As the driverless car gets closer to reality, so too does the dilemma of how to insure the car and its owner. The auto insurance industry faces upheaval in the next 25 years as the migration to autonomous safety features -- and ultimately a self-driving car -- shifts more of a car's accident risk from the driver to the vehicle, analysts said. The number of accidents is expected to drop sharply because currently more than 90% of accidents are caused by driver error. The U.S. market for personal auto insurance policies, which currently generates 200 billion in premiums a year, could shrink substantially, some experts predict. "There are going to be dramatic changes," said Joe Schneider, a managing director at KPMG who's part of the accounting firm's task force studying the issue.

This series of posts is most probably getting by now an imposition on the'Og readership, which either attended ISBA 2016 and does (do?) not need my impressions or did not attend and hence does (do?) not need vague impressions about talks they (it?) did not see, but indulge me in reminiscing about this last ISBA meeting (or more reasonably ignore this post altogether). Now that I am back home (with most of my Sard wine bottles intact!, and a good array of Sard cheeses). This meeting seems to be the largest ISBA meeting ever, with hundreds of young statisticians taking part in it (despite my early misgivings about the deterrent represented by the overall cost of attending the meeting. I presume holding the meeting in Europe made it easier and cheaper for most Europeans to attend (and hopefully the same will happen in Edinburgh in 2018!), as was the (somewhat unsuspected) wide availability of rental alternatives in the close vicinity of the conference resort. I also presume the same travel opportunities would not have been true in Banff, although local costs would have been lower. It was fantastic to see so many new researchers interested in Bayesian statistics and to meet some of them.

When you think of leaders in artificial intelligence, Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) doesn't usually jump to the top of the list. But the streaming video service's VP of Product Innovation Carlos Uribe-Gomez and Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt published a paper that says some of its AI algorithms save Netflix 1 billion each year. In their paper, the two Netflix execs detail how the company's recommendation engine impacts its churn rate. Netflix no longer reports its churn rate, but the paper notes that Netflix's "retention rates are already high enough that it takes a very meaningful improvement to make a retention difference of even 0.1%." Let's dive into how the recommendation engine saves Netflix money -- and what the return on investment looks like.

Enfield Council has taken a step into the use of artificial intelligence in a deal with cognitive technology company IPSoft to use its Amelia virtual agent in supporting its services. The London borough plans to begin using the software during the autumn, providing the first role for the technology platform in a public sector organisation. A spokesperson for the council told UKAuthority: "The initial deployment will be to help people navigate the website more effectively, and free up time for customer service staff to handle the more complicated enquiries." Amelia is a cognitive agent for service desk roles that uses natural language to communicate with people. IPsoft claims it can analyse language, understand context, apply logic, learn through observation, determine what actions to take to resolve problems and sense emotions.

Tambe's systems provided measurable outcomes that prove A.I. can be more efficient in managing patrol schedules than a lone human decision-maker. After LAX security officials implemented Tambe's first software system, called ARMOR, they saw an immediate, five-fold increase in the seizure of weapons, drugs and more. In 2013, a study by Los Angeles Metro found a 66 percent increase in the number of fare jumpers on L.A.'s subways. ARMOR was even adapted for the U.S. Coast Guard to catch illegal fishers in the Gulf of Mexico. ARMOR-FISH, tested in 2014, located illegal activities, though funding for the project has since stalled.

The researcher hired by Toyota Motor Corp. to spearhead its robotics and artificial intelligence efforts says the automaker's production principles can be applied to build affordable helper robots for rapidly aging societies. Robot makers are struggling with the same scale challenges that the auto industry overcame with the "miracle" that occurred when Henry Ford developed the assembly line, according to Gill Pratt, the chief executive officer of Toyota Research Institute. Toyota's vaunted production system later showed how to make cars both more cheaply and reliably, despite mistake-prone humans' role in manufacturing, he said. "My thought is, if the Toyota production system can be applied to cars, maybe it can also be applied to robots, because they're quite similar," Pratt told reporters Friday in Tokyo. He's particularly sanguine about the prospects for devices that would help the elderly age where they live.

Sitting on the Fintech panel at today's ASIFMA capital markets conference in Hong Kong, I had a small epiphany. By "we" I mean anyone involved in Finance or Fintech. If you work in a field with real A.I. applications such as image processing, robotics, industrial automation or such, keep pretending like you know what you're talking about. Why are we even talking about A.I. in the first place? To the lay man, which let's face it most investors are, A.I. sounds magical.

Ever since humans invented technology, those new developments came along with fears about the unknown consequences of their impact. Consistently, one of those fears has been whether technology would replace humans in certain places. A great example was last month's Legal Service Jam, where I was lucky to mentor a group of legal workers in the adoption of service design tools to re-invent their profession. I couldn't help but notice a certain level of anxiety around the topic of professional uncertainty in the face of technological advancement. Many of us were there that day to think about how technology could disrupt a stereotypically old-fashioned industry, but many raised concerns: Are we not working towards replacing ourselves? Naturally, change is inevitable and those who realize this and adapt to it early enough, will reap the rewards.

Intelligent computers that can make decisions like humans may some day be on Hewlett Packard Enterprise's product roadmap. The company has been showing a prototype computer designed to emulate the way the brain makes calculations. It's based on a new architecture that could define how future computers work. The brain can be seen as an extremely power-efficient biological computer. Brains take in a lot of data related to sights, sounds and smell, which they have to process in parallel without lagging, in terms of computation speed.

A robotic employee will be deployed instead of human council workers to answer customer queries. IPsoft said Amelia, its technology platform, will be deployed to work for Enfield Council in North London. Capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context, applies logic, learns, resolves problems and even senses emotions. IPsoft said Amelia will be deployed to work for Enfield Council in North London. Capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context and even senses emotions.