Susa Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture firm, announced today that it has secured a 50 million fund, Susa Ventures II. This is just the second fund for the firm, which was founded three years ago and has so far backed 41 companies through its first fund of 25 million. With its new fund, Susa plans to back 12 companies per year at seed investments falling between 400,000 and 750,000 (roughly twice the check size compared to Fund I investments). Furthermore, the firm has wisened up about the way it invests. In Fund I, Susa adhered to a 1:1 ratio for follow-on funding.

Using machine learning for early detection of eye diseases: this is what DeepMind, a division of Google, and London's Moorfields Eye Hospital are planning. The two partners are working on a five-year research project which aims to use algorithms to speed up the process for detecting eye diseases via scans carried out at Moorfields Eye Hospital. Ars Technica looked at the project in more detail. Data science is no longer fantasy but reality. Back in December 2015, we talked about an algorithm that can predict how sugar levels vary from one person to another after a meal.

This sponsored post is part of our Mobile Commerce Explosion series. Produced in partnership with Braintree, the series looks at the explosive growth in mobile and how it's disrupting industries and impacting brands. See the whole series here. The refrain of "mobile first" seems anachronistic now, but 2016 may actually be the year mobile commerce has taken hold aided by AI and machine learning. Braintree's GM of Mobile, Aunkur Arya, sat down with Michael Yamartino, Pinterest's Head of Commerce, to break it down on stage at MobileBeat 2016.

SLOUGH, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Global business outsourcing provider Arvato has entered a strategic partnership with Blue Prism to offer Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to help councils deliver back-office transformation. The partnership will see Arvato use the cutting-edge automation software to provide local authorities with an end-to-end solution of identifying, designing, building and monitoring automated processes, providing RPA-as-a-service and consultancy and training. Arvato will use the innovative technology to help current and future clients in local government automate transactional back office functions, such as revenues and benefits, HR, payroll and finance, increasing process speed and efficiency while freeing up employees to deliver front-line services. RPA uses software to create an agile, virtual workforce which mimics human processing of repetitive labour-intensive tasks. It follows rule-based business processes and interacts with systems in the same way that people do.

In March this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked about the industry trend of using human language more pervasively for interaction with computing devices, a trend he called "conversation as a platform." He also announced several bot initiatives, including the company's bot framework. In April, Facebook launched its Messenger platform with bots. Then, in May, Google announced its attempt to develop AI-powered bots, called Google Assistant. Since then, bots have been widely regarded as a new user interface (UI) to fundamentally change how computing will be experienced by people.

A summer program at Stanford University introduced high school girls to artificial intelligence this summer. Among the activities they learned more about were flying drones, how autonomous cars work, diving robots and machine learning for healthcare. The two-week AI program was developed last year by Olga Russakovsky, a Stanford postdoctoral researcher, and Fei-Fei Li, associate professor of computer science and director of Stanford's AI Lab. They were motivated by a "desperate" need to bring more women into the field. As Li told the girls during their first day, as explained in a blog entry, AI could in the future become the "Terminator next door," or follow a more humane direction, based on the people behind the scenes doing the research and development work.

The investment firm Susa Ventures won't have any partners based in Los Angeles as it begins investing from a new 50-million fund. Susa unveiled its second fund -- double the size of its first -- Tuesday. In looking at the first batch of investments, Susa's geographically spread apart team realized that most of the companies were in the San Francisco Bay Area, including finance start-ups Robin Hood and LendUp. They decided to consolidate in San Francisco, too. "To take it to take next level, we all needed to be in the same office and S.F. seemed like the best," said general partner Seth Berman, who moved there from Los Angeles more than a year ago.

Criteo is the world leader in performance Internet advertising. The Recommender System is at the core of its Engine. Real-time prediction: Everybody predicts clicks. But how do you accurately predict if the userâ s click on a product will generate a sale? Thankfully, you have billions of data points to help you.

Data Science covers all such tools, techniques and technologies which help us handle data and use it for our good. It's an interdisciplinary blend of Data Inference, Algorithm Development, and Technology in order to solve analytically complex problems. The 3 components involved in data science are organising, packaging and delivering data (the OPD of data). Data Science is such a vast and subjective topic of discussion, it is not practically possible to encapsulate it in one single blog. It isn't an independent field in itself, it is a combination of various fields including Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics, and Business Strategy.