Canadian video game star Elliot Carroza-Oyarce won the gold medal Tuesday in the first-ever EGames contest, held amid the Olympics festivities in Rio de Janeiro. Organizers hoped the hours-long "Super Smash Bros." competition would show how the growing number of competitive video gamers across the world could have their own recurring celebration in the years to come. The e-sports community has been divided over whether video games should be in the Olympics, commemorated with their own global championships, or continue as is, with disparate worldwide contests and leagues. Video game players "don't necessarily want to be boxed in with traditional athletes," said Neil Duffy, executive vice president at the British nonprofit behind the EGames. "But the level of skill and practice and effort that this competition requires really is comparable with that of a football or basketball player."

NEW YORK (Reuters) – IBM is in an unusual fix in telling big U.S. banks they can use its Watson software of Jeopardy-winning fame as a cost-saving solution: bankers say they like it, but cannot afford it. IBM is in good company. Banks are in the fifth year of their belt-tightening campaigns that began in 2011, chasing billions of dollars' worth of savings, and vendors that offer everything from technology to janitorial services are getting squeezed. With persistently low interest rates hurting revenue and businesses like bond trading hemmed in by new regulations, few on Wall Street expect the austerity to end any time soon. For IBM the irony lies in the fact that senior bank executives say they believe its artificial intelligence software could help them achieve cost-cutting goals in coming years, but are not ready to pay for Watson today.

Snapchat Inc. is in the process of acquiring personalized search app Vurb, according to people familiar with matter. The Venice entertainment app maker would spend more than 100 million in cash and stock to purchase the San Francisco start-up, said a source unauthorized to speak publicly about the deal. The transaction hasn't been finalized, multiple sources said. Vurb co-founder and Chief Executive Bobby Lo would receive 75 million over several years -- separate from the initial purchase price -- if he stays at Snapchat. The tech news website the Information first reported details of the deal Monday.

SpaceX launched JCSAT-16 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and landed the first stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday, July 28, 2016 with a secret payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral and landed it about eight minutes later. United Launch Alliance launched an Atlas V rocket at 10:30 a.m. SpaceX launched a pair of communications satellites from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, but it was unknown if the first stage landed successfully.

Do machine-learning algorithms processing search engine queries bring on prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping in query results? Search results have been known to highlight these negative attributes in the past. Now researchers at Brazil's Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais suggest it could be true when it comes to female physical attractiveness in images available across the Web. The paper submitted to the International Conference on Social Informatics scheduled for publication analyzes how Google and Bing represent female beauty in their image search results, particularly when it comes to different age and racial groups. They then passed the more than 2,000 images through a program, which estimates subject age, race and gender with an estimated 90% accuracy.

This guest article was written by Dr. Cleber Gomes who is an Electronic Engineer with a Ph.D. from Tokyo University of Technology and Agriculture. As we approach the date of the Impeachment vote in Brazil, it might be interesting to take a look at how the Brazilian stock market behaves. In this article, I propose to do that from the point of view of Trend Following Algorithms. To exemplify, I will present the results acquired from my own Trend Following System, which is based on Machine Learning technologies, specifically Neural Networks. Take the lead from today's leaders.

The following is a condensed and edited interview with Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM. You joined IBM 35 years ago. What was the company like back then? What struck me was the seriousness of the kind of things we did. We were building complex back-office banking systems.

Scientists with the international scientific collaboration known as the "Walk Again Project" use noninvasive brain-machine interfaces in their efforts to reawaken damaged fibers in the spinal cord. Scientists with the international scientific collaboration known as the "Walk Again Project" use noninvasive brain-machine interfaces in their efforts to reawaken damaged fibers in the spinal cord. Researchers in Brazil who are trying to help people with spine injuries gain mobility have made a surprising discovery: Injured people doing brain training while interacting with robot-like machines were able to regain some sensation and movement. The findings, published in Scientific Reports (one of the Nature journals), suggest that damaged spinal tissue in some people with paraplegia can be retrained to a certain extent -- somewhat the way certain people can regain some brain function following stroke though repetition and practice. Even people with severe injuries can regain some sensation and function through physical therapy if some nerve fibers remain.

The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters--elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for. Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he's been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines--archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science--to construct a profile of religious practices. Whitehouse's fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s.

Techniques such as clusterization, neural networks and decision making usually rely on algorithms that are not well suited to deal with missing values. However, real world data frequently contains such cases. The simplest solution is to either substitute them by a best guess value or completely disregard the missing values. Unfortunately, both approaches can lead to biased results. In this paper, we propose a technique for dealing with missing values in heterogeneous data using imputation based on the k-nearest neighbors algorithm. It can handle real (which we refer to as crisp henceforward), interval and fuzzy data. The effectiveness of the algorithm is tested on several datasets and the numerical results are promising.