Accenture's Fintech Innovation Lab initiative is an accelerator programme designed to put the best fintech start ups in front of potential banking customers and investors - we interview those that made it to the final. Quotip: "We help to introduce investors into the financial product industry and help them find ideas in any product environment by using a machine learning based algorithm. "Traditional banks have a big trading desk for pricing products but for many it is not economical to do that in the same way. So we came up with an idea for machine learning to extract information from the exchange. "In Switzerland there are lots of products listed on an exchange, if you look at them there is something like 35,000 on the Swiss exchange. We will extract information from the prices that are fed from investment banks to the exchange and with this information we can incorporate pricing and feed that back to customers."

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

Machine learning (ML) is the unsung hero that powers many applications, systems, sensors, devices, and products. Machine learning is so pervasive that we can often assume its presence in most of the applications and systems without having to specifically call it out. In simple terms, machine learning is a computer's ability to learn from data, and it is one of the most useful tools we have to develop intelligent systems and applications. Machine learning is used widely today for all kinds of tasks, from churn prediction in large companies, to web search, to medical diagnostics, to robotics. It's hard to find a field that cannot benefit from machine learning in one way or another.

A report shown at the 2016 World Economic Forum in January says millions of jobs will be lost to robots in the next few years. When thinking about who is most vulnerable, factory workers, drivers, and pilots come to mind. Surely the jobs requiring a human touch, such as artists, entertainers, and managers, will stick around, right? Maybe some of those jobs will be safe. Managers, not so much; very soon, robots will be replacing humans in top management positions, even up to the CEO level.

Microsoft is showing off its artificial intelligence abilities, with a new program that can produce an'original' Rembrandt painting based on the master's old works. The project is a collaboration between ING, Microsoft, Delft University of Technology, The Mauritshuis and Museum Het Rembrandthuis. 'The Next Rembrandt' project uses AI, capable of deep learning, was imprinted with 346 of Rembrandt's known works in the hopes that it can create a unique 3D printed image in his style. The computer analysed Dutch master Rembrandt's work, thoroughly tagged by humans. "We examined the entire collection of Rembrandt's work, studying the contents of his paintings pixel by pixel," the project team explained.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station Sunday (April 10) to deliver vital supplies, science experiments and a prototype inflatable space habitat for the orbiting outpost and its six-person crew. Launched on Friday (April 8) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the Dragon pulled up to space station on this morning where it was captured by the orbital complex's Canadarm2 robotic arm. "It looks like we caught a Dragon," British astronaut Tim Peake of the European Space Agency radioed to Mission Control after snagging the spacecraft with the station's arm. Dragon was later attached to the Earth-facing port on the station's Harmony module at 9:57 a.m. EDT (1357 GMT) to begin its one-month stay. The Dragon's arrival marked the first time that two U.S. commercial spacecraft were berthed to the space station simultaneously.

Venture capital firm IvyCap Ventures has raised the first tranche of Rs 300 crore in its Rs 600-crore IvyCap Fund 2, which was launched last October. The fund saw the participation of five of the 15 existing institutional investors of IvyCap. As a part of the IvyCap Ventures Initiative, we will invest in 25-30 startups in the next two years, in sectors like healthtech, IoT, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, edtech and agritech." Last December, IvyCamp had partnered with Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), a business incubator of IIT Bombay. The objective was to leverage the IvyCamp Platform to connect and create value for entrepreneurs and innovators across the student and alumni community.

Google made headlines when it revealed that it is using machine learning to optimize its data center performance. In fact, Google's effort is only the latest in a series of initiatives to create an electronic "data center brain" that can analyze IT infrastructure. Automation has always been a priority for data center managers, and has become more important as facilities have become more complex. The DevOps movement seeks to "automate all the things" in a data center, while the push for greater efficiency has driven the development of smarter cooling systems. Where is this all headed? The data center won't be a portal to Skynet anytime soon.

Today's Internet applications are required to be highly scalable and available in the face of rapidly changing, unpredictable workloads. Multi-tier architecture is commonly used to build Internet applications, with different tiers providing load balancing, application logic, and persistence. The advent of cloud computing has given rise to rapid horizontal scaling of applications hosted in virtual machines (VMs) in each of the tiers. Currently, this scaling is done by monitoring system-level metrics (e.g., CPU utilization) and determining whether to scale out or in based on a threshold. These threshold-based algorithms, however, do not capture the complex interaction among multiple tiers, and determining the right set of thresholds for multiple resources to achieve a particular service level objective (SLO) is difficult. In this paper, we present vScale, a horizontal scaling system that can automatically scale the number of VMs in a tier to meet end-to-end application SLOs.

"Things that were, things that are… and some things that have not yet come to pass." I wish I had Galadriel's dramatic voice telling what the future will look like, as we are rapidly entering a time that still felt like a distant scenario not long ago. In the last few years, artificial intelligence, robots and connected devices have expanded into a whole new context: our everyday lives. They've also started making the headlines. We read how the Go-playing AI AlphaGo beat the world-class Go player Sedol by 5–1, and how toy robots like Pleo and social robots like Jibo and Pepper are coming to our homes.