In the next stage of artificial intelligence adoption, banks will use AI to help understand the intentions and emotions of customers and enable better interactions, according to a new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN). A new report from Accenture has revealed that banks are set to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand customers' intentions and emotions, with the aim of enabling better interactions. The report, Accenture Banking Technology Vision 2017, draws on the analysis of an advisory board of more than two dozen individuals, interviews with technology luminaries and industry experts, and results of a survey of 579 bank executives in 31 countries across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and South America. The goal of the survey was to identify the key issues and priorities for technology adoption and investment. According to the report, more than three-quarters (78%) of bankers believe that AI will enable simpler user interfaces that will help banks create a more human-like customer experience.

A recent piece from Angelica Mari of ZDNet shows that the number of Brazilian banks that see artificial intelligence (AI) as a strategic priority is higher than many mature markets. About 30 percent of local institutions in the country are seeing AI playing an important role in their innovation plans, according to GFT Technologies' Digital Banking Expert Survey. By comparison, 23 percent of sector firms in the UK and Mexico see AI as crucial in their strategy, while only 17 percent of US banks perceive the technology as an important aspect of their overall plans, the study from the financial services vendor says. Banking giant Bradesco is the highest profile supporter of AI technology in Brazil and has been piloting IBM's Watson for over a year. Earlier this year, the bank has announced its plans to make its Watson-based artificial intelligence system available to end consumers.

Remember the last burger you really enjoyed – try to summon up its rich, juicy taste in your mind and its chewy, firm-yet-soft-yet-crunchy texture. Try to recall how the taste filled your mouth with flavour as you bit into it. Remember how satisfying it was. Now think about how it might have tasted without any meat in it. Farming the meat for beef burgers takes a hefty toll on the environment around the world.

These and many other insights are from the Salesforce Fourth Annual State of Marketing - Marketing Embraces the AI Revolution published last week. The report is available for download here (50 pp., PDF, no opt-in). The survey is based on interviews with 3,500 marketers worldwide conducted by Salesforce Research through a third-party survey firm in April 2017. The 3,500 respondents are full-time marketing leaders in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, U.K., Ireland and U.S. Respondents were segmented into high-performing, moderate-performing or under-performing groups. High-performing organizations are defined as those who are "extremely satisfied" with the current outcomes realized as a direct result of their company's marketing investment.

It took Amazon a while to get its streaming music strategy truly off the ground -- its Music Unlimited service, with competes with Spotify, Apple Music and the like, only launched last fall. But today, both Music Unlimited and the Echo smart speaker lineup are expanding in a big way: Amazon has announced that both are available in 28 new countries, most of which are found across Europe and South America. Pricing for Music Unlimited will vary by area, but Amazon says it'll offer the same three plans it currently does -- including an Echo-only plan, the standard individual plan for smartphones, computers and other devices and a family plan for multiple users. Amazon's also not discussing pricing for Echo hardware, as that also will vary from country to country. But launching both the hardware and service at the same time is a smart move, as the company says its music service is designed with voice control in mind. Of course, Spotify and the like work just as well, but having both the Echo and Music Unlimited available at the same time will ensure new customers can use their new speakers to their fullest extent.

Rafael Yuste thinks neuroscientists have been looking at the brain too close. "It's just like a TV screen--if you're watching a movie and could only look at an individual pixel, you would never understand what's going on," he says. "What neuroscientists have been doing since [the father of neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y] Cajal, is looking at the single pixels of the brain--one neuron at a time. So that's why we need these methods to see the whole screen, to see what's playing in our brains." The methods in question were on display in a recent study he and his graduate student, Christopher Dupre, conducted, recording the activity of all neurons in the Hydra vulgaris, a centimeter-long hydroid, while the animal swam between two pieces of glass.

Understanding the causes of crime is a longstanding issue in researcher's agenda. While it is a hard task to extract causality from data, several linear models have been proposed to predict crime through the existing correlations between crime and urban metrics. However, because of non-Gaussian distributions and multicollinearity in urban indicators, it is common to find controversial conclusions about the influence of some urban indicators on crime. Machine learning ensemble-based algorithms can handle well such problems. Here, we use a random forest regressor to predict crime and quantify the influence of urban indicators on homicides. Our approach can have up to $97\%$ of accuracy on crime prediction and the importance of urban indicators is ranked and clustered in groups of equal influence, which are robust under slightly changes in the data sample analyzed. Our results determine the rank of importance of urban indicators to predict crime, unveiling that unemployment and illiteracy are the most important variables for describing homicides in Brazilian cities. We further believe that our approach helps in producing more robust conclusions regarding the effects of urban indicators on crime, having potential applications for guiding public policies for crime control.

Margaret Thatcher's remarkable success at the ballot box may have been partially due to her distinctive voice, according to a new study. Experts looked at whether voters could be swayed by the way politicians speak. They found that politicians whose voices were hoarse, flat or slow received a better response from the public than those who had a different speech pattern. They believe this is because they are perceived as wiser and more competent than those who have a high-pitched voice. Margaret Thatcher's remarkable success at the ballot box may have been partially due to her distinctive voice, according to a new study.

When your best friend catches you in a bad mood, does she try to console you, give you space to cool off or lick her own face in an uncontrollable slobber? If your best friend is a dog, this third reaction may be familiar to you. Certain cuteness-obsessed Internet communities call it a "mlem"; some animal behavior researchers prefer to call it mouth-licking, and offer many possible explanations for the quirky canine behavior. Mouth-licking has been described as a stress-coping mechanism, a spontaneous display of arousal or a way to communicate desire to play with a certain toy or munch a certain treat. But according to a new study by animal behavior researchers from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, mouth-licking may actually be one of a dog's best tools for reading and responding to human faces -- in particular, angry faces.

For male rhesus macaques hoping to woo a mate, it just might help to look a little macho. While researchers have long suspected that differing facial features among male and female primates of the same species may play a role in mate choice, the draw of'facial masculinity' has remained understudied outside of human subjects. To better understand how female monkeys perceive these traits, primatologists observed free-range rhesus macaques over a series of'looking-experiments.' The study revealed that the female macaques held their gaze longer when looking at more masculine faces – but, the researchers aren't exactly sure why. While researchers have long suspected that differing facial features among male and female primates of the same species may play a role in mate choice, the draw of'facial masculinity' has remained understudied outside of human subjects In the new study led by Penn State primatologist and biological anthropologist Kevin Rosenfield, researchers studied rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago, just off the east coast of Puerto Rico. The team observed the reactions of 107 female macaques presented with pairs of images of male faces.