How ready are we as banks to adopt AI and applied technologies for the various relevant use cases in our business and organization? Let me try and draw a parallel and take you a few years back in time. About half a decade ago, if any one spoke of Cloud as a technology in the banking context and scenario, most bankers would typically cringe and say, "Do they even understand banking as an industry, the restrictions and the risks? Cloud cannot be a reality in the world of banking, especially with respect to business-critical systems." This belief now sounds more archaic than it is. In just a period of 5 years, banks not only seem to have got past their stern reluctance but also the initial apprehensions surrounding cloud adoption.

Drug discovery is the process of identifying new medicines for treating or curing human diseases.1 Historically, the discovery of new medicines involved extracting ingredients from natural products and basic research to find potential treatments. Progress was generally slow, frustrating and labour-intensive. The majority of drugs discovered during the 20th century were chemically synthesised small molecules, which still make up 90 per cent of drugs on the market today.2 Their advantages include simple manufacturing and administration routes. They also have low specificity and a stable shelf life, meaning they are safe and effective for large groups of people.

Drones are one of the coolest technologies every maker and enthusiast wants to lay their hands on. At the same time as drones are becoming common, AI is rapidly advancing and we are now in a state where object detection and semantic segmentation are possible right onboard the drone. In this blog post, I will share how to perform object detection on images taken by a drone. Any decent object detection model trained the Stanford dataset should do a good job of detecting these six objects. In this post, we will be using RetinaNet, a very good object detection model released by Facebook (FAIR), which shapes the loss function in such a way that the model learns to focus on hard examples during training and thus learns much better.

Could robots with feelings be the next step in AI? It is titled "Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines" in Nature Machine Intelligence. No need to see the robot as an enemy just because it takes on a robotic version of human feelings; the train of thought that the authors take is a distance away from fear and trembling by some futurists who ponder robots turning against their masters in an upside-down switch of master-servant roles. Rather, Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio, the authors, choose to focus on machines acquiring homeostasis. Man and Damasio are with the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Many programmers are moving towards data science and machine learning hoping for better pay and career opportunities -- and there is a reason for it. The Data scientist has been ranked the number one job on Glassdoor for last a couple of years and the average salary of a data scientist is over $120,000 in the United States according to Indeed. Data science is not only a rewarding career in terms of money but it also provides the opportunity for you to solve some of the world's most interesting problems. IMHO, that's the main motivation many good programmers are moving towards data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. If you are in the same boat and thinking about becoming a data scientist in 2019, then you have come to the right place.

At its NXTWORK conference in Las Vegas, Juniper Networks announced on Monday new capabilities for its Mist and Contrail solutions that were designed to help its enterprise customers. For Mist, Juniper announced what it claimed was the first "AI Driven Self Diving Network" for enterprises that use Mist's AI engine. It also uses Mist's microservices cloud to streamline IT operations to help simplify troubleshooting across both wired and wireless networks. Using Mist's integrated AI-engine, which is called Marvis, the Mist platform identifies the root cause of issues across various IT domains, such as WLAN, LAN, WAN and security, and automatically resolves them when possible. If the issue is outside the domain of the access network, Marvis will provide a set of recommended actions to help IT managers resolve their issues.

Despite scepticism over the cost-effectiveness of new technologies, and the worries surrounding the potential difficulty of their installation, many companies in the UK are deciding to use emerging tech such as artificial intelligence (AI). This is according to a new report by Genesys, which claims almost two thirds (60 per cent) of UK firms are either using AI already, or planning to do so within a year from now. More than a third (37 per cent) are already using such tech to drive business objectives, increase efficiency and cut costs, while 42 per cent expect to see a positive impact within 12 months. But scepticism and worry remain. A significant portion of UK employers believe implementation will be too complex, and a quarter has its doubts whether or not the tech is over-hyped.

SAS partners played a bigger role than ever in the event this year, as SAS continues to move beyond its legacy direct sales days and invest more in its channel. TORONTO – Curiosity Meets Capability was the theme of the main keynote at the annual SAS Toronto roadshow for executives. The event this year was held Wednesday at the Globe and Mail Centre across the street from SAS's offices east of downtown Toronto, and there didn't appear to be a vacant seat in the house. Many of the execs in attendance were focused on AI, rather than being general line of business people, and the focus of the event was to explain to them how to optimize the chances of their projects being successful. "The goal is to demystify AI and walk through real world examples, to show why it's not that hard or that new," said Shadi Shahin, SAS's VP of Product Strategy, in the main keynote.

The best weapons are secret weapons. Freed from the boundaries of observable reality, they can hold infinite power and thus provoke infinite fear -- or hope. In World War II, as reality turned against them, the Nazis kept telling Germans about the Wunderwaffe about to hit the front lines -- "miracle weapons" that would guarantee victory for the Reich. The Stealth Bomber's stealth was not just about being invisible to radar -- it was also about its capabilities being mysterious to the Soviets. And whatever the Russian "dome of light" weapon is and those Cuban "sonic attacks" are, they're all terrifying.

Google announced a partnership with a large U.S. health care system aimed at modernizing its information system and providing new tools for doctors, in the tech giant's latest foray into the health industry. Announcement of its arrangement with the Catholic health care system Ascension followed a Wall Street Journal report on Monday that Google had access to thousands of patient health records without doctors' knowledge. Both companies stressed that their deal is compliant with federal health-privacy law. Unlike most of the data Google collects on individuals, health data is strictly regulated by the federal government. Google is providing cloud computing services to Ascension, which operates health centers in 21 states, mostly across the South and Midwest. It is also testing the use of artificial intelligence to examine health records and find patterns that Google says might help doctors and other providers.