ABSTRACT The availability of powerful Natural Language Processing techniques led to the emergence of AI tool that reads and interprets unstructured textual information, such as news and social media messages. The sentiment of finance-related content influences trading and investment decisions of players in financial markets and hence, moves the prices of assets. Dr. Svetlana Borovkova has been working for several years in the area of sentiment analysis and its relation to financial markets; applications of sentiment analysis range from commodity trading to systemic risk to quantitative investment strategies. In this talk, Dr. Borovkova will give an overview of this exciting field and show, among other things, how media sentiment can be used to forecast global financial distress, to generate sector and country rotation investment strategies and to help enhance machine learning applications to intraday trading. SPEAKER Dr. Svetlana Borovkova is an Associate Professor of Quantitative Finance in Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Head of Quantitative Modelling in risk advisory firm Probability & Partners.

I sit at my desk at least eight hours a day. Between the steady pings from Slack, my trusty group chat and the siren song of the greater internet, staying focused can be difficult. As I write this, I'm swiping between a full-screen Scrivener window and a full-screen Chrome window because... Some people listen to podcasts at work to make mindless tasks go by. Unfortunately, I can't simultaneously pay attention to a conversation and write, so to help combat the incessant distractions, I listen to music -- a lot of it. Usually I turn to original scores from movies and video games, but I switch it up with instrumental hip-hop, industrial and downtempo electronic. A side effect of my efforts to fight against distraction is that I'm always on the lookout for new music to help me focus. Tune into ChilledCow's "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" on YouTube at any given moment and you'll find thousands of people watching simultaneously.

In 2002, the sci-fi thriller Minority Report gave us a fictionalised glimpse of life in 2054. Initially, the movie evokes a perfect utopian society where artificial intelligence (AI) is blended with surveillance technology for the wellbeing of humanity. The AI supposedly prevents crime using the predictions from three precogs – these psychics visualise murders before they happen and police act on the information. "The precogs are never wrong. But occasionally, they do disagree."

Each July, some 130,000 fans from around the world descend on the San Diego Convention Center for four days of vendor exhibitions, celebrity appearances, sneak previews of new movies, cosplay, and just general all-around geeking out. Founded in 1970, Comic-Comic International has grown into one of the world's largest such festivals--a must-attend event for lovers of superheroes, science fiction, and fantasy. For photographer Angie Smith, attending Comic-Con for the first time, the spectacle felt overwhelming, yet welcoming. "There's a real community energy--you feel like you can walk up and talk to anyone," she says. "People were there for a lot of different reasons, but the main one was to meet other people, network with other people. Everyone talked about the connections they'd made in previous years, people they keep in touch with and see every year when they come back."

Astronaut Tim Peake has launched a competition to name the British-made Mars rover set to search for life on the red planet -- and'Rover McRoverface' is already in the running. The rover is scheduled to land on the red planet in August 2021 and will be part of a mission to investigate how Mars evolved and whether it has conditions for life. People with suggestions can submit them on a designated website set-up by the European Space Agency (ESA). However, it is not a popularity poll, with an expert panel scheduled to make the final decision. As a result, 'Rover McRoverface' is unlikely to be the winning entry.

Last year, veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg denounced online ads for ruining the online experience. The model is bad for everyone, as advertisers and online sites scrabble over quality control and the fight for cheap digital real estate. Of course, the consumer has had no say other than to suffer in silence or deploy decreasingly effective adblockers. In this war, they are little more than innocent bystanders forced to wade through disingenuous attempts at engagement and bombarded with disruptive advertising that serve little purpose other than getting in the way of the content they actually want to consume. Up until this point we have consumed mass content--newspapers, radio ads, TV ads, display ads--knowing that we're going to get some crap with it along the way.

Does all the hype about AI sound just a little too familiar? If you're old enough to remember the first beginnings of the Internet and the dotcom bubble, you might also remember the tsunami of hype that attended these events as they unfolded. Wired magazine made endlessly breathless predictions about how the Internet would transform humanity and bring about a technologically-driven utopia. Now we're wrestling with how such a promising technology devolved into a netherworld of hacking, hate speech, exploitation of personal data, "dark webs", misinformation, political chicanery, and citizen surveillance despite these glowing promises. In the latest twist, AI is being sold in a similar way by similar players and the cultural amnesia is impressive.

Will robots eventually put writers out of a job? Are we going to see computers writing the next Great American Novel? Over the last decade or so, though, AI (artificial intelligence) has become increasingly sophisticated, and it's influencing the world of writing in a number of interesting ways. AI is all about machines learning and adapting. Instead of simply being programmed in minute detail with everything they need to know to accomplish a particular task, they're programmed with instructions that allow them to learn from their experience (just as people do).

Will robots eventually put writers out of a job? Are we going to see computers writing the next Great American Novel? Over the last decade or so, though, AI (artificial intelligence) has become increasingly sophisticated, and it's influencing the world of writing in a number of interesting ways. AI is all about machines learning and adapting. Instead of simply being programmed in minute detail with everything they need to know to accomplish a particular task, they're programmed with instructions that allow them to learn from their experience (just as people do).