One of the world's biggest banks has revealed it is leading the fight against criminals using state of the art AI technology. The Bank of Russia has teamed up with Yandex Data Factory to use the latter's machine learning services to identify unlicensed money lenders, and the websites hosting them. So far, Yandex Data Factory's custom search algorithm has helped to reveal 2,500 suspicious organisations, and played a significant role in spotting any inaccuracies, meaning that potentially fraudulent organisations will not be missed in the future. The system works by analysing key words across an existing Yandex database, which identified seven million web pages related to finance topics. The algorithm is then able to assign a web page to its correct category, before identifying if an organisation is licenced, which Yandex says occurred correctly in 98 percent of cases.

Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The fruit of his labors of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than 50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone. "I figured I should just do it when the timing is right and realize my dream. If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," said Ma, who had to learn about fields completely new to him before he could build the complex gadget.

"YOU are a developer and you've just spent two weeks writing this amazing app. Your dream is to get it in front of every iPhone user." That was how Steve Jobs, then Apple's boss, introduced an online shop for smartphone apps eight years ago. At first few paid it much heed, but it launched one of the fastest growing software markets ever. Since then, over 100 billion apps have been downloaded, generating 40 billion in revenues for developers and billions more in subscriptions and other fees.

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

Twitter was not always an advertising business, and it doesn't want to limit itself to promoted tweets. Under second-time CEO Jack Dorsey, the company has been reinvigorating its foundation as a real-time data service, and the revenue is following. Since Dorsey arrived last summer, he has been cultivating relationships with developers -- particularly those who pay for Twitter's data. In February, Dorsey listed developers as his fifth priority, behind the more obvious need to address the core service, live video, creators and safety. But interestingly, this fifth priority is the one that's already been bringing in more cash and continues to make Twitter relevant.

On this blog, we have been often preaching how Machine Learning has been expanding out of its historic habitat of academics and R&D labs into all kinds of industries by powering smart applications. One of the reflections of this trend can be seen in the number of conferences and events that are bringing together real life practitioners and business leaders that are looking for ways to incorporate Machine Learning in their core activities. This year we are witnessing the addition of Machine Learning Prague to that growing event list as possibly the first conference of its kind in Eastern Europe. We are also proud to announce BigML's active participation at the event that will take place on April 23–24, 2016. In the organizers' words "This is not another academic conference. Our goal is to foster discussion between machine learning practitioners and all people who are interested in applications of modern trends in artificial intelligence. You can look forward to inspiring people, algorithms, data, applications, workshops and a lot of fun during both days as well as at the afterparty."

A combined project by Microsoft, the Rembrandt House Museum, advertising firm J Walter Thompson Amsterdam, and strangely, ING Bank has yielded a 148 million pixel portrait generated by a computer. Developers of The Next Rembrandt say a series of complex algorithms were used to extract the key features of Rembrandt's work. Given the companies involved, the project smacks of an advertising stunt, but the resulting printed image does raise interesting questions about the quality of future forgeries. Under the project, all 346 Rembrandt paintings were analyzed using 3D scans to pinpoint common techniques and themes used by the 17th century artist. READ MORE: Lawnmower explodes during crazy backyard'art' experiment (VIDEO) "The first step was to study the works of Rembrandt in order to create an extensive database," explains Emmanuel Flores, director of technology at J Walter Thompson Amsterdam.

About a dozen trucks from major manufacturers like Volvo and Daimler just completed a week of largely autonomous driving across Europe, the first such major exercise on the continent. The trucks set off from their bases in three European countries and completed their journeys in Rotterdam in the Netherlands today (Apr. One set of trucks, made by the Volkswagen subsidiary Scania, traveled more than 2,000 km and crossed four borders to get there. The trucks were taking part in the European Truck Platooning Challenge, organized by the Dutch government as one of the big events for its 2016 presidency of the European Union. While self-driving cars from Google or Ford get most of the credit for capturing the public imagination, commercial uses for autonomous or nearly autonomous vehicles, like tractors from John Deere, have been quietly putting the concept to work in a business setting. When trucks autonomously follow one another, it's called "platooning."

One of the most important things that ever happened to Dan Faggella was a collapsed roof. The then 25-year-old had been building his own business in his hometown of Wakefield, Rhode Island: a martial arts gym focusing on his specialty, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. "I was 17 or so when I first learned Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and I really fell in love with the'chess game' aspect of the martial art," Faggella says. When his teacher's studio closed, he used the money he'd earned from teaching private lessons and working at a local beach to open his own studio, which grew from a rented space in someone else's gym to a 500-square-foot training area to 2,500 square feet of his own. At the same time, he was using his earnings from the studio to pursue what might seem like a very different path: a one-year Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at the University of Pennsylvania, studying under well-known author and positive psychology expert Martin Seligman.

If you're the kind of person who really likes chatting with the mail carrier, Dispatch won't be your favorite startup. That's because the four-person South San Francisco company is working on technology that could replace postal workers; UPS and FedEx drivers; Instacart couriers; and anyone else who gets paid to bring you stuff. Instead, you might be dealing with a 3-foot-tall, 150-pound, battery-powered roving robot that looks like a little dumpster on wheels. Called Carry, the device uses artificial intelligence, five cameras and a laser to navigate on sidewalks around pedestrians, flaming hoverboards and any other obstacles to get packages to your door. The only places you'll find Carry today are on two California college campuses, where it's still being tested.