NOT since the era of imperial Rome has the "thumbs-up" sign been such a potent and public symbol of power. A mere 12 years after it was founded, Facebook is a great empire with a vast population, immense wealth, a charismatic leader, and mind-boggling reach and influence. The world's largest social network has 1.6 billion users, a billion of whom use it every day for an average of over 20 minutes each. In the Western world, Facebook accounts for the largest share of the most popular activity (social networking) on the most widely used computing devices (smartphones); its various apps account for 30% of mobile internet use by Americans. And it is the sixth-most-valuable public company on Earth, worth some 325 billion.

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to the latest research study released by Technavio, the global FinTech investment market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 53% until 2020. This research report titled'Global FinTech Investment Market 2016-2020', provides an in-depth analysis of market growth in terms of revenue and emerging market trends. This market research report also includes up to date analysis and forecasts for various market segments and all leading regions. "FinTech companies seek new means to store, analyze, and search vast amounts of data. Such analysis is anticipated to help them segment customer populations, identify opportunities for new products and services, and optimize pricing mechanisms. A key example is this is seen with the pooling of social network data with fund management and investments in relation to company analysis and management. The use of big data and new data can improve investment decisions, and also help arrive at a comprehensive credit scoring mechanisms," said Soumya Mutsuddi, one of Technavio's lead research analysts for gaming.

Next time you schedule a meeting and an assistant named Amy or Andrew Ingram sets up the logistics, here's a pro tip: You may be chatting with a robot. And if it's one of x.ai's bots, you might never know the difference. That was my experience when I exchanged emails with "Andrew" to set up an interview with x.ai's CEO. After I emailed x.ai's press contact, she referred me to Andrew to hammer out the details. Andrew proposed a time, thanked me when I accepted and sent out a calendar invitation.

If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results only in hotter water. But at some point everything changes – the water starts to boil, turning from hot liquid into steam. Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: will new technology spawn mass unemployment, as the robots take jobs away from humans? Or will the jobs robots take over release or unveil – or even create – demand for new human jobs?

In the third issue of this monthly digest series you can find out how Microsoft is bringing AI to the visually impaired, how to colorize your grayscale images, why a Google car caused a crash for the first time, and much more. Last Thursday, Microsoft showed off its Seeing AI app for the first time. It's still under development, but it looks extremely promising. Using a smartphone camera or a pair of camera-equipped smart glasses, the Seeing AI app can identify things in your environment--people, objects, and even emotions--to provide important context for what's going on around you. By a swipe of hand, the user can instruct the app to take a snapshot of the current visual scene and run it through image recognition software.

A new partnership between Google and chip maker Movidius could change the way your phone looks at the world. According to Movidius, Google will be licensing Movidius' latest flagship chip, the MA2450, along with the accompanying software stack. The chip has 12 cores, and is able to perform low power, advanced computer vision processing. One possible use for this could be Google's Project Tango. Google is partnering with Lenovo on a smartphone that would be able to sense where it is, how it's positioned, and what's around it, which opens the door for many new software opportunities.

In this special guest feature, Greg Council, VP Marketing and Product Management at Parascript, discusses how applied AI can help businesses uncover and use valuable information that they are already storing. In his role at Parascript, Greg is responsible for market vision and product strategy. He oversees all aspects of Parascript software life cycles, leading the successful development and introduction of advanced technology to the marketplace. Greg has over 15 years of experience in marketing, product definition and development, competitive/market analysis, and channel engagement for both on-premise solutions and SaaS. Formerly, he led product management at Evolving Systems and Captaris, now OpenText.

Vilson Vieira/TwitterGoogle's AI adds dog faces to Hieronymus Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights." In return, they discovered their algorithms can turn almost anything into trippy images of knights with dog heads and pig-snails. Now computer programmers across the internet are getting in on the "inceptionism" fun, after Google let their AI code run free on the internet. The open-source AI networks are available on GitHub for anyone with the know-how to download, use, and tweak. Gathered under the Twitter hashtag #deepdream, the resulting images range from amusing to deeply disturbing.

Imagine strapping an enormous VR headset to a car. Now, place that car inside a facility the size of a football field that simulates a full range of motion. Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt provided a peek inside that incredible facility during a keynote speech to a crowd of more than 3,000 at our GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley Thursday. Pratt also announced that Toyota will be opening a new autonomous driving research facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that will be staffed by about 50 researchers to complement Toyota's ongoing efforts in Japan, Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Mass., near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pratt is a legendary figure in the robotics community.

Tay, Microsoft Corp's so-called chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to engage with millennials on Twitter, lasted less than a day before it was hobbled by a barrage of racist and sexist comments by Twitter users that it parroted back to them. TayTweets (@TayandYou), which began tweeting on Wednesday, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it, according to its Twitter biography. But it was shut down by Microsoft early on Thursday after it made a series of inappropriate tweets. A Microsoft representative said on Thursday that the company was "making adjustments" to the chatbot while the account is quiet. "Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways," the representative said in a written statement supplied to Reuters, without elaborating.