Google has said it will ban ads for payday loans because they can be "deceptive or harmful". The ban, which will come into force globally from 13 July, will cover loans that can be due within 60 days and, in the US, loans that carry an annual interest rate of 36% or higher. In a blog post, Google's director of public policy, David Graff, wrote: "Research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that. "This change is designed to protect our users from deceptive or harmful financial products." The ban will not cover mortgages, car loans, student loans, commercial loans or credit cards, said Graff, adding: "We'll continue to review the effectiveness of this policy, but our hope is that fewer people will be exposed to misleading or harmful products." In a quote accompanying the announcement, Wade Henderson, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said: "This new policy addresses many of the longstanding concerns shared by the entire civil rights community about predatory payday lending.

George Osborne has said contingency planning is taking place to anticipate the likely impact on the UK's financial stability of a vote to leave the EU. The chancellor told MPs there would be a "number of impacts" on the financial system that would have to be addressed. Economists have warned of market volatility and a sharp fall in sterling should there be a Leave vote. The chancellor said it would be up to the Bank of England to consider appropriate monetary responses. Mr Osborne, a key figure in the Remain campaign, has previously refused to be drawn on whether the Treasury and other public bodies were, in any way, preparing for the possibility of a Leave vote in the referendum on 23 June.

Bob Greifeld works in an industry where fractions of a second matter. Still, that hasn't stopped the longtime CEO of Nasdaq from taking a workman-like approach to his job. Dan DeFrancesco talks to Greifeld about his journey to Nasdaq, and what he's learned along the way. Bob Greifeld fits the traditional profile of a capital markets CEO. He's well spoken, intelligent and quick-witted.

And pretty soon, they'll come for us. That seems to be the story today, whether from Hollywood or in breathless articles in popular tech magazines about artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. In a world where machines can learn, once humans push the "on" button, there's no stopping our robot overlords, right? When machines become more intelligent, humans are freed to become more creative.

Green Running was founded with a mission to use high speed energy data sampling technology and advanced Machine Learning techniques to break energy bills down to appliance level information making unknown energy bills a thing of the past. At these high speeds each appliance has its own unique'energy signature' and we were able to develop a system that recognises these signatures through self-learning Artificial Intelligent algorithms. Installing the eGenius arms you with your own consumption and usage behaviour, which can show you which appliances are consuming the majority of your bill, what a return on investment would be if you were to replace any of those appliances with the latest eco appliances and how your appliances like your fridge of freezer have worn over time. Your usage information is a great tangible asset which companies are willing to buy off you, further offsetting your energy bills. It is all calculated in real time and sent to your smartphone or tablet using our cool app!

It's not the same as a visit from a clown or a star athlete, but the work of a supercomputer could help make kids' stays in the hospital less dreary and frightful. IBM on Wednesday announced a three-year partnership with Alder Hey Children's Hospital in the UK that will see its Watson supercomputer harnessed to analyze and improve every aspect of patient care. Watson became one of the world's most famous artificial intelligence systems after winning the game show "Jeopardy" five year ago and for designing Karolina Kurkova's dress for the Met Gala last week. IBM has been putting Watson's supercomputing powers to task in health care since 2011, when it started assisting doctors in making clinical decisions. Its newest challenge will be to turn Alder Hey into a "cognitive hospital," delivering insights about the patient experience through a new platform.

A SpaceX capsule is headed back to Earth with precious science samples from NASA's one-year space station resident. The Dragon left the International Space Station in the morning, bound for an afternoon splashdown in the Pacific, a few hundred miles off the Southern California coast. The station's big robot arm set the Dragon free over Australia. The commercial cargo craft has been packed with about 3,700 pounds of cargo, spacewalk gear and biological samples for analysis on Earth. They include blood and urine samples from astronaut Scott Kelly's one-year mission. Kelly returned to Earth in March and has since retired from NASA.

The annual March Machine Learning Mania competition sponsored by SAP challenged Kagglers to predict the outcomes of every possible match-up in the 2016 men's NCAA basketball tournament. Nearly 600 teams competed, but only the first place forecasts were robust enough against upsets to top this year's bracket. In this blog post, Miguel Alomar describes how calculating the offensive and defensive efficiency played into his winning strategy. I earned a Master's Degree in Computer Science from UIB in Mallorca, Spain. For nearly 20 years, I have been involved in software development, business intelligence and data warehousing.

Over the past few years, IBM has been devoting a great deal of corporate energy into developing Watson, the company's Jeopardy-beating supercomputing platform. Watson represents a larger focus at IBM that integrates machine learning and data analytics technologies to bring cognitive computing capabilities to its customers. To find out about how the company perceives its own invention, we asked IBM Fellow Dr. Alessandro Curioni to characterize Watson and how it has evolved into new application domains. Curioni, will be speaking on the subject at the upcoming ISC High Performance conference. He is an IBM Fellow, Vice President Europe and Director IBM Research – Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland.

That represents a strategic error. The U.S. can and should sell more drones as a way of complementing its foreign policy objectives. After all, some of the top threats to U.S. national security are the very nonstate actors that countries in the Middle East and Africa are buying drones in order to fight. The question is a quasi-legal one. In accordance with the Missile Technology Control Regime, a voluntary arrangement established in the late 1980s and now followed by 34 countries, the United States subjects the sale of military drones and other Category 1 items to "a strong presumption of denial" when determining whether to export to a particular country.