Genpact (NYSE: G), a global leader in digitally-powered business process management and services, announces that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PNMsoft, a Gartner Magic Quadrant-rated dynamic workflow, case management and work optimization solutions provider based around Tel Aviv, Israel. PNMsoft complements and easily integrates pre-existing systems of records that typically host manual process work, and will act as a core component in Genpact's digital portfolio whose roadmap comprises close to 100 digital solution components ("digital assets"). Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Closing is subject to satisfaction of certain customary conditions and expected in the third quarter. The transaction is not expected to be material to current year financial performance.

Contagions such as the spread of popular news stories, or infectious diseases, propagate in cascades over dynamic networks with unobservable topologies. However, "social signals" such as product purchase time, or blog entry timestamps are measurable, and implicitly depend on the underlying topology, making it possible to track it over time. Interestingly, network topologies often "jump" between discrete states that may account for sudden changes in the observed signals. The present paper advocates a switched dynamic structural equation model to capture the topology-dependent cascade evolution, as well as the discrete states driving the underlying topologies. Conditions under which the proposed switched model is identifiable are established. Leveraging the edge sparsity inherent to social networks, a recursive $\ell_1$-norm regularized least-squares estimator is put forth to jointly track the states and network topologies. An efficient first-order proximal-gradient algorithm is developed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Numerical experiments on both synthetic data and real cascades measured over the span of one year are conducted, and test results corroborate the efficacy of the advocated approach.

We develop a flexible framework for low-rank matrix estimation that allows us to transform noise models into regularization schemes via a simple bootstrap algorithm. Effectively, our procedure seeks an autoencoding basis for the observed matrix that is stable with respect to the specified noise model; we call the resulting procedure a stable autoencoder. In the simplest case, with an isotropic noise model, our method is equivalent to a classical singular value shrinkage estimator. For non-isotropic noise models--e.g., Poisson noise-- the method does not reduce to singular value shrinkage, and instead yields new estimators that perform well in experiments. Moreover, by iterating our stable autoencoding scheme, we can automatically generate low-rank estimates without specifying the target rank as a tuning parameter.

June 27, Baltimore, MD - Youth Laboratories, the organizer of the first beauty contest judged by a panel of robots today announced the inclusion of AntiAgeist, an algorithm evaluating the difference between the chronological age of contest participants and the age predicted by a system of deep neural networks trained to predict human age. "We are very happy to have AntiAgeist on our jury of robot judges, since this is a rather novel idea of looking at beauty through the prism of how successfully the person is aging. We encourage teams from all over the world to submit algorithms and ideas on how machines can evaluate human beauty to the Beauty.AI contest. Best algorithms will get monetary prizes and will be promoted worldwide", said Anastasia Georgievskaya, general manager of Beauty.AI. Insilico Medicine specializes in drug discovery and biomarker development for a broad range of diseases with a mission to accelerate and improve lead generation and pre-clinical studies within biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

Engineers have developed a robotic shopping trolley for elderly customers based on a drawing by a boy who simply wanted to help his grandmother. Aidan McCann, 13, dreamed up a push cart with height adjustment features to help his grandmother Lydia who'isn't very strong'. He witnessed how the 4ft 11in 76-year-old finds it difficult to carry groceries from the shops and perform other physically demanding tasks due to her height. Bosses at engineering giant Doosan Babcock were so impressed with Aidan's design they selected it as their overall winner at the Scottish Engineering Special Leaders Award 2015 Users can make the trolley go up and down by the flick of a switch. The idea is to lift bags of shopping towards the users so that they don't have to bend down and lift it up themselves.

IBM's Watson is still in its early days, but the cognitive computing system could end up having a substantial impact on a number of industries, particularly healthcare and education. For example, Alder Hey Children's Hospital in England is currently using the technology to improve the patient experience, while an interactive toy called the Cognitoys Dino uses Watson to answer a child's questions in a kid-friendly and personalized way. Another space that could largely benefit from Watson's capabilities is the gaming industry. The interactive nature of games paired with Watson's natural language processing capabilities and data analysis has already led to a number of new gaming initiatives, including the first-ever Minecraft game that utilizes Watson. Called'Medical Minecraft,' the game was recently created by a group of high school students.

In the quest to be able to keep driving in the coming years, more drivers 50 and up are eager to try the latest in car-safety tech that might help them stay behind the wheel, a new study finds. Some 76% of drivers in that age group surveyed say they would look for a car with the latest safety features, finds the online survey by insurer The Hartford. "Our findings indicate that some drivers, age 50-plus, would be more willing to drive in certain situations if they had particular technologies," said Jodi Olshevski, a gerontologist who is executive director of The Hartford Center for Mature Marketing Excellence. They study suggests "they associate advanced technologies with enhanced safety," They are looking for advanced safety features like blind-spot warning, crash mitigation, lane-departure warnings and advanced headlights. Some of new technologies pave the way toward self-driving cars, which are still a few years away.

When Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk proclaims that artificial intelligence is "our biggest existential threat," it makes headlines worldwide. But what goes unreported is that the very search engines people used to find Musk's comments are themselves an example of how AI has subtly but forcefully become a part of everyday, real-world life. When it comes to a discussion of AI, it helps to have a sense of history--as well as a sense of humor. Thanks to premonitory proclamations by Musk, Microsoft's Bill Gates, Cambridge's Stephen Hawking and other prominent technologists, AI has become a popular topic again, after a 20-year cooling-off period. It's tempting to assume that the "dire warnings" about AI being a threat to mankind were mostly tongue-in-cheek, but the end result is that just as it happened in the 1980s and '90s, the hype over AI is again outpacing the reality (virtual and otherwise). The first question that needs to be answered though is: Whatever happened to AI and why did it go underground for so many years?

I consider Ray Kurzweil a very close friend and a very smart person. Ray is a brilliant technologist, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google focused on AI and language processing. As reported, "of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be "essentially correct" (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate." Two weeks ago, Ray and I held an hour-long webinar with my Abundance 360 CEOs about predicting the future. During our session, there was one of Ray's specific predictions that really blew my mind. "In the 2030s," said Ray, "we are going to send nano-robots into the brain (via capillaries) that will provide full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system and will connect our neocortex to the cloud. Just like how we can wirelessly expand the power of our smartphones 10,000-fold in the cloud today, we'll be able to expand our ...

Once again, thousands of people from various corners of the marketing industry and the world descended on the French Riviera for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Some things haven't changed: the celebrity appearances, the late nights on the Carlton terrace that invariably lead to a regrettable hangover, the gigantic Daily Mail Yacht and the endlessly flowing rose. But this year also brought some surprises, including the Brexit decision at the end of the week as well as some unexpected Lions winners. Here are some other takeaways from adland's biggest event. The Maison Samsung featured a VR surfing experience on the roof and a super-secret "second-floor experience."