On May 27, a deluge dumped more than 6 inches of rain in less than three hours on Ellicott City, Maryland, killing one person and transforming Main Street into what looked like Class V river rapids, with cars tossed about like rubber ducks. The National Weather Service put the probability of such a storm at once in 1,000 years. Yet, "it's the second time it's happened in the last three years," says Jeff Allenby, director of conservation technology for Chesapeake Conservancy, an environmental group. Floods are nothing new in Ellicott City, located where two tributaries join the Patapsco River. But Allenby says the floods are getting worse, as development covers what used to be the "natural sponge of a forest" with paved surfaces, rooftops, and lawns.

A recent study of 34 major banks across several geographies (US, EU, Singapore, Africa, Australia, India) by MEDICI Team found that 27 out of these 34 banks have implemented AI in their front-office functions in the form of chatbots, virtual assistants, and digital advisors. Across these regions, some of the most prominent banks in this space are Bank of America, OCBC, ABN Amro, YES BANK, etc. Front-office applications have certainly seen a significant increase in intensity, scope, and adoption. In reality, however, the AI strategy in the US banking industry is far more diverse. Automation is one of the more explored areas of AI/ML application. The estimated global market potential of RPA is projected to be $8.75 billion by 2024.

QBE North America recently announced its investment and multi-year commercial use agreement with HyperScience (New York), a machine learning, enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) solution, which the insurer intends to use drive operational efficiency and unlock new data and insights for underwriting, pricing and claims. The acquisition was the third in a series flowing from a $50 million commitment QBE announced in 2017 to invest in early-stage businesses working on technically-challenging and industry-changing ideas. The company earlier announced its investments in RiskGenius (Overland Park, Kan.), a machine learning platform for analyzing policy wordings, in Oct. 2017, and Cytora, a London-based company that uses open source data to help commercial insurers lower loss ratios, grow premiums and improve expense ratios, in Dec. 2017. David McMillan, QBE's Group COO has characterized the acquisitions as contributing to the company's objective of delivering "Brilliant Basics" in underwriting, pricing and claims. Insurance Innovation Reporter talked with Ted Stuckey, SVP, Managing Director of QBE Ventures, and Head of QBE's Global Innovation Lab, to talk about the acquisitions and how they fit into QBE's broader strategy.

Top Pentagon official Michael Griffin sat down a few weeks ago with Air Force scientists at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to discuss the future of quantum computing in the U.S. military. Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has listed quantum computers and related applications among the Pentagon's must-do R&D investments. Quantum computing is one area where the Pentagon worries that it is playing catchup while China continues to leap ahead. The technology is being developed for many civilian applications, and the military sees it as potentially game-changing for information and space warfare. The U.S. Air Force particularly is focused on what is known as quantum information science.

While billionaires buy up property in New Zealand and pay technologists huge sums of money for advice on how to keep their staff in check after "the event" – that is, whatever it is that wipes out enough of the planet to justify living in bunkers – the rest of us are left to deal with the looming threat of catastrophe by playing video games. Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout series offers a very American take on the post-apocalypse: humans, ghouls and mutants protect their respective corners of the wasteland with big guns and power armour, in a retro future with sci-fi technology and a 1950s aesthetic. The games present a ravaged, irradiated all-American picket-fence fantasy with classic cars, suburban homes and US landmarks devastated by nuclear bombs. Fallouts 3 and 4 are explorative role-playing games that cast the player as a survivor emerging from a vault after more than 100 years into a world they don't recognise – though, after a few hours, they have significantly more weapons and resources than the average pitiable remnant of humanity. The games offer the player 100 or more hours exploring the wasteland and meeting its dogged inhabitants.

We're excited to announce the winners of the third Robot Art competition! This year we had 19 teams from all over the world submit over 100 robot-created artworks. Winners were determined based on a combination of public voting (over 2000 people with a Facebook account), judges consisting of working artists, critics, and technologists, and by how well the team met the spirit of the competition – that is, to create something beautiful using a physical brush and robotics and to share what they learned with others. See the previous winners: 2017, 2016. Incorporating machine-learning technology, CloudPainter was able to paint evocative portraits with varying degrees of abstraction.

The report, in its second year having been piloted in 2017, identified artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) as technologies under the umbrella of digital transformation. The six factors for digital transformation success were determined following participation in an online survey by 1,535 c-suite executives at medium to large-sized companies based across Australia, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, the UK and the US. The six factors identified by Fujitsu were: Leadership, People, Agility, Business Integration, Ecosystem and Value from Data. The companies declaring positive outcomes from digital transformation showed showing strong capabilities in these areas. See also: Looking for leadership?

Score following is the process of tracking a musical performance (audio) with respect to a known symbolic representation (a score). We start this paper by formulating score following as a multimodal Markov Decision Process, the mathematical foundation for sequential decision making. Given this formal definition, we address the score following task with state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms such as synchronous advantage actor critic (A2C). In particular, we design multimodal RL agents that simultaneously learn to listen to music, read the scores from images of sheet music, and follow the audio along in the sheet, in an end-to-end fashion. All this behavior is learned entirely from scratch, based on a weak and potentially delayed reward signal that indicates to the agent how close it is to the correct position in the score. Besides discussing the theoretical advantages of this learning paradigm, we show in experiments that it is in fact superior compared to previously proposed methods for score following in raw sheet music images.

Brands not taking the opportunity to get on the front foot of voice-based interaction and experiment with devices such as Amazon Alexa risk missing the boat on the next wave of customer engagement. That's the view of Auto & General director of digital and marketing, Jonathan Kerr, who spoke to CMO following the launch of Budget Direct's first Amazon Alexa skill in Australia. The new Budget Direct Alexa Skills has debuted with 40 different information-based and commonly asked queries, from learning more about insurance definitions, to frequently asked questions about motor and home insurance as well as how to get a quote or make a claim. Each of these questions can be asked and answered in an average of five or six ways, Kerr said, and stem from common questions being asked of the insurer's contact centre team and online. Given the brand's tongue-in-cheek content approach, there's also a fun question in the mix: 'Alexa, ask if Budget Direct knows how to party'. In response, customers will hear the sound of a party horn and response reflecting the brand's award winning track record with Money Magazine.

Cognitive Robotic Process Automation is the next step in the evolution of robotic process automation trends. Many of the leading robotic process automation companies are already eyeing the big shift towards the cognitive automation. Cognitive robotic process automation is basically a combination of robotic process automation and Data Analytics, which together make it easy and effective to manage processes that are information-intensive, in an intelligent and efficient manner. By that definition, it is a marriage between artificial intelligence and cognitive computing methods. By incorporating artificial intelligence, cognitive automation broadens the scope and depth of actions that would typically be associated with RPA.