With its complex rules, fine print and lengthy processes, it's little wonder that the $1.2tn insurance industry has a poor reputation for trust and customer service. In a recent global survey from accounting firm EY, consumers ranked insurance below banks, car manufacturers, online shopping sites and supermarkets for trustworthiness. A newcomer to the field, New York City-based Lemonade hopes to reverse that reputation by using technology and behavioral science to create a faster and more transparent service. The company is working with Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, to take antagonism out of its relationship with customers. Lemonade set out to create algorithms that make it easy and quick to sign up and approve claims – in minutes rather than days.

Future projection of climate is typically obtained by combining outputs from multiple Earth System Models (ESMs) for several climate variables such as temperature and precipitation. While IPCC has traditionally used a simple model output average, recent work has illustrated potential advantages of using a multitask learning (MTL) framework for projections of individual climate variables. In this paper we introduce a framework for hierarchical multitask learning (HMTL) with two levels of tasks such that each super-task, i.e., task at the top level, is itself a multitask learning problem over sub-tasks. For climate projections, each super-task focuses on projections of specific climate variables spatially using an MTL formulation. For the proposed HMTL approach, a group lasso regularization is added to couple parameters across the super-tasks, which in the climate context helps exploit relationships among the behavior of different climate variables at a given spatial location. We show that some recent works on MTL based on learning task dependency structures can be viewed as special cases of HMTL. Experiments on synthetic and real climate data show that HMTL produces better results than decoupled MTL methods applied separately on the super-tasks and HMTL significantly outperforms baselines for climate projection.

"The last 10 years have been about building a world that is mobile-first. In the next 10 years, we will shift to a world that is AI-first.", Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at a tipping point, leading a watershed shift to digital intelligence by discovering previously unseen patterns, drawing new inferences, and identifying new relationships from vast amounts of data. This shift from the current Programmatic Era to the new AI Era will be transformative and disrupt companies and entire markets. To accomplish this, AI/Cognitive solutions will require entirely new skill sets and job descriptions.

A kind of ethics fever has taken hold of the AI community. As smart machines displace human jobs and seem poised to make life-or-death decisions in self-driving cars and health care, concerns about where AI is taking us are gaining increasing urgency. Earlier this month, the MIT Media Lab joined with the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to anchor a $27 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence initiative. The fund joins a growing array of AI ethics initiatives crisscrossing the corporate world and academia. In July 2016, leading AI researchers discussed the technologies' social and economic implications at the AI Now symposium in New York City.

Persistence Market Research delivers pertinent insights on the growth of the Cognitive Computing Market and identifies key market dynamics impacting this growth. New York City, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 01/27/2017 -- In the ever changing world of information technology, business organizations are left with humongous amount of data with them. This data includes very critical information for business use, but business organizations are only able to utilize 20% of whole data available with them with the use of traditional data analytics technology. To process and interpret the reaming 80% of the data that is in the form of videos, images, and human voice (also called as dark data), there is a need of cognitive computing systems. Cognitive computing systems are typical combination of hardware and software that constitute natural language processing (NLP) and machine language, and have capability to collect, process, and interpret the dark data available with business organizations.

More and more Japanese companies are seeing benefits from helping Paralympians and their support organizations ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics. In mid-October, Yui Kamiji, bronze medalist in women's wheelchair tennis at the Rio de Janeiro Paralympics, was invited to a meeting with 11 employees at Japan Airlines, an official sponsor of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. The group has been nicknamed the JAL Sports Ambassadors. Kamiji, who belongs to record label Avex Group Holdings Inc., recalled her experience at the Rio Games and how she dealt with the long flight. Asked what wheelchair athletes care most about during long flights, Kamiji said some carry cushions with them, depending on their disability, to avoid developing bedsores.

As a postdoc, plant biologist Christopher Topp was not satisfied with the usual way of studying root development: growing plants on agar dishes and placing them on flatbed scanners to measure root lengths and angles. Five years later, the idea of using detailed imaging to study plant form and function has caught on. The use of drones and robots is also on the rise as researchers pursue the'quantified plant'--one in which each trait has been carefully and precisely measured from nearly every angle, from the length of its root hairs to the volatile chemicals it emits under duress. Such traits are known as an organism's phenotype, and researchers are looking for faster and more comprehensive ways of characterizing it. From February 10 to 14, scientists will gather in Tucson, Arizona, to compare their methods.

It started as a seemingly sweet Twitter chatbot. Modeled after a millennial, it awakened on the internet from behind a pixelated image of a full-lipped young female with a wide and staring gaze. Microsoft, the multinational technology company that created the bot, named it Tay, assigned it a gender, and gave "her" account a tagline that promised, "The more you talk the smarter Tay gets!" She brimmed with enthusiasm: "can i just say that im stoked to meet u? humans are super cool." She asked innocent questions: "Why isn't #NationalPuppyDay everyday?" Tay's designers built her to be a creature of the web, reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) to learn and engage in human conversations and get better at it by interacting with people over social media. As the day went on, Tay gained followers. She also quickly fell prey to Twitter users targeting her vulnerabilities. For those internet antagonists looking to manipulate Tay, it didn't take much effort; they engaged the bot in ugly conversations, tricking the technology into mimicking their racist and sexist behavior.

According to Business Insider, the top jobs of the future will be in technology and healthcare. Either way, success will require empathy. Imagine you're part of a team designing a technology solution to help stop the spread of infectious diseases in hospitals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that two million patients get an infection while in the hospital each year, and 99,000 of them die as a result, so your job could have a serious impact! For Daniel Duarte, Head of Innovation and Customer Experience at SAP Labs Latin America, this is a real task.

Billionaires in the world's tech capital Silicon Valley are reportedly preparing for the apocalypse by buying underground bunkers, guns, ammo and motorcycles. Fearful that artificial intelligence will displace so many jobs that there will be a revolt against those responsible for the technology, the are entrepreneurs readying themselves for doomsday like scenarios. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of the professional social network, LinkedIn, told The New Yorker that he believes more than 50 per cent of billionaires in the Californian tech hub are preparing for the worst. "I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time," he said.