Accountants all over the world will soon face stiff competition: artificial intelligence. A new startup that specializes in automating financial processes through AI has secured 3.5 million in venture capital from Cherry Ventures, Rocket Internet, Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures, Grazia Equity and angel investors. Smacc, founded by businessmen Uli Erxleben, Janosch Novak and Stefan Korsch, have created a self-learning program renders the need for a team of human accountants obsolete. SEE ALSO: Tech giant's CEO warns of AI apocalypse: 'The Singularity is coming' "Now you have all you need for liquidity planning and revenue/expense reports close to real-time in the tool w/o the need to input data yourself or wait for your external account to do it for you at month's end," Mr. Erxleben told Tech Crunch on Tuesday. The trio's business model echoes the work of companies like Thoughtly, which uses AI to allow customers to analyze, visualize and summarize large volumes of data in real time.

You might know Google Deep Dream from the trippy, layered images it produces--some are like a digital cross between Dali and Van Gogh on acid. The Deep Dream Generator is a computer vision platform that allows users to input photos into the program and transform them through an artificial intelligence algorithm. This video by Computerphile, an educational Youtube channel about videos, explains just how Deep Dream works. The platform uses convolutional neural networks--a machine term for a forward-fed artificial neural network where neuron connectivity patterns respond to overlapping regions in the visual field--in order to enhance photo patterns with surreal effects. In simple terms, many levels of neural networks process the images input into the program.

Major medical centers and technology companies recently announced new projects aimed at harnessing artificial learning to improve detection, diagnosis, treatment, and management of diseases. Google's DeepMind Health, a Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence project, and Moorfields Eye Hospital, a leading center for eye research in London, have teamed up for a five-year project to determine if machine learning can speed up and improve diagnosis of eye diseases by developing machine learning approaches to automatically review eye scans. The deal was announced in July. NVIDIA, the Silicon Valley-based developer of graphics processing unit techniques for use in scientific, engineering, and consumer products, is collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to apply machine learning initially in radiology and pathology, areas rich in images and data. The organizations in April announced they eventually will expand the research into genomics and electronic health records.

Recent years have seen Artificial Intelligence (AI) become the next big thing, or one of the next big things on a technological level and it is starting to have serious social consequences. The advent of Machine to Machine (M2M) communications and the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) are changing industrial processes, from production to distribution, and bringing robotics and automation into every industry. We are entering the "age of complexity"., where computers can optimize processes based by crunching massive data sets. Uber is preparing to add self-driving cars to its current fleet in Pittsburgh, while the Rio Olympics were partly covered by Artificial Intelligence (as openly admitted by the Washington Post for example). You can relax, we're not quite there yet. The legal framework around automated transportation is still widely debated and Facebook bots are widely known to be, at best, irrelevant.

Startupbootcamp InsurTech has announced that the FastTrack tour will be coming to Cape Town on 11 October and Johannesburg on 13 October 2016. Exponential Ventures, the innovation unit of JSE listed financial services group, MMI Holdings, partners with Europe's leading accelerator programme to showcase South Africa's entrepreneurial talent in the global market FastTracks are open to innovative early stage startups specialising in insurance related areas: virtual and augmented reality; Blockchain; artificial intelligence and machine learning; Internet of Things and wearables; drones and robots; cyber security; data analysis and big data; life science and genome; MedTech and digital health; and customer experience. Exponential Ventures, the disruptive innovation unit of JSE listed company, MMI Holdings, has continued with its relentless pursuit of innovation by becoming an investor partner in the insurance incubator programme, Startupbootcamp InsurTech managed by Startupbootcamp a leading international startup accelerator. Startupbootcamp InsurTech has announced that the FastTrack tour will be coming to Cape Town on 11 October and Johannesburg on 13 October 2016. FastTrack days (or pitch days) are sessions where startups are given an opportunity to present their insurance related business idea to the Startupbootcamp InsurTech team and industry experts.

When I hear colleagues talk at a high level about their models, it has a very different feeling to it than people talking about more classical models. People talk about things in lots of different ways, of course – there's lots of variance in how people see deep learning – but there's often an undercurrent that feels very similar to functional programming conversations. It feels like a new kind of programming altogether, a kind of differentiable functional programming. One writes a very rough functional program, with these flexible, learnable pieces, and defines the correct behavior of the program with lots of data. Then you apply gradient descent, or some other optimization algorithm. The result is a program capable of doing remarkable things that we have no idea how to create directly, like generating captions describing images. It's the natural intersection of functional programming and optimization, and I think it's beautiful. I find this idea really beautiful. At the same time, this is a pretty strange article and I feel a bit weird posting it.

Mark Zuckerberg say he's created an AI that controls his smart house What is Korea's Strategy to Manage the Implications of Artificial Intelligence?

Healthcare organizations have spent years installing electronic health records and other information systems that collect data and improve patient care. Is the information collected by Fitbits and Apple Watches covered by HIPAA regulations? Find out more about what's covered – and what isn't – when it comes to wearable devices and data so you can avoid the risks. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent.

K-means' goal is to reveal patterns within the data. Let's imagine that you have a database with millions of rows representing your customers' orders. You might want to use the K-means algorithm to gather your customers into different groups based on key characteristics. K-means is easy to implement; you just need to specify how many clusters you want. Here you should look at two measures.

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological condition that affects approximately 70 million people worldwide. Characterised by sudden bursts of excess electricity in the brain, manifesting as seizures, epilepsy is still not well understood when compared with other neurological disorders. Seizures often happen unexpectedly and attempting to predict them has been a research topic for the last 30 years. Electroencephalograms have been integral to these studies, as the recordings that they produce can capture the brain's electrical signals. The diagnosis of epilepsy is usually made by a neurologist, but can be difficult to make in the early stages.