Former trader Jerome Kerviel lost Societe Generale 4.9 billion ( 6.4 billion) in rogue trades. Top investment banks like Goldman Sachs and UBS are spotting insider trading and other rule-breaking using a machine learning platform that was first developed to help the US catch terrorists. Digital Reasoning has "more than half the bulge bracket firms using our technology to spot inside behaviours and insider threats," according to Kiran Narsu, senior vice president of commercial sales at the company. Digital Reasonings has developed a machine learning platform that can learn patterns of language rather than simply looking for key words, helping banks spot things like insider trading and price fixing with a greater degree of accuracy than traditional compliance tools. Its smart platform can be trained to spot trading abuse, collusion, and market manipulation.

IBM's Watson artificial intelligence supercomputer is going to lend its insights to help enhance the fan experience at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships. It will do so via a new cognitive-based concierge feature in the tournament's official mobile app. To enhance the fan experience at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, the mobile app will pilot a Watson-enabled discovery tool that allows fans to input natural language questions and receive immediate responses about a range of tournament topics, such as transportation and directions, food and drink options, and on-site services and facilities. Accessible via the cloud, Watson will offer cognitive computing, cloud, and analytics. By tapping into the natural language software from the Watson platform, the A.I.-infused app will enable fans to ask questions in natural language and get the information they need to plan and navigate their tournament experience.

Chrissie Lightfoot takes a detailed look at how AI is used by law firms and what is on the horizon. As a futurist, an entrepreneur, and a lawyer, I always get asked, 'What do you think is the next big thing in the legal world?' I always begin my response with a catch-all reply: 'The next big thing is anything that helps you attract and keep a client. No client equals no business. A bit of a cliché, I know.

New York City-based Datorama, a marketing analytics provider, closed on a 32 million round of Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. It plans to invest the funds in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to support its machine-learning capabilities. Datorama has raised 50 million since it was founded in 2012. Before founding the company, Sarig spent nearly three years in at MediaMind (now Sizmek), most recently as vice president of research and development. He also worked for Swets Information Services and Pointech Information Systems and spent six years as an officer in the Israeli Navy.

Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned us of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, but is AI really going to be the downfall of humanity?

Cool, colorful, creative Perceptron Learning Algorithm in plain words https://t.co/LPmMTPsRHb Maximum Likelihood Estimate (MLE) and Logistic Regression simplified: https://t.co/CUdOhpP4ko

Mitsubishi Electric has developed what may be a crucial next step in the development of artificial intelligence systems. Its "compact AI" technology eliminates the need for large servers and can be embedded in a far wider scope of devices and machines than existing AI systems can. The company says that, by filtering information necessary for analysis, the new technology can drastically reduce the processes involved in computation for AI systems. The development can trim the computation needed for certain tasks by as much as 90%, according to Mitsubishi Electric. It plans to start offering applications for compact AI technology, such as autonomous driving systems and smarter industrial robots and machine tools, as early as 2017, a company source said.

The new Surface Complete for Education warranty program allows schools to pool their accidental damage claims. Microsoft R Server Developer Edition is now available on the Linux version of the company s Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM), enabling users to build models using Microsoft s ScaleR libraries. In January, Microsoft launched R Server Developer Edition, a free version of the analytics platform for developers, students and nonproduction deployments. The offering arrived nearly a year after the software maker announced it was acquiring Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial supporter of R, the popular open-source statistical computing language. Making Microsoft R Server Developer available on the Linux flavor of the DSVM offers a major bump in big data processing capabilities.

Data School's 8-week Master Course begins September 28. More than two-thirds of the available spots are gone! Learn more about the course and enroll: http://www.dataschool.io/learn/ This info session was recorded on September 13. View the chat history and complete Q&A: http://ccst.io/e/text-course

I recently came across this question on Cross Validated, and I thought it offered a great opportunity to use R and ggplot2 to explore, in depth, the assumptions underlying the k-means algorithm. The question, and my response, follow. K-means is a widely used method in cluster analysis. In my understanding, this method does NOT require ANY assumptions, i.e., give me a data set and a pre-specified number of clusters, k, then I just apply this algorithm which minimize the SSE, the within cluster square error. So k-means, it is essentially an optimization problem.