It was quite by accident I bumped into former RTÉ chief digital officer Muirne Laffan on the street in Dublin recently and asked: "So, what have you been up to?" Zoom forward a few days and she gave me the answer in the form of a demo with some of the most successful people in software globally. Alongside Laffan, who now runs LaffanLABs as a platform for collaboration with content creators and start-ups, sat successful Irish tech entrepreneur Eamon Moore who runs cloud firm Hikari and who successfully exited EMIT in 2018 along with the CEO and architect of San Diego-based Solliance, Zoiner Tejada, and Ciprian Jichi, CEO of Genisoft and chief data scientist at Solliance. Under the working titled'Music Manager' (a new brand has yet to be revealed) Moore pulled together the group to build what is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that could help radio stations tune in accurately to broadcast what music lovers want to hear. The start-up will be headquartered in Ireland and is already funded. 'Music Manager' is currently a working title for the business.

A human can likely tell the difference between a turtle and a rifle. For quite some time, a subset of computer science research has been dedicated to better understanding how machine-learning models handle these "adversarial" attacks, which are inputs deliberately created to trick or fool machine-learning algorithms. While much of this work has focused on speech and images, recently, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) tested the boundaries of text. They came up with "TextFooler," a general framework that can successfully attack natural language processing (NLP) systems -- the types of systems that let us interact with our Siri and Alexa voice assistants -- and "fool" them into making the wrong predictions. One could imagine using TextFooler for many applications related to internet safety, such as email spam filtering, hate speech flagging, or "sensitive" political speech text detection -- which are all based on text classification models.

Elon Musk has improved his controversial Neuralink technology that he hopes will allow people to hook themselves up to a computer and become cyborgs. Musk's company Neuralink is building tiny and flexible'threads' which are ten times thinner than a human hair and can be inserted directly into the brain. Musk, the billionaire boss of Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla, took to his usual stomping ground of Twitter to parade his latest development. He called the improvements to Neuralink and the scary robot that will insert the device into human brains'truly transformational' and'awesome' in several tweets. The tiny brain implants, called brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), connects the human brain to external devices and enables them to control computers.

Is bias in AI self-reinforcing? Decision-making systems that impact criminal justice, financial institutions, human resources, and many other areas often have bias. This is especially true of algorithmic systems that learn from historical data, which tends to reflect existing societal biases. In many high-stakes applications, like hiring and lending, these decision-making systems may even reshape the underlying populations. When the system is retrained on future data, it may become not less but more detrimental to historically disadvantaged groups.

Using data collected in a global survey during 2019, the report analysed a sample of 151 fintechs and incumbents across 33 countries to paint a rich picture of how artificial technology is being developed and deployed within the financial services sector. While 77% of respondents noted that they expect AI to become an essential business driver across the financial services industry in the near term, the report found that the way incumbents and fintechs are leveraging AI technologies differ in a number of ways. A higher share of fintechs tend to be creating AI-based products and services, employing autonomous decision-making systems, and relying on cloud-based systems. Whereas incumbents appear to focus on "harnessing AI to improve existing products. This might explain why AI appears to have a higher positive impact on fintechs' profitability."

Advancements in telescopes have enabled researchers to study the universe with greater detail, and to establish a standard cosmological model that explains various observational facts simultaneously. But there are many things researchers still do not understand. Remarkably, the majority of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy of an unknown nature. A promising avenue to solving these mysteries is studying the structure of the universe. The universe is made up of filaments where galaxies cluster together.

To celebrate India's rising startups, Inc42 is profiling a new soonicorn every Friday in the Inc42 UpNext: Unicorns Of Tomorrow series. For the next few months, we will be speaking to founders and cofounders at these potential unicorns and shining light on their journeys and growth stories. We begin the series with a look at insurance tech startup RenewBuy. "Our differentiated approach has enabled us to be efficient and productive in a short span and we are confident of being profitable by 2021. We want to be present in every nook and corner of the country."

AI is coming for journalism. But rather than simply being used to take jobs from writers, Reuters has now shown that it can enhance the scale and personalization of news in ways previously unimaginable. Today, it has announced a prototype for a world first: a fully automated, yet presenter-led sports news summary system. Developed in collaboration with London-based AI startup Synthesia, the new system harnesses AI in order to synthesize pre-recorded footage of a news presenter into entirely new reports. It works in a similar way to deepfake videos, although its current prototype combines with incoming data on English Premier League football matches to report on things that have actually happened.

"If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it's not necessarily the case. If you look at, say, people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, these guys didn't graduate from college, but if you had a chance to hire them, of course that would be a good idea," Musk said. Instead, Musk said he looks for "evidence of exceptional ability. And if there is a track record of exceptional achievement, then it is likely that that will continue into the future," he told Auto Bild. Tesla needs artificial intelligence talent to work on its self-driving vehicle ambitions.

Some of the fastest-growing tech companies right now are reinventing web functions that have been with us since before the turn of the century. Not as famous as the first two, San Francisco-based Intercom has found favor as an online messaging platform that helps businesses engage and support their customers and prospects. The boom in online messaging among consumers and the rise of conversational computing in business has helped Intercom thrive since its foundation in 2011. It now has more than 30,000 paying customers globally and is backed by $241 million in venture funding. People increasingly expect to find a chat option for customer support when they visit a website or use an app, says Intercom's SVP of Marketing, Shane Murphy-Reuter: Given that every single company in the world has customer support -- typically by email, maybe calls for larger companies -- I do not see a world in the future where a messenger isn't on every single website and in every app.