It's the mantra of many a financial advisor: "It's not what you spend that matters. But the mantra of many respondents is "easier said than done." In hopes of making saving easier, San Francisco-based start-up Digit created a chatbot that helps you put money aside by analyzing your spending history and daily activity. It then figures out where to siphon off small sums of cash on a regular basis. To see how well the bot's algorithms work, I decided to try it out. It took me less than a minute to sign up on Digit's website, where I handed over my email address and mobile phone number. After verifying the email and providing my bank login credentials, the bot kicked in. Within a few days, it started to withdraw small amounts of money (between 0 and 150). The bot isn't supposed to transfer more than you can afford but if it does cause an overdraft, Digit refunds the fee. The funds are then held by Digit in what they call your "Digit account." To withdraw funds you text the bot and the ...

But such tweets could help insurers to price premiums for individuals, with research suggesting a direct link between positive posts and a reduced risk of heart disease. This could lead to future insurance cover based on "sentiment analysis", in which Big Data and artificial intelligence make predictive models ever more accurate. Swiss Re ( Swiss Re AG) says technological advances will cut the price of insurance protection and help individuals and firms make better decisions through programs that offer advice and incentivise improvements in areas such as health and driving. However, detractors fret that such developments could erode customers' privacy or lead to increasingly personalized pricing, undermining the basic principle of insurance - sharing risk. Social media monitoring is one of several advances insurers are examining to improve the pricing of policies.

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her. It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone. Such a situation is still science fiction -- but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

In machine learning and computational learning theory, Logit Boost is a boosting algorithm formulated by Jerome Friedman, Trevor Hastie, and Robert Tibshirani. The original paper casts the AdaBoost algorithm into a statistical framework. Specifically, if one considers AdaBoost as a generalized additive model and then applies the cost functional of logistic regression, one can derive the LogitBoost algorithm. LogitBoost can be seen as a convex optimization. Bootstrap Aggregation (or Bagging for short), is a simple and very powerful ensemble method.

When I was a CS student about 13 years ago (damn it, I'm getting old), I was very much fascinated by Fractals. After doing some coding, debugging and fixing things, I had my first Mandelbrot explorer up and running with zoom capabilities. Then, in the closest thing I have ever had to a religious experience, I witnessed how the most simple and random looking way of generating the set produces something that is infinitely self similar and amazingly complex. It was the first time I truly understood how order can spawn out of chaos. It's one of the best examples of how chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions.

I wish I had an artificial-intelligence slave. A digital avatar--call it MY AI--that knows ("knows"?) I spent last weekend at New York University listening to philosophers, scientists and engineers jaw about "Ethics of Artificial Intelligence." How can we ensure that driverless cars, drones and other smart technologies--such as algorithms that decide whether a human gets parole or a loan or has breast cancer--are used ethically? Also, what happens if machines get really smart?

Ocado Technology announced a new approach to handle their 500,000 customer base and their pool of email requests through a partnership with Google and its Cloud Platform (GCP). The work focuses on automating email categorization using TensorFlow and its Python APIs hosted on the GCP. Ocado decided the email pool classification is a good candidate for production-scaled machine learning and automation, specifically, natural language processing (NLP). The workflow adopted by many support-centers is for people to manually process the email queues in a consistent and reliable manner. This doesn't scale well if the business grows quickly or if the overall customer support volume requires an ever-growing support staff.

Stephen Hawking, the famous scientist who once said intelligent machines could be mankind's biggest threat, opened an artificial intelligence lab in Britain this week to help develop robot surgeons and Terminator-style military droids. Britain's Cambridge University will play host to the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) as it uses a 10 million grant to bring together experts from many disciplines to develop AI robots. Scientists from around the world will use the AI lab to design and test intelligent robots that could potentially transform mankind, according to SpaceDaily. "Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one – industrialization." Calling the creation of AI, the biggest event in the history of civilization, Hawking said the British lab hoped to help eradicate disease and poverty in our lifetime, according to Phys.org.

Just over 19 years ago, a milestone in the world of AI was achieved when IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Until then, he was the undefeated world Chess champion – probably the greatest human player of all time. This was a momentous event in AI's brief history. Computer chess programs had been playing good chess since the 1970's, and had improved to the point where their level of play would beat the vast majority of the population. I myself recall buying a chess program in the early 1980's which offered 6 levels of play from beginner to advanced. Even then, I had difficulty beating the machine above level 3.

This year, we've watched Apple, Google, Facebook, Samsung, Microsoft, and many other tech giants make acquisitions or launch products to get into the bot business. They're building bot ecosystems around their chat app platforms -- in SMS, web pages, and elsewhere -- but they're still facing one of the biggest problems in this age of artificial intelligence: How do you find the very best bots? Microsoft wants to expand its bot directory, Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, told VentureBeat in an interview Wednesday, and the company wants to do it with the help of developers and other chat app platforms. "My hope is that we can do something more like search does with web pages, rather than a very closed directory that just Microsoft owns, and we kind of lean that way anyway because we support all these channels," Cheng said. No prospective launch date has been set for an expanded Microsoft bot directory, but Cheng said Microsoft wants to work with the bot developer community and other platforms to create a directory that includes names like Skype, Facebook Messenger, Kik, and Slack -- some of the biggest chat app platforms in the world.