As artificial intelligence (AI) makes deeper inroads to improve our daily life, a group of Land Rover engineers have helped the British Land Rover BAR team by building a faster boat so that they could win the sailing competition America's Cup. Using AI, the engineers worked for more than a year to find patterns in the boat's performance data which could be used to make it go faster, the company said in a statement on Thursday. Land Rover BAR is second in America's Cup World Series rankings, following a podium finish in Chicago in the US recently. The next leg is in the island city of Portsmouth from July 21-24 when the team will try to close the 10-point gap to series leader Emirates Team New Zealand. "Land Rover's AI could prove the difference in its bid to win the America's Cup for the first time for Britain," said Sir Ben Ainslie, Land Rover BAR Team's principal and skipper.

Going on a date with someone you have met online can be a daunting experience. While taking a friend with you might seem strange, this is exactly the aim of Tinder's latest feature. Some have pointed out these activities may not be as innocent as they seem, describing it as a'group sex' feature. But Tinder Social says the tool is not designed for this, and simply enables users to create groups, meet new people and plan activities together. After downloading the latest update, Tinder users can now choose to'unlock' Tinder Social to gain access to the feature.

Tinder Social came about after a test in Australia that proved a glut of the app's users have been looking for a feature to aid in planning out their night, their hangouts, and ways to meet new people for concerts and other friendly excursions aside from romantic encounters. When using the feature, Tinder users can "unlock" Tinder Social to create a group of 1-3 friends with a sole focus, like attending a movie or hitting up a bar. The group access can be turned on or off at any time. When users swipe right on a group they like, the groups will combine and offer up a group chat for planning the event. The feature is available in the US, UK and select other areas around the world.

A Land Rover team of engineers is helping the Land Rover BAR team make its America's Cup entry faster. America's Cup is the pinnacle of sailing competitiveness. Teams spend upwards of 100 million just to sniff success and rumor has it Oracle Team USA owner Larry Ellison blew past that by nearly double when his team won it in 2013. However, in an attempt to bring the Cup to Great Britain for the first time ever, one team is looking not to outspend its opponents, but to outthink them. The Land Rover BAR team is using the brains from one of its sponsors – Land Rover – to build a faster boat … faster because it's smarter.

Consumers can look forward to a future increasingly defined by a global voice, and dominated by robots, the Internet of Things (IoT), and virtual and augmented reality (the last of which has become considerably more plausible since the release of Pokemon Go), according to a new trends report by Toronto-based non-profit innovation hub MaRS. Arguably more fascinating than the report's conclusion, however, is its methods: To determine the trends that will define tech's future, authors Farah Momen and Sue McGill calculated the startups that were receiving the most funding, then divided them into sectors. "By analyzing the capital raised over the past year, we can understand: a) which consumer and commerce verticals are seeing the most activity here in Canada (such as wearables and foodtech); and b) which specific, innovative consumer and enterprise business-to-business companies are gaining traction in the market," Momen and McGill wrote in a July 7 press release announcing the report. While ecommerce might be delivering a wider variety of products to consumers than ever before, the final purchase decision is still frequently influenced by their shopping experience, Momen and McGill write – and advancements in VR and AR have created new opportunities for companies to provide an immersive, unforgettable experience, with manufacturers such as Lexus and Volvo implementing virtual test-driving simulations, and Ikea adding an AR feature to its mobile app that lets viewers virtually place and view nearly 300 of the Swedish furniture giant's products in their homes. Sure, we all know about Alexa and Cortana, but more interesting to Momen and McGill is the role that digital shopping assistants could play in retail's future, with companies like Stitch Fix already delivering monthly boxes of curated items chosen by a combination of machine and human stylists.

According to a new release, "Zendesk, Inc. today announced the launch of Automatic Answers, a feature powered by machine learning within Zendesk that helps customers solve their inquiries faster and enables businesses to have more efficient support teams. Zendesk is one of the first customer service platforms implementing machine learning to natively auto-respond to customer tickets with relevant knowledge base articles, helping solve and deflect customer inquiries before they ever reach an agent. Automatic Answers was developed in Australia by Zendesk's Melbourne-based development team, who previously brought Satisfaction Prediction to market and was awarded the 2016 Victorian iAward for Big Data Innovation of the Year."

We are currently looking for an exceptionally talented and passionate Senior Data Scientist to work closely with product engineering teams to identify development opportunities, strategies and architect plans, and develop algorithmic solutions. We are looking for someone who can generate valuable and actionable insights by utilising advanced statistical techniques and data mining approaches to improve decision making. Also analysing and interpreting the results of new product development experiments, with the ability to communicate the findings to key stakeholders, gaining support and'buy in' for any recommendations. The role As a Senior Data Scientist you will build well maintained models of customer behaviours that influence programmatic decision making. Then evolve and enhance systems and tools for agile data analysis and visualisation.

Microsoft's mini Xbox games console will go on sale on August 2nd, the firm has revealed. The Xbox One S, which comes in a colour called'robot white', is 40 per cent smaller than the original Xbox One and has abandoned the bulky power external supply seen in previous consoles. It also supports 4K Ultra HD video, but will also come with up to 2TB of internal hard disk space - and boasted it will be'the first and only console that allows you to watch Blu-ray movies and stream video in stunning 4K Ultra HD with High Dynamic Range (HDR).' The Xbox One S, which comes in a colour called'robot white', is 40 per cent smaller than the original Xbox One and has abandoned the bulky power external supply seen in previous consoles. Rumours that Sony is working on a more powerful version of the PlayStation 4 have been confirmed.

Artificial intelligence is usually associated with futuristic sci-fi movies and the rise of the machines against humanity. What many people don't realise is that it's commonplace today, and something you've probably not noticed has become a critical part of your life. The intelligence Facebook uses to make friends suggestions or how Google photos recognises faces and places are both examples of AI, and machine learning, in action. AI is also being used in organisations worldwide to augment and assist human employees to do their jobs better and smarter. In South Africa, Stellenbosch-based CLEVVA has developed an AI platform that enables companies to rapidly and easily deploy Virtual Advisors across every aspect of their businesses.

The media interest surrounding deep learning has grown exponentially in the last few years. But what does it actually mean, and how will it change business and society? Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that refers to mapping artificial neural networks to recreate some of the same processes that the human brain performs, and using algorithms with speech, images and text, to recognise, identify and understand patterns in the data. Although this sounds simple, it involves complex processes and functions - but once trained, the application of deep learning algorithms could be world changing. For instance, a machine that learns like a human, but can rapidly process thousands of images and recognise patterns, is already showing promise for applying deep learning to medical imaging.