Xero has global expansion plans for Xero Signals, its data service to help small business owners understand how they are faring compared to the larger market. "Signals will be rolled out globally, or where we have significant subscriber numbers which is Australia, UK and the US," says Anna Curzon, Xero's local managing director. "We have some initial data for the UK and we'll be rolling out Australia soon." With the use of big data and machine learning, SMBs can be alerted to economic trends in advance, she states. "The Xero platform is providing unique and real-time insights into the importance of small business in economies," she told the audience at a panel discussion on cross border e-commerce at the Tripartite Economic Summit in Auckland.

We live in a world of information abundance. The ability to create, produce, market and distribute content in almost any form has becoming very easy. So easy that a shocking amount of what we're reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms - perhaps even this post;). In the most recent post on strategy4telcomediatech I highlighted the need to consider the role that'bots' play particularly in automating conversational commerce - 'sales and service'. In this post I take a look at the use of'bots' or algorithmic content in digital media, how it is shaping our consumption habits, content creation and some of the capabilities required in both traditional and new media organisations. Algorithms and natural language generators have been around for a while.

Passengers on a 14-day cruise were treated to an unusual sight in Shark Bay, Australia - about 70 tiger sharks feeding on a dead whale. Tour group Eco Abrolhos told the BBC the humpback whale had died naturally. It said the sight was "something to tell the grandchildren".

Google is planning to put the art in artificial intelligence. The announcement was made at a session in Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina. The company's artificial researcher Douglas Eck had developed a new group that would focus on figuring out what computers can truly create. The group is named Magenta, and they will launch more publicly at the start of June. However, the Moogfest attendees got an introduction on what it will be working on.

Artificial intelligence has become a larger part of our everyday lives in recent years. It's being used in medical devices, smart-home systems, and video games--to say nothing of robots and autonomous cars. And AI has even started to do what many people have feared: outsmart humans. In its June special report, The Institute dives into today's AI applications as well as its latest development: deep learning, in which machines teach themselves, then make decisions on their own. Here to answer questions about the future of AI are three experts in the field.

Second-order optimization methods such as natural gradient descent have the potential to speed up training of neural networks by correcting for the curvature of the loss function. Unfortunately, the exact natural gradient is impractical to compute for large models, and most approximations either require an expensive iterative procedure or make crude approximations to the curvature. We present Kronecker Factors for Convolution (KFC), a tractable approximation to the Fisher matrix for convolutional networks based on a structured probabilistic model for the distribution over backpropagated derivatives. Similarly to the recently proposed Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC), each block of the approximate Fisher matrix decomposes as the Kronecker product of small matrices, allowing for efficient inversion. KFC captures important curvature information while still yielding comparably efficient updates to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We show that the updates are invariant to commonly used reparameterizations, such as centering of the activations. In our experiments, approximate natural gradient descent with KFC was able to train convolutional networks several times faster than carefully tuned SGD. Furthermore, it was able to train the networks in 10-20 times fewer iterations than SGD, suggesting its potential applicability in a distributed setting.

I love the feeling of having a new way to think about the world. I especially love when there's some vague idea that gets formalized into a concrete concept. Information theory is a prime example of this. Information theory gives us precise language for describing a lot of things. How uncertain am I? How much does knowing the answer to question A tell me about the answer to question B? How similar is one set of beliefs to another? I've had informal versions of these ideas since I was a young child, but information theory crystallizes them into precise, powerful ideas. These ideas have an enormous variety of applications, from the compression of data, to quantum physics, to machine learning, and vast fields in between. Unfortunately, information theory can seem kind of intimidating. I don't think there's any reason it should be. In fact, many core ideas can be explained completely visually! Before we dive into information theory, let's think about how we can visualize simple probability distributions. We'll need this later on, and it's convenient to address now. As a bonus, these tricks for visualizing probability are pretty useful in and of themselves! Sometimes it rains, but mostly there's sun! Let's say it's sunny 75% of the time. It's easy to make a picture of that: Most days, I wear a t-shirt, but some days I wear a coat. Let's say I wear a coat 38% of the time. It's also easy to make a picture for that! What if I want to visualize both at the same time?

I can't remember the last time I called someone on the phone to place an order for pizza. Papa John's told investors during its first-quarter earnings call that 55% of its total sales now come through digital. Sixty percent of those digital transactions came from mobile devices. Competing pizza chains Domino's and Yum! Brands' Pizza Hut are also investing heavily in e-commerce. Both have invested in ordering methods for smartwatches, connected cars, and video game systems.

LAGOS--Nigeria is beating the West at its own word game, using a strategy that sounds like Scrabble sacrilege. By relentlessly studying short words, this country of 500 languages has risen to dominate English's top lexical contest. Last November, for the final of Scrabble's 32-round World Championship in Australia, Nigeria's winningest wordsmith, Wellington Jighere, defeated Britain's Lewis Mackay, in a victory that led morning news broadcasts in his homeland half a world away. It was the crowning achievement for a nation that boasts more top-200 Scrabble players than any other country, including the U.K., Nigeria's former colonizer and one of the board game's legacy powers. "In other countries they see it as a game," said Mr. Jighere, now a borderline celebrity and talent scout for one of the world's few government-backed national programs.

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favourite book of 2011, and has been translated into ten languages. He is the coauthor, with Tom Griffiths, of Algorithms to Live By, available Spring 2016. The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. He has just released his latest book, Algorithms to Live By. Co-written with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths, the book offers a fascinating exploration of how computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind.