Having herself held senior roles in IT at Wall Street companies including Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Oksana Sokolovsky is quite familiar with the challenge of Data Management and data discovery. As co-founder and CEO of ROKITT, her goal was "to build a product that solves that challenge," she says. The challenge exists across large enterprises in multiple industries, but is often especially acute in those dealing with regulatory pressures and compliance requirements – healthcare, for instance, and of course, the financial sector. Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) 239 compliance for effective risk data aggregation and reporting, for example, is a big driver of improved Data Management for global systemically important banks. In fact, a McKinsey & Company and Institute of International Finance survey showed that more than half of the world's biggest banks faced significant challenges meeting the January 1, 2016 deadline for compliance, with the Global Association of Risk Professionals commenting that "many institutions continue to struggle to fully implement the requirements across the business under the most demanding interpretation of those requirements."

Google has acquired Moodstocks, a company that develops machine-learning based object recognition tech for mobile phones. The Paris-based startup will shut down its object recognition Application Programming Interface (API) after its staff joins Mountain View's Parisan R&D team, reports PC World. The purchase was made for an unknown sum, and appears like an acquihire deal. The French technology startup builds photo and object recognition software by employing deep learning techniques. The company produced a visual search API and an Android app that could identify certain kinds of objects.

If you've been following the news recently, you've probably heard a few of the breaking stories about robots beating humans in fairly complex tasks. It started with game show contestants, evolved into outperforming human instinct, and now computers are even outperforming fighter pilots in tactical simulations. What does this all mean for you? Although Hollywood loves to depict artificial intelligence as robots out to destroy humans, that's far from the case in the real world. Chances are you've been using artificial intelligence for awhile and haven't even noticed.

Google DeepMind has announced its second collaboration with the NHS, as part of which it will work with Moorfields Eye Hospital in east London to build a machine learning system which will eventually be able to recognise sight-threatening conditions from just a digital scan of the eye. The five-year research project will draw on one million anonymous eye scans which are held on Moorfields' patient database, reports Ars Technica, with the aim to speed up the complex and time-consuming process of analysing eye scans. From the report:The hope is that this will allow diagnoses of common causes of sight loss, like diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, to be spotted more rapidly and hence be treated more effectively. For example, Google says that up to 98 percent of sight loss resulting from diabetes can be prevented by early detection and treatment. Two million people are already living with sight loss in the UK, of whom around 360,000 are registered as blind or partially-sighted.

Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can detect early forms of Alzheimer's disease by combining machine learning methods with a special MRI technique. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computer programmes to learn when exposed to new data without being programmed. Researchers coupled machine learning methods with a special magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that measures the perfusion, or tissue absorption rate, of blood throughout the brain to detect early forms of dementia, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). "MRI can help with the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. However, the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is problematic," said Alle Meije Wink, from the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam.

It's impossible to talk about artificial intelligence without mentioning IBM's Watson. A pioneer in cognitive computing, the American computer giant has found multiple health applications for Watson. Pascal Sempé, senior sales consultant for Watson Health Solutions in France, explained how Watson functions and what's at stake. Pascal Sempé: Watson is a tool that helps the doctor, certainly not one that tells the doctor what to do. Using Watson doesn't mean the doctor won't examine patients or ask questions.

The complex passenger flows, demanding identification challenges and pressure-filled security conditions that are inherent in border control make the arena appear an interesting prospect for artificial intelligence-based solutions that can revolutionise critical processes. Machine-learning technologies being developed could identify risk patterns at speeds way beyond humans' capacity, and when tied with the powerful security offered by biometrics, AI's potential to disrupt the world of borders expands even further. What then is the future for the border guard? Will their decades of document security expertise and nuanced instincts be made rendered obsolete by a'border bot'? Planet Biometrics caught up with Cyrille Bataller, Artificial Intelligence lead at Accenture, to learn about his team's AI initiatives for borders and about his views on the importance of a "people-first" approach.

Some very intelligent people – including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates – seem to have been seduced by the idea that because computers are becoming ever faster calculating devices that at some point relatively soon we will reach and pass a "singularity" at which computers will become "more intelligent" than humans. Some are terrified that a society of intelligent computers will (perhaps violently) replace the human race, echoing films such as the Terminator; others – very controversially – see the development of such technologies as an opportunity to evolve into a "post-human" species. Already, some prominent technologists including Tim O'Reilly are arguing that we should replace current models of public services, not just in infrastructure but in human services such as social care and education, with "algorithmic regulation". Algorithmic regulation proposes that the role of human decision-makers and policy-makers should be replaced by automated systems that compare the outcomes of public services to desired objectives through the measurement of data, and make automatic adjustments to address any discrepancies. Not only does that approach cede far too much control over people's lives to technology; it fundamentally misunderstands what technology is capable of doing. For both ethical and scientific reasons, in human domains technology should support us taking decisions about our lives, it should not take them for us. At the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy last week I got a chance to discuss some of these issues with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of "The Second Machine Age", recently highlighted by Bloomberg as one of the top books of 2014. Andy and Erik compare the current transformation of our world by digital technology to the last great transformation, the Industrial Revolution.

You may have heard about the Donald Trump bot army and the Twitter bots that have influenced elections in Latin America, but there are other bots out there, bots that connect citizens to services, bots that plan to crowdsource the election of a president or act as your personal assistant in government. They're going to change civil society, how people interact with government, and the self-governance of free societies. Here are five example of bots that have already impacted or will impact democracy. Dirty Water VT sends a tweet each time a sewage spill occurs in the state of Vermont. Trib IL CampaignCash sends a tweet any time a campaign contribution is made above 1,000 in the state of Illinois.

Starship Technologies of Greenwich in London has built a robot that is starting trials delivering meals, groceries and parcels. Four firms in Britain and Germany are involved. But will the robots be able to navigate safely between business and customer?