Despite the ongoing efforts of banks to attract millennials, they are still failing to make an impression. According to Gallup, only 23% of millennials are actively engaged with their bank, making millennials the least engaged generation. Considering that fully engaged customers bring considerable benefits and higher revenues – this is a big problem. If banks expect millennials to "simply grow up," they may be facing a tough road ahead. Financial institutions – banks and others – that find a way to communicate with millennials on their terms and give them the financial tools they want are more likely to end up the winners. When millennials feel supported and are able to choose the way in which they interact with a bank, they are more likely to strengthen their relationships and make smarter financial decisions.

Manulife Financial is working with indico data solutions on artificial intelligence (AI) that will review data from sources such as news articles and analysts' reports and present recommendations to help investment researchers and portfolio managers make more informed decisions. On August 26, the insurer announced that its Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is working with the Boston-based indico on an artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning tool that will be able to analyze unstructured financial data. Manulife and its John Hancock brand in the United States have established LOFT offices in Boston, Toronto, and Singapore that are working to make the most of new technologies such as AI, blockchain, and virtual reality. In this case, the insurer is using indico's platform to decipher natural language and train the computer to analyze text and extract insights that can be tailored to a researcher's individual requirements. "Deep learning, while proven in the realms of the Facebook's and Google's of the world, is just starting to come into its own as an enterprise capability," said indico's CEO and co-founder Slater Victoroff.

A Chinese robot reporter produced 450 Olympic news items over the 15-day sporting event, mostly about China's dominant sports, like badminton and table tennis. While its prose was criticized for being somewhat rote, the coverage certainly was speedy, appearing minutes after events ended. The "AI writing robot" Xiaomingbot (link in Chinese) produced 30 to 40 pieces most days of the Olympics, and on August 14 it published 58 (link in Chinese), according to co-inventor Toutiao news. Toutiao, or "headline news" is a search engine and news syndication service with a website, app, and public WeChat account that boasted 530 million total users in August. Most of the robot news items were 100 words or so. The most-read was a piece on a Badminton Women's Singles game won by London Olympics sliver medalist Wang Yihan.

The infographic below from our friends over at Visenze was inspired by the growing trend on how AI capabilities and applications are attempting to solve real-world issues that e-commerce businesses are facing. By merging massive data sets that e-retailers are collecting with intelligent neural networks, each of the mentioned AI features can help e-commerce companies build unparalleled competitiveness in the market. The infographic consolidates all these AI applications – from its impact on back-end supply chains to front-end consumer experiences.

The Defense Science Board's much-anticipated "Autonomy" study sees promise and peril in the years ahead. The good news: autonomy, artificial intelligence, and machine learning could revolutionize the way the military spies on enemies, defends its troops, or speeds its supplies to the front lines. The bad news: AI in commercial and academic settings is moving faster than the military can keep up. Among the most startling recommendations in the study: the United States should take "immediate action" to figure out how to defeat new AI-enabled operations. While the Pentagon was busy developing offensive weapons, techniques, plans, and tricks to use against enemies, it ignored U.S. equipment's own vulnerabilities.

Today on In Case You Missed It: Harvard Researchers created the world's first fully-autonomous octo-robot, something that runs on hydrogen peroxide and moves by pumping oxygen into its tentacles. We'd be afraid, except it looks so similar to what research vessel EV Nautilus just spotted in the sea that we can't help but be charmed instead. If you're more into nature as medicine, you may be interested in the study that showed houseplants may be better at removing air pollution than many ventilation systems. We round up the week's stories with TL;DR but can't limit our suggestions to just one this week. Read up on the Apple iOS patch after a human rights activist was spied on here, and the story about the VR video starring President Obama and more even more impressive, the National Parks!-- is here.

LinkedIn knowledge graph is a large knowledge base built upon "entities" on LinkedIn, such as members, jobs, titles, skills, companies, geographical locations, schools, etc. These entities and the relationships among them form the ontology of the professional world and are used by LinkedIn to enhance its recommender systems, search, monetization and consumer products, business and consumer analytics. Creating a large knowledge base is a big challenge. Web sites like Wikipedia and Freebase primarily rely on direct contributions from human volunteers. Other related work such as Google's Knowledge Vault and Microsoft's Satori focuses on automatically extracting facts from the Web by leveraging the data redundancy nature of big data for constructing knowledge bases.

Sydney legal startup LegalVision announced today that it has secured 4.2 million in a Series B round to continue its growth in the Australian online legal market. The funding round was led by commercial law firm Gilbert Tobin, who previously made a strategic investment into LegalVision last November. LegalVision delivers legal services through a tech-driven business model, helping businesses around Australia access quality resources by providing startups and SMBs with access to more than 3,000 legal articles and 40 free legal documents. In just over three years the startup reports that it has assisted more than 15,000 business around the country. CEO of LegalVision, Lachlan McKnight said the backing of Gilbert Tobin and the latest round of funding is validation of the startup's goal and progress to date.

Here are our most recent featured articles and resources, including three interesting books, as well as tutorials about R Data Frames, and Stats with Google Sheets.

A Cambridge entrepreneur who sold his company to Amazon is increasing the amount of angel investing he's doing now he no longer works for the e-commerce giant. William Tunstall-Pedoe sold Evi Technologies, his voice recognition startup to Amazon in 2012, for an undisclosed amount that TechCrunch reported to be around 26 million ( 20 million). Following the acquisition, Tunstall-Pedoe became part of the Amazon family. However, his investment activities have been somewhat limited over the last four years. "I did a bit of investment while I was in Amazon but obviously that was constrained by Amazon legal; I had to get permission if it overlapped at all with anything Amazon did and most things overlap with something that Amazon is doing," Tunstall-Pedoe told Business Insider at his home in Cambridge.