Welcome to our 11th addition of The FR. This week, we discuss the coming of the robots to financial services and the Bitcoin civil war. We also take a look at "stack fallacy," Max Levchin's Affirm, IEX, Cornell's tech-infused MBA and the little digital bank on the prairie. Is Wall Street destined for Planet of the Robos? According to George Mason University's Robin D. Hanson, it's not a question of if but when the jobs of highly skilled, specialized workers are automated, since computers eventually will have the "mental powers" to do everything humans now do and more (See here).

HIROSHIMA – Keiichi Tsukishiro, a veteran in the field of prosthetic engineering, will be in Rio de Janeiro this summer supporting athletes taking part in the Paralympics by repairing wheelchairs and artificial limbs. This will be the sixth Paralympics for the 51-year-old Japanese, who also teaches at Hiroshima International University as a member of the faculty of rehabilitation. "I will have to play a central role as I have participated in the event more often than most other staff members," Tsukishiro said. Born in the city of Kyoto, he first took up the family business of training dogs after graduating from high school. Keenly interested in craftsmanship, he later enrolled in a national training school for producing prosthetic devices.

We've seen a big rise in apps and bots, and a lot of them have something in common besides being based on artificial intelligence and machine learning: many of them are written first (or only) for English-speaking users. Now one of the more interesting personal assistant apps created first for Spanish speakers is announcing funding: Sherpa, a personal assistant app based out of Spain, has raised 6.5 million in a Series A round. Xabi Uribe- Etxebarria, the founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that the funding will be used to continue building out more functionality in the app, as well as on more hires and to expand the reach of the app as it gears up for a much bigger Series B and eventual expansion to other languages like English and Portuguese. Sherpa is filling an interesting niche in the market that most English speakers might not even realise exists: many of the interesting evolutions in AI and natural language processing have been focused on English applications, leaving large swathes of the non-English speaking world without the same kinds of services. Uribe- Etxebarria notes that while some apps do have Spanish versions they are basic.

By 2020, more than five million jobs are expected to be lost to robots and artificial intelligence. And in the next two decades, graduates will be going into jobs that don't yet exist. Anticipating this future, businesses and employers are overhauling their recruitment strategies. Job hopping has replaced the one job, one-employer career, and hybrid jobs are on the rise. Employers want recruits who have strong technical and soft skills such as empathy and flexibility.

Gravity, her forthcoming EP (due out May 27th on Universal Germany) and moody first single, explores a familiar theme: the push and pull of an irresistible lover. But this being a Simonne Jones' joint, that heartache is wrapped in a blanket of industrial beats and physics-based metaphor. "You've set me in motion / The stars are blurs around the sun / The push and pull, the force of your body / Closer you get, I'm overcome / Bound by attraction / Floating on axis / Around your atlas / You're holding me like gravity, all around." In less skilled hands, this scientific approach to lyrical matters of the heart could've come off as ham-handed, and run the risk of alienating listeners from the song's emotional content by shoehorning it within dense concepts. Yet, it succeeds, lending to the seductive timbre of Jones' soft voice, because this is how her mind works.

Last month at SAS Global Forum 2016, I presented the paper, Ensemble Modeling: Recent Advances and Applications, that I wrote along with my colleagues yeliu and M_Maldonado. In this paper, we shared a SAS Enterprise Miner subflow that can be incorporated into your predictive modeling flow to implement the following ensemble methods that take model performance into account: top-t, hill-climbing, clustering-based selection, and stacking methods. After importing this XML file into your project, you can copy the entire flow into the diagram that has your predictive modeling flow, connect the flows together, and run. See the README file for instructions on how to import these XML files and quickly get started with these more sophisticated ensemble methods. Note there are several nodes that directly create ensemble models in SAS Enterprise Miner, and they've been covered in previous SAS Global Forum papers: See Leveraging Ensemble Models in SAS Enterprise Miner and The Power of the Group Processing Facility in SAS Enterprise Miner for more information.

The News and information ecosystem is in the midst of change -- again. Mobile-first consumption is on the rise, smart homes are becoming mainstream and connected cars will soon take over the roads of major cities around the world. Smart devices will require "smart content." It's only a matter of time before artificial intelligence (AI) becomes the backbone of the media industry of the future. Today, most people find information via search or social. And while these two channels are radically different in functionality, they have one thing in common -- any given article surfaced through these platforms is exactly the same for everyone in the world.

"Excuse me," the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. Outside Gore's New York City office, spring has certainly sprung--early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him.

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art. In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art. Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If not, why not?'," he said.

Computers and other machines have and will continue to change the way people do business and how we live. Many researchers use the term artificial intelligence (AI) to describe the thinking and intelligent behavior demonstrated by machines. While AI can be helpful to human beings, scientists warn, it can also be a threat. We live with artificial intelligence all around us. A few examples are iPhone's personal assistant Siri, searches on the Internet, and autopilot programs on airplanes.