking at the event was ICON's Chief Information Officer, Tom O'Leary. Since its inception in 1990, ICON has been offering a range of drug development services to the pharmaceutical industry, running clinical trials worldwide across all therapeutic areas, diseases, and indications, on behalf of pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies.

There is a need for a new global platform to monitor, consider, and make recommendations about the implications of emerging technologies in general, and AI more specifically, for international security. The doomsday scenarios spun around this theme are so outlandish – like The Matrix, in which human-created artificial intelligence plugs humans into a simulated reality to harvest energy from their bodies – it's difficult to visualize them as serious threats. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent systems continue to develop apace. Self-driving cars are beginning to share our roads; pocket-sized devices respond to our queries and manage our schedules in real-time; algorithms beat us at Go; robots become better at getting up when they fall over. It's obvious how developing these technologies will benefit humanity. But, then – don't all the dystopian sci-fi stories start out this way?

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display