Politicians like President Donald Trump often demonize trade deals and undocumented immigrants for their suspected downward pressure on labor and job supply, but a study published Tuesday by the National Bureau of Economic Research indicated that the economic threat of artificial intelligence may be far more serious. With the introduction of one robot per 1,000 workers, the percent of the population employed could drop by between 0.18 and 0.34 percentage points, while wages could fall by between a quarter and a half of a percentage point, according to the study, by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University. That may not sound like much, but, for perspective, Amazon.com The fast food restaurant Wendy's announced plans in February to install ordering kiosks at 1,000 of its stores by the end of 2017. Even stock market traders aren't immune, as investment management firm BlackRock Inc. has recently begun to shift its trade decision-making toward algorithmic and robotic stock pickers.

The topic of automation of jobs is a source of much debate in the business world. People are worried about how many jobs will be lost to the advancement of AI, however, a recent study made PwC also added that this new technology would create new professions in the process. Yet, if the United States' Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, is to be believed the US doesn't think that its a matter worth worry about at the moment and believes that it's "50 to 100 more years away." While talking to Axios' Mike Allen on Friday, the Treasury Secretary was asked to address to concerns of people like Mark Cuban and Elon Musk regarding the potential loss of jobs to automation. His response confirmed that it isn't something this current administration is very concerned about. "We had an Axios event the other day with Mark Cuban who was very focused on artificial intelligence and how that was going to affect the workforce," Allen divulged.

AI is rapidly creeping its way into the software we use on a daily basis. Everything from CRM to Account Based Marketing (ABM) to marketing automation is getting "smarter." The promise of AI-powered systems to suggest qualified leads to a B2B sales person is very exciting. One aspect of AI that is very exciting is its ability to tap into unstructured data to learn more about prospects as they engage with a brand's digital channels. Examples of unstructured data include online engagement such as tweets, comments, likes, shares, etc. Think about the potential for smarter systems to reduce much of the heavy lifting associated with identifying qualified sales opportunities.

FinTech Studios(TM), the leading network of artificial intelligence-based financial information, FinTech apps and big-data analytics operated in partnership with dozens of top FinTech software companies, data providers and financial institutions, announced today a strategic partnership with OpenExchange Inc. to integrate their product offerings and provide distribution of each other's solutions to existing clients. This unique partnership enables financial market participants to access both FinTech Studios' financial content and big data analytics, and OpenExchange's video conference capabilities, through a single sign-on process. Under the agreement, FinTech Studios users can access OpenExchange's patented videoconference technology, currently being used by many of the largest financial institutions in the world. FinTech Studios users can seamlessly navigate from its advanced AI-based news, research and market analytics application to OpenExchange's video platform, making financial news and information more actionable than ever before. Users can engage in video calls securely with participants inside and outside the combined user bases of OpenExchange and FinTech Studios.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the great milestones of recent years. It has changed our way of relating to technology and will be the basis for the fourth industrial revolution where robotics will gain ground compared to humans. Autonomous cars and smartphones, as examples of AI, not only make our lives more comfortable but we can talk to them and interact. Experts are considering how this transformation influences our mental processes and how it will affect the lives of human beings and their way of behaving and of thinking. Science has had difficulties in portraying this phenomenon that advances by leaps and bounds, but there are some concrete points on which a consensus has been reached.

LONDON (Reuters) – Artificial intelligence (AI) will become the primary way banks interact with their customers within the next three years, according to three quarters of bankers surveyed by consultancy Accenture in a new report. Four in five bankers believe AI will "revolutionise" the way in which banks gather information as well as how they interact with their clients, said the Accenture Banking Technology Vision 2017 report, which surveyed more than 600 top bankers and also consulted tech industry experts and academics. Artificial intelligence -- the technology behind driverless cars, drones and voice-recognition software -- is seen by the financial world as a key technology which, along with other "fintech" innovations such as blockchain, will change the face of banking in the coming years. More than three quarters of respondents to the survey believed that AI would enable more simple user interfaces, which would help banks create a more human-like customer experience. "The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we've seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized," said Alan McIntyre, head of the Accenture's banking practice and co-author of the report. "(It) will give people the impression that the bank knows them a lot better, and in many ways it will take banking back to the feeling that people had when there were more human interactions."

Artificial intelligence (AI) will become the primary way banks interact with their customers within the next three years, according to three quarters of bankers surveyed by consultancy Accenture in a new report, Reuters says. Four in five bankers believe AI will "revolutionise" the way in which banks gather information as well as how they interact with their clients, said the Accenture Banking Technology Vision 2017 report, which surveyed more than 600 top bankers and also consulted tech industry experts and academics. Artificial intelligence -- the technology behind driverless cars, drones and voice-recognition software -- is seen by the financial world as a key technology which, along with other "fintech" innovations such as blockchain, will change the face of banking in the coming years. More than three quarters of respondents to the survey believed that AI would enable more simple user interfaces, which would help banks create a more human-like customer experience. "The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we've seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized," said Alan McIntyre, head of the Accenture's banking practice and co-author of the report.

PARIS – A decade after a bike crash left an American man paralyzed from the shoulders down, he can again feed himself thanks to a medical first, researchers reported Wednesday. The remarkable advance hinges on a prosthesis that circumvents rather than repairs his spinal injury, using wires, electrodes and computer software to reconnect the severed link between his brain and muscles. "To our knowledge, this is the first instance in the world of a person with severe and chronic paralysis directly using their own brain activity to move their own arm and hand to perform functional movements," said the study's lead author, Bolu Ajiboye of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The study's only patient, 56-year-old Bill Kochevar, has two surgically implanted clusters of electrodes -- each no bigger than a baby aspirin -- in his head. They read his brain signals, which are interpreted by a computer.

A paralysed man has been able to feed himself by using his thoughts to send messages from implants in his brain to ones in his arm. Bill Kochevar, who was paralysed in a cycling accident, said he was "wowed" to regain control of his right arm. Researchers say this is the first time anyone has been able to restore brain-controlled reaching and grasping in a person with complete paralysis. But the technology is a long way from being used outside the lab. "I think it's pretty cool I get to be the first one in the world to do it," said Bill, who was 53 when he took part in the study.

The stochastic block model (SBM) is a random graph model with planted clusters. It is widely employed as a canonical model to study clustering and community detection, and provides generally a fertile ground to study the statistical and computational tradeoffs that arise in network and data sciences. This note surveys the recent developments that establish the fundamental limits for community detection in the SBM, both with respect to information-theoretic and computational thresholds, and for various recovery requirements such as exact, partial and weak recovery (a.k.a., detection). The main results discussed are the phase transitions for exact recovery at the Chernoff-Hellinger threshold, the phase transition for weak recovery at the Kesten-Stigum threshold, the optimal distortion-SNR tradeoff for partial recovery, the learning of the SBM parameters and the gap between information-theoretic and computational thresholds. The note also covers some of the algorithms developed in the quest of achieving the limits, in particular two-round algorithms via graph-splitting, semi-definite programming, linearized belief propagation, classical and nonbacktracking spectral methods. A few open problems are also discussed.