I saw a news article recently about how high frequency trading firms are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their trading performance and profit. Two large companies were mentioned with each having a slightly different approach. This May, Nomura Securities are releasing a new stock trading system, built around analysing and assessing vast price and trading data resources. The system aims to simulate the insights of experienced (human) traders and make predictions based on historical market conditions and the correlation to current asset prices. Nothing particularly new about that, but the difference is they will be using AI tools to enable the system to enhance its price prediction ability as it gains more experience.

The CHIRON consortium are aiming to revolutionise long-term care with exciting robotic technology. We hear this phrase almost every day and we recognise that this is an area where we need to do a lot of convincing. However, we are really excited by the possibilities that robotics can offer. The CHIRON consortium is a somewhat unlikely group of experts and professionals from across the UK. Jobeda Ali from Three Sisters Care was the driving force behind the CHIRON consortium.

Artificial intelligence has won Jeopardy, mastered Go and has now predicted the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV show. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'We are very pleased with the Ai's performance in achieving 100 percent accuracy in predicting the I'm a Singer competition's results,' Dr. Min Wanli, Alibaba Cloud's chief scientist for artificial intelligence, said in a statement following the show, according to the Wall Street Journal. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'The results demonstrated that Ai is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions,' he added.

Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety, according to a new report. Under even the most-aggressive tests, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess their safety compared to human-driven vehicles. Researchers say the findings suggest that in order to advance autonomous vehicles into daily use, alternative testing methods must be developed to supplement on-the-road testing. Autonomous vehicles (Google's car pictured) would have to be driven hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety, according to a new report. The report, Driving to Safety: How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?, was written by Rand Corporation.

ONLY a handful of South Africans are using artificial intelligence to help solve business and social problems, and to make money. The past year's devastating drought might have been mitigated if information about previous droughts had been used to predict it and to prepare, says Bhekisipho Twala, director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Johannesburg. Data scientists could also help Eskom predict the where and when of electricity use, easing its task of keeping the lights on when power supply is constrained. "The whole point of data mining or machine learning is finding hidden information that can make business (or other) decisions easier," says Obakeng Moepya, one of the three founders of Johannesburg-based Isazi Consulting, which uses advanced mathematics and statistics to solve difficult problems. Machine learning -- also known as artificial intelligence -- is a field of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Data mining is the analysis step in machine learning, with the goal of extracting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data.

Facebook is expected to announce chatbots, among other things, at its annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco this week, in pursuit of its continuing goal of luring back younger users. Chatbots are programs that largely use artificial intelligence to simulate conversations with humans; the technology will likely be included in the company's Messenger app. The goal is to change the way we communicate with businesses, and with each other, on the Internet. "Bots are conversational so they are a natural extension of how we like to communicate and what we like to do," said Julie Ask, an analyst with Forrester. You can chat with the bot, ask the bot to do things for you, like order take-out or get a new lipstick." Since F8 is a developer conference, Facebook will also likely show off API tools so enterprises and third-party developers can build chatbots and Live Chat plug-ins for business users. These announcements are not getting as much buzz as the chatbots at this point. Think of chatbots as digital assistants that could help enterprises do away with 1-800 numbers, by taking customer questions, helping users find products and even handling problems. "Bots will give consumers, who are more comfortable chatting with someone, the ability to buy products and services and get customer service," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "I personally don't like getting on the phone and would love for Messenger to be able to validate my identity and provide information I need.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way, but it's still a work in progress. We can find instances of AI from video games to robots, the goal being to mimic the human mind. One Canadian company, Maluuba, is working on a algorithm that will read texts to see if the program can understand what was read. Their goal is "building systems that replicate how human beings learn to read, understand, and reason using state-of-the-art deep learning techniques." Hey, maybe we can finally know what is in the Terms and Conditions we always pass over.

For two straight quarters, deal activity in artificial intelligence has hit record highs. Dennis Mortensen is one of the biggest winners in all the craze. His startup x.ai is the creator of Amy Ingram, an AI-driven personal assistant that can schedule meetings for you. After testing Amy in beta for two years, Mortensen announced last week 23 million in Series B funding to bring Amy to market. Dennis Mortensen: AI used to be for academia only and decades-long research.

A recent study by researchers at Oxford University and consultants Deloitte may have given finance professionals pause for thought. It found that, based on the nature of their work and the expected advance of machine intelligence, it is 95% likely that charted accountants will be replaced by some form of automation over the next 20 years. That is a startling figure, but it should come as no surprise that the work of the finance department is ripe for automation. Since 2004 the median number of full-time employees working in the function at big companies has declined by 40% to about 71 people for every US 1bn of revenue, down from 119 people, according to Hackett Group, a consulting firm. This is due, in part at least, to the increased use of automation within the finance department, the researchers say.

Even the savviest city residents get lost sometimes. According to one estimate, 33% of New Yorkers have no idea which way is north at any given time. And anyone who has used Google Maps knows that GPS can be wildly unreliable. Could there be a better way to find your place on a map than by relying on satellite positioning and Wi-Fi triangulation? As highlighted on Prosthetic Knowledge, researchers at the University of Cambridge have created a promising neural network called PoseNet. From a single snapshot from wherever you stand, it can localize your position in just 5ms--that's about 60 times faster than it takes you to blink.