I have been studying Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Capital Markets for ten months now and I am shocked everyday by the speed of evolution of this technology. When I started researching this last year I was looking for the Holy Grail trading tools and could not find them, hence I settled for other parts of the trade lifecycle where AI solutions already existed. Yesterday, as I was preparing for a speech on AI at a conference, one of my colleagues in Tokyo forwarded me an Asian newswire mentioning that Nomura securities, after two years of research, would be launching an AI enabled HFT equity tool for its brokerage institutional clients in May – here it is: the Holy Grail exists, and not only at Nomura. Other brokers have been shyly speaking about their customizable smart brokerage, e.g. Some IBs are working on that, they just don't publicly talk about it.

On Thursday, Aaron's Inc., a Maryland-based appliance and electronics company, set a new Guinness World Record for the "largest human mattress dominoes" chain with 1,200 participants taking a total of 13 minutes and 38 seconds to complete the larger than life feat. Event organizers used two exhibit halls covering 70,000 square feet to set up 34 rows of mattresses. The first mattress was pushed over by Aaron's CEO John Robinson. "Breaking a Guinness World Records title has been a great team building event for the associates we have attending our National Managers meeting," said Robinson at the event. The event not only broke a world record but supported a great cause.

Accenture's Fintech Innovation Lab initiative is an accelerator programme designed to put the best fintech start ups in front of potential banking customers and investors - we interview those that made it to the final. Quotip: "We help to introduce investors into the financial product industry and help them find ideas in any product environment by using a machine learning based algorithm. "Traditional banks have a big trading desk for pricing products but for many it is not economical to do that in the same way. So we came up with an idea for machine learning to extract information from the exchange. "In Switzerland there are lots of products listed on an exchange, if you look at them there is something like 35,000 on the Swiss exchange. We will extract information from the prices that are fed from investment banks to the exchange and with this information we can incorporate pricing and feed that back to customers."

George Hotz has landed 3.1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others to help fulfill… more George Hotz has been bragging for months about his plan to beat Tesla and Google with his self-driving car technology. Now his San Francisco startup, Comma.ai, has raised 3.1 million from Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) and others who are betting he might be able to do it. George Hotz has landed 3.1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others to help fulfill… more Chris Dixon, a partner at A16Z, disclosed in a blog on Sunday that his firm led the funding which had been rumored since early last month. Dixon said he was initially skeptical of Hotz' claims that he could mass produce technology that would convert existing cars into semi-autonomous vehicles. Click here to get the free daily TechFlash Silicon Valley newsletter.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said Monday that Americans have reaped significant benefits from the international architecture put in place after World War II and the United States would be making a serious mistake to retreat from its global leadership role. In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, Lew sought to counter arguments being advanced by Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates that Americans are losing badly in competition with China and other countries in the global economy. Lew said that the United States needs to embrace new players on the global economic stage and make sure they meet the standards of the trading system that the country helped create. "The worst possible outcome would be to step away from our leadership role and let others fill in behind us," he said. Lew's comments came in advance of global finance meetings later this week.

More than 20 private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have been acquired in the last 3 years by corporate giants competing in the space, including Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook, Intel, and, more recently, Salesforce. There have been 4 major acquisitions already in 2016. Google has been the most prominent global player, with 5 key acquisitions under its belt (follow all of Google's M&A activity here, through our real-time Google acquisitions tracker). In 2013, the corporate giant picked up deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto. This acquisition reportedly helped Google make major upgrades to its image search feature.

The Defense Department christened the Sea Hunter, a 132-foot robot ghost ship designed to seek out and track diesel-powered submarines across the ocean. The start of the test phase for the program on Thursday signals a new dawn for autonomous systems at sea, which, Pentagon officials say, will perform an ever-wider variety of jobs and could fundamentally change the way militaries operate on the water. The Sea Hunter is the first of a new type of ocean drone, called an Anti-submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV. The goal of the program: field an autonomous ship with the range and endurance to go anywhere in the world while avoiding collisions with other ships and obeying the rules of navigation. "Current unmanned surface vessel systems and concepts are operated as close-adjuncts to conventional manned ships – they are launched and recovered from manned ships, tele-operated from manned ships, and are limited to direct support of manned ship missions. The ACTUVsystem will be a first of its kind unmanned naval vessel that is designed and sized for theater or global independent deployment," reads the program's description from 2014.

Technology advances not so much when it exhibits innovation, but when it becomes truly practical for everyday people. In 2016, we'll see an acceleration of that shift of technologies from the drawing board and geek-only curiosities to consumer devices that change our lives in ways small and big. Here are a handful of technologies that are on the cusp of major action in the coming year. For decades, artificial intelligence was a thing best understood by sci-fi fanatics and screenwriters. That started to change n 2011 with Apple's Siri voice assistant, but 2015 turned out to be a watershed year for computer algorithms that could ape human thought and interaction.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

The new Atom comes in at just 122mm wide, and thanks to its durable carbon fiber frame plus polycarbonate shell, it only weighs 5 ounces or about 142 grams -- well below the the FAA's 250-gram threshold for mandatory registration. For the same reasons, this tiny drone comes with greater crash resistanance as well as maneuverability than its bigger counterparts. The custom-made brushless motors and propellers allow the Atom to reach speeds of up to 60 mph or 100 km/h, and depending on how hard you push it, its 6,400 mAh swappable lithium ion battery will last for somewhere between three to ten minutes. Video feed is courtesy of a 600TVL CMOS camera with a 120-degree field of view at the front, and on the receiving end the 480p monitor features 40 channels on 5.8 GHz, with a range of 1.5 miles or about 2.4 km. Should you wish to record video, RotorX will later let you mount a 1080p camera module with a microSD slot.