As technology gets smarter and takes over more and more of the work we typically deem "skilled", are professionals like accountants at risk of being replaced? The short answer is "No". The long answer is "It all depends on the professional accountant's attitude". Let's begin by taking a step back to understand the nature of this trend. The author Martin Ford has written extensively on this subject, and his recent book, The Rise of the Robots, contains a lot of food for thought. The main point that should concern professional accountants is that the ongoing drive towards automation is no longer just a threat to low-level jobs, particularly those that already rely heavily on machinery--think driverless cars, automated mining and agriculture and so on.

It was reported that Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will cut 25,000 to 30,000 more jobs as part of a 2.7 billion restructuring September 15, 2015. PC company HP Inc. will report earnings after the bell Wednesday. Meanwhile, Microsoft wrapped a major deal involving the hit game Minecraft. The personal computer company will report second quarter results when the markets close Wednesday. Analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence project earnings of 38 cents a share on 11.7 billion in revenue.

The hit sandbox game Minecraft is officially headed to China. Microsoft announced Monday it has reached a five-year deal with Chinese tech company NetEase to host the popular game for PCs and mobile devices. The deal calls for studio Mojang to develop a version of the game for the Chinese audience. "We are excited to bring Minecraft to Chinese audiences, and expect our large online community to embrace this preeminent game," said NetEase CEO and founder William Ding in a statement. The sandbox-style video game launched in 2011, and allows players to gather resources and create elaborate structures.

Self-Organising Maps (SOMs) are an unsupervised data visualisation technique that can be used to visualise high-dimensional data sets in lower (typically 2) dimensional representations. In this post, we examine the use of R to create a SOM for customer segmentation. The figures shown here used use the 2011 Irish Census information for the greater Dublin area as an example data set. This work is based on a talk given to the Dublin R Users group in January 2014. SOMs were first described by Teuvo Kohonen in Finland in 1982, and Kohonen's work in this space has made him the most cited Finnish scientist in the world.

Training a machine learning algorithm to accurately solve complex problems requires large amounts of data. The previous article discussed how scalable distributed parallel computing using a high-performance communications fabric like Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) is an essential part of what makes the training of deep learning on large complex datasets tractable in both the data center and within the cloud. Preparing large unstructured data sets for machine learning can be as intensive a task as the training process – especially for the file-system and storage subsystem(s). Starting (and restarting) big data training jobs using tens of thousands of clients also make severe demands on the file-system. The Lustre* file-system, which is part of the Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF), is the current de facto high-performance, parallel/distributed file-system.

An article explores how Nvidia Corp. microchips, the kind that are used in video games and by social media networks for photo tagging, are being applied to medicine. They are being used to add machine learning to medical imaging. The idea is to use the technology to spot conditions such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease earlier and faster. But one potential consequence of advancements in this area is reduced dependence on radiologists. Luminex has raised its offer for Nanosphere to obtain its molecular diagnostics technology from 83 million to more than 100 million.

Adopting a digital transformation strategy in the face of tight budgets and cuts could save the NHS from becoming increasingly burdened and possibly collapsing as the healthcare service we know. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has committed 4bn to invest in technology for the NHS, but the level of digital transformation and its maturity across 239 trusts is mixed at best. Achieving a data-sharing, paper-free NHS appears a little way off. Solid projects have been undertaken recently to adopt more digital services over traditional on-premise IT systems in public healthcare. These projects are not as comprehensive as the IT overhaul undertaken by the Cambridge University NHS Hospitals Trust in partnership with HP, but they do show how the NHS is beginning to use more digital technology that yields results.

Whitewater river guide Bret Wojciak has long been a fan of the West's dramatic, cathedral-like canyons and the wild rivers that flow through many of them. In the last five years or so, he has found another reason to cherish these deep gorges: They force people to disconnect from their computers, tablets and cellphones, at least for a few days. The results can be remarkable, Wojciak told me on a recent Don Hatch River Expeditions rafting and kayaking trip down the Green River on the Colorado-Utah border. For three days, my family and a dozen other fortunate souls paddled rafts through Dinosaur National Monument in the 1,500-foot-deep, rainbow-striped Gates of Lodore canyon, bounced over moderate Class III rapids, hiked up trails to see native petroglyphs and dined on delicious campfire meals. Always a bit of an outlier, I tagged along in a hard-shell kayak and had the freedom to run rapids and surf waves on my own.

As news organizations scramble for ways to cut costs, robot video conferencing is one tool that could dramatically expand reporters' access to events and previously unaccommodating government agencies. There's nothing new about using video conferencing -- the business is booming and is expected to reach 2.9 billion in revenue by 2020. But robots, used in video conferencing mode as a journalism tool, could dramatically alter the industry at large. Imagine a bureau of robots in Afghanistan, or in a highly secured building like the Pentagon, stationed at the White House -- or, locally, the State House. Reporters could, functionally, be present for hearings, briefings and interviews -- and multi-tasking -- when they are not able to be physically present.

The World Economic Forum's recent The Future of Jobs Report went further in saying that '65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don't yet exist'. In putting ThisWay forward to the pitch competition at Venturefest, Stewart McTavish, founding Director of the accelerator ideaspace, at University of Cambridge, said: "We look for founders with big ideas and the business acumen to leverage our support. Ultimately we are looking for companies that will positively affect millions in three to five years' time. ThisWay's traction in hiring for large and small companies has demonstrated an ability to exceed these expectations." Founder/CEO,Angela Hood left the world of engineering and architecture to lead research with PhDs in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence and data modeling.