According to Elo's research, the biggest threat for the well-being of Finnish entrepreneurs seem to be the challenge of time management and the lack of supporting networks. This is one of the challenges hackers in'Elo Data Science Hack' hackathon are set to solve. "The aim of our hackathon is to help entrepreneurs flourish and maintain balance in their working life. As Finland's most popular employment pension insurer, we feel passionate about Finnish entrepreneurs' well-being. We have over 85,000 customers and the only way to reach each and every one of them is with digital solutions. This also calls for a new kind of intelligent services," tells Satu Huber, CEO of Elo Mutual Pension Insurance Company.

Ben Robinson, chief strategy & marketing officer at banking software firm Temenos, explains how the future of finance will be shaped by artificial technology. Google's DeepMind triumph this year over one of the world's highest ranked champions at Go is a sign: computers with artificial intelligence (AI) are learning how to outperform us. If computers can learn to beat us at a game, why not at things that we can't afford to get wrong – medical diagnostics, risk analysis, legal and investment advice? And what effect over time – say 20 years – will this have on the way a host of services, such as banking, are delivered? "Service will be all about data and algorithms," David Brear, co-founder and CEO at 11:FS recently suggested.

Chatbots are not new, especially for this generation. In fact, back in 2000, if any of you had ever been an avid user of AOL Instant Messenger, you probably tried chatting with its bot, SmarterChild. I used it to request movie times and to be honest, called him names too (apparently, he didn't mind). SmarterChild was the only bot at that time and was loved for so many reasons. Who knew he would rest in peace so soon?

Scientists at Sony have claimed that they have created "first-ever entire songs composed by Artificial Intelligence". The two songs'Daddy's Car' and'Mister Shadow' have been developed using'FlowMachines', an AI system that learns music styles from a vast database of songs to compose new songs. 'Daddy's Car' has been composed in the style of the English band'The Beatles'.

Sony recently released two songs composed by AI and French composer Benoît Carré arranged, produced the songs, and wrote the lyrics. Sony has also announced a full album made by their AI to be released in 2017. Earlier, AI had written the screenplay for a short film (though it doesnt make too much sense, for now). It is already known that many media sources, including Yahoo, have been using AI to write articles for their websites. AI at Google has attempted its hand at poetry and with good result.

Amid Japan's rapidly aging population, a burgeoning industry is targeting families expecting a death in the near future. Services on offer range from seminars on funerals and inheritance arrangements to a board game that prepares players for the financial implications of age-related decline. With more and more elderly Japanese living alone, consultations are also offered on how to obtain guardianship needed for time in hospital, as well as how to bequeath assets to individuals and organizations other than legal heirs. Pip Robot Technology Co.'s "Kokorozumori" ("Making Preparations in One's Head") is a dice board game that gets families to think about the costs and implications of caring for aging, ailing relatives. The Osaka-based manufacturer of robot dolls intended as companions for elderly people created the game in 2015, in collaboration with a research team at the University of Tsukuba. Players form pairs -- one elderly and the other a younger family member -- and earn an income in the form of pension and salary as they progress on the board.

So needless to say, coming back to it there has been a lot to learn. In the future, I will write a bit more about some of the available tools and libraries that exist these days (both expanding on the traditional AI Stanford libraries I have mentioned previously with my tweet sentiment analysis, plus newer frameworks that cover "deep learning"). Anyway, inspired by this post, I thought it would be a fun Sunday night refresher to write my own neural network. The first, and last, time that I wrote a neural network was for my final year dissertation (and that code is long gone), so was writing from first principals. The rest of this post will be a very straightforward introduction to the ideas and the code for a basic single layer neural network with a simple sigmoid activation function.

Gearing up for three days of coverage of BigDataNYC 2016 at 37 Pillars in New York City, the SiliconANGLE Media team and NVIDIA Corp. hosted The Future: AI-Driven Analytics, An Evening of Deep Learning. This event kicked off the conversation about deriving benefits from Big Data to advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). An event panel met to talk about deep learning, what it means, where it's headed and implications for next-gen apps. Panelists Jim McHugh, VP and GM of NVIDIA Corp.; Randy Swanberg, distinguished engineer at IBM; Ram Sriharsha, product manager, Apache Spark, at DataBricks, Inc.; and Josh Patterson, director of Field Engineering at Skymind joined host George Gilbert, (@ggilbert41), Big Data analyst at Wikibon and theCUBE cohost (from the SiliconANGLE Media team), to talk about deep learning and where is going in the future. Gilbert began the panel discussion by saying that the real advance that is impending right now is the magnitude of cores that use GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) as auxiliary processing units, which he feels is going to change the future of where computation will go.

Accenture has teamed up with a coder, an orchestral composer and a datavis company to put artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to music, in a project called Symphonologie. Looking to combine data with art, Symphonologie's visual music piece has three influences: business, technology and the new digital world. To combine all of these into one artistic experience, Accenture looked to Hannah Davis, a musician and creative technologist; Rare Volume, an interactive design and data company; and composer Mathieu Lamboley. The project began with Davis' thesis, which dealt with putting music to words. She built a computer programme called TransProse, which reads bodies of text and determines the "densities" of eight emotions: joy, sadness, anger, disgust, anticipation, surprise, trust, and fear.

One of my favorite deep learning papers is Learning to Generate Chairs, Tables, and Cars with Convolutional Networks. It's a very simple concept – you give the network the parameters of the thing you want to draw and it does it – but it yields an incredibly interesting result. The network seems like it is able to learn concepts about 3D space and the structure of the objects it's drawing, and because it's generating images rather than numbers it gives us a better sense about how the network "thinks" as well. I happened to stumble upon the Radboud Faces Database some time ago, and wondered if something like this could be used to generate and interpolate between faces as well. To implement this, I adapted a version of the "1s-S-deep" model from the chairs paper.