Globally-renowned AI expert Dr Demis Hassabis will today be confirmed as an adviser to the new Office for Artificial Intelligence as the UK looks to cement its place as a world leader in the fast-growing technology. Hassabis, who is the co-founder of leading AI research company DeepMind, will provide expert industry guidance to help the country build the skills and capability it needs to capitalise on the huge social and economic potential of AI - a key part of the Government's modern Industrial Strategy. Digital Secretary Matt Hancock will also confirm Tabitha Goldstaub as the chair and spokesperson of the AI Council, a new industry body tasked with increasing growth in the AI sector and promoting its adoption in other sectors of the economy. Tabitha Goldstaub is the co-founder of AI company CognitionX, an online platform which provides companies with information and access to AI experts to boost their businesses, and runs CogX, one of the largest gatherings of AI experts in the world. She led the team who wrote the influential report London: the AI Growth Capital of Europe, and was the co-founder of Rightster, the largest online video distribution company outside the US.

'The Stone Sky' by N.K. Jemison won the 2018 Locus Award for the best fantasy novel. The 2018 Locus Awards were announced this past weekend. Unlike the Hugo and Nebula Awards, voting for the Locus Awards is open to everyone. Membership in an organization or even a subscription to Locus is not required. Subscribers do have an advantage, however, because their votes count double.

Flocks of robotic birds are taking to the skies of China equipped with high-tech surveillance technology, according to a report. The so-called "spy bird" programme, first reported by the South China Morning Post, is already in operation in at least five provinces and provides another tendril in the country's already advanced surveillance network. The dove-like drones are being developed by researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University in the Shaanxi province, who have previously worked on stealth fighter jets used by China's airforce. One of the researchers involved said the roll out of the technology was still in its early stages. "The scale is still small," said Yang Wenqing, an associate professor at the university's School of Aeronautics who worked on the programme.

By redirecting focus, wealth managers can successfully respond to challenges brought on by digital disruption, demographic shifts, and tighter regulation. Wealth managers have seen their fair share of ups and downs in recent years, and while challenges remain, advisers can drive business and growth by paying attention to demographic segmentation, how investors are using technology, and changes in regulation. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, Simon London first speaks with PriceMetrix chief customer officer Patrick Kennedy and McKinsey partner Jill Zucker about the North American wealth-management industry; he follows that with a discussion with senior partner Joe Ngai, on the industry in China. Simon London: Welcome to the McKinsey Podcast with me, Simon London. Today, we're going to be talking about financial advice and the people who provide it: financial advisers, or as they're sometimes known, wealth managers. Wealth management is a very big business--and also a business facing a number of challenges, such as new technology, changing demographics, and tighter regulation in a lot of countries. A little later, we're going to be getting a perspective on China. But we're going to start here in North America. For the first part of the conversation, I'm joined on the line by Jill Zucker, a McKinsey partner based in New York, and Patrick Kennedy, who's based in Toronto. Pat is chief customer officer for PriceMetrix, which provides data and analytics to the wealth-management industry.

B2B marketers should be pissed. For the past ten or fifteen years, we've heard a steady stream of pitches that promise a 1:1 relationship with our target audience. Unfortunately, the reality has not matched the promises. In fact, I'd argue that the technology we've deployed has, in many cases, pushed us further away from that 1:1 connection. We fell in love with technologies that by their very nature, focused on volume rather than relationships.

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan – Pakistani Taliban militants chose a religious scholar as their new chief in place of Mullah Fazlullah, the insurgent leader who ordered the assassination of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and was killed earlier this month in a U.S. drone strike. Mohammad Khurasani, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, said Saturday that the executive council of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan appointed Mufti Noor Wali Mahsud as its new chief and Mufti Mazhim, aka Mufti Hafzullah, as his deputy. Khurasani conceded for the first time that Mullah Fazlullah was killed in the drone attack in Afghanistan's Kunar province. He did not say when and where the TTP executive council met to choose the new leader. A ruthless leader, Fazlullah ordered the beheading of dozens of opponents when his band of insurgents controlled Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley from 2007 until a massive military operation routed them out in 2009. Fazlullah rose to prominence through his radio broadcasts in Swat demanding the imposition of Islamic law, earning him the nickname "Mullah Radio."

Scott Hartley: In this world where we focus so much on what we're building, how we're building it, I think we need to take a step back and reconsider why we're building, and really humanize our technology, really bring together diverse teams of methodologies and people and mindsets so that we can take our technology and actually apply it to the most fundamental human problems. Today the conversation is largely about artificial intelligence, and one of the concepts that I like to discuss in the book The Fuzzie and the Techie is this concept of intelligence augmentation--so: thinking about using AI but using it in a way that's augmenting the ability of humans. So Paul English, who was the creator of Kayak.com, he is a techie through and through, but he also calls himself an AI realist; he's somebody who believes in the promise of artificial intelligence, but also realizes that this is not something that tomorrow or next year or maybe perhaps in the next decade is going to completely take away from the characteristics and the qualities of what a human can provide. And so he's now creating a company called Lola that's based in Boston, and Lola is sort of Kayak 2.0, where rather than trying to take the travel industry and put it online he's actually taking travel and putting it back into the hands of travel agents, real people that are working on the phones dealing with people that are calling in to book travel. And what he's doing is he's supplementing those travel agents with technology, with artificial intelligence, really "flipping the letters" and trying to use intelligence augmentation as an AI realist to sort of better the service that a travel agent can provide.

Sliced inverse regression (SIR) is a pioneer tool for supervised dimension reduction. It identifies the effective dimension reduction space, the subspace of significant factors with intrinsic lower dimensionality. In this paper, we propose to refine the SIR algorithm through an overlapping slicing scheme. The new algorithm, called overlapping sliced inverse regression (OSIR), is able to estimate the effective dimension reduction space and determine the number of effective factors more accurately. We show that such overlapping procedure has the potential to identify the information contained in the derivatives of the inverse regression curve, which helps to explain the superiority of OSIR. We also prove that OSIR algorithm is $\sqrt n $-consistent and verify its effectiveness by simulations and real applications.

Nearly a decade ago, I had the good fortune of being one of the last people to interview the founder of Commodore International, Jack Tramiel (famous for Commodore computers and the popular C64), before he passed away. At 83 he died from heart failure after pioneering the consumer market for personal computers and home gaming, and working toward changing people's lives for the better through technology. What few people knew, and what I discovered in our interview, was that the foundational concept driving the Commodore 64 was Tramiel's vision for a future in which the Holocaust and its concentration camps (from which Jack survived but his father did not) would never be able to happen again. In our interview Mr. Tramiel told me: I made the market for the computer youth-driven. I went around the world meeting young people in computer clubs and showing them what the computer can do.

John Donahoe of ServiceNow and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn speak about how businesses can play a role in improving work for people in the age of automation and artificial intelligence. How can CEOs stay ahead of the curve in training and developing their workforces for using automation and artificial intelligence (AI)? Since companies are doing the hiring and creating the jobs, what role do they play in talent and development? How should companies think about hiring as work changes? In this episode of the New World of Work podcast, McKinsey Global Institute director James Manyika speaks with two leaders on the forefront of applying AI techniques, such as automation and machine learning, in the business world. John Donahoe, president and CEO of ServiceNow, and Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, tackle the tough questions facing companies today. James Manyika: When it comes to the issue of the future of work and automation, businesses are at the center for several reasons. For one, they are large employers of people and workers, and they are embracing these technologies that are starting to automate work. They play a central role through the choices that they make in using these technologies. Sometimes, they're also in the business of building products and services that also change and transform how we do work. And then sometimes, you come across rare business leaders who are far-forward-looking, think beyond their own businesses, and think about what these things mean for society. With that note, I'm quite delighted that we have two business leaders who satisfy all three of those criteria. They are employers, they are innovators building products and services, and they're also thinking beyond their own businesses to what this means for society.