The words'private banking' can evoke some stereotypical images, like leather-backed chairs in rooms with wood-panelled walls and bookshelves filled with expensive tomes or expensively attired Swiss bankers parcelling out bits of investment wisdom over snifters of brandy and cigars. One item not typically included? The rise and rise of new technology is upending many assumptions in finance. Technologically savvy companies are already competing fiercely with banks in areas such as retail banking and small company loans. They now see private banking as their next hunting ground. Automated investment programmes, often called robo-advisers, use algorithms to arrange individual investment portfolios based upon stated preferences – for a fraction of the fees charged by private banks.

Rembrandt may have died in 1669 but his artistic legacy lives on thanks in part to a new piece of work created with computer data, instead of the artist's hands. Revealed in the Netherlands, 'The Next Rembrandt' is the result of an 18-month project undertaken by a group of art historians, along with software developers, scientists, engineers and data analysts – not the usual team of artists for portraits work. Get your company on stage at TNW Europe. The team worked tirelessly to anyalyze all known works of Rembrandt, which amounts to over 300 paintings, using high resolution 3D scans to capture every little detail and create an algorithm that would eventually be able to accurately recreate his style. That data was then fed to a 3D printer, which recreated the painting using 13 layers of paint-based UV ink.

It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie like "Blade Runner." But researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new 3D printing process that creates robots that are fully functional from the moment they come off the printer. The normal process for creating something complex and mobile like a robot through 3D printing usually involves multiple print runs to make each component. After all the pieces are printed out, then the object needs to be assembled. MIT's new process is significant in that the production period is streamlined, with the robot's solid and liquid hydraulic parts being created in one step, according to a university press release.

Emotional intelligence is a cornerstone of human interactions--an essential part of what it means to be human. But now, artificial intelligences are being developed to better read and process human emotions, which is already changing the way we interact with robots. In the early 1990s, psychologists Salovey and Mayer were the first to recognize emotional intelligence as a set of knowledge and skills distinct from other forms of intelligence, defining it as "the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions." Emotional intelligence is something that seems wonderfully and innately human. But it turns out the tenets of emotional intelligence--which we start picking up in infancy and which seem so closely linked to human nature itself--can be quantified and reduced to logical procedures and algorithms.

A major glitch that occurred last Friday in Japan Airlines Co.'s weight management system was caused by a faulty computer program, which was designed by Deutsche Lufthansa AG, the Japanese carrier said Wednesday. JAL also said that Lufthansa for its part has admitted to programming errors, adding, however, that it was "difficult to prevent the system trouble proactively." Friday's glitch led to the cancellation of 50 domestic flights to and from Tokyo's Haneda airport on the day, affecting about 24,000 passengers, according to JAL. JAL commissioned the program to a computer system firm under the Lufthansa group. JAL started using the program in 2014 and updated it March 23.

Are you building a robot that's supposed to autonomously navigate in a useful way? Cool, that means you'll be needing a LIDAR system, then. For better or worse, it's usually just that straightforward: LIDAR is arguably the best sensor we have right now for reliable navigation, localization, and obstacle avoidance for ground robots. In terms of relatively low-cost sensors, sonar is poor resolution and short range; structured light and time-of-flight sensors are short range and don't work well outdoors; and camera-based vision systems aren't robust enough for reliable navigation. The "relatively low cost" bit is the problem: LIDARs are pricey, and an "affordable" 2D unit, with a range of 10 meters or less, can cost you over US 1,000.

Imagine you could use a standard 3D printer to create your next robotic assistant. Just snap in a motor and battery, and it's ready to go. That's precisely the scenario made possible by a new 3D printing technique developed at MIT. Liquids have long been a challenge for 3D printing, and they're necessary for hydraulic devices like moving robots. On Wednesday, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced what they call the first-ever technique for 3D printing robots that can print solid and liquid materials at the same time. That means it's possible to print dynamic robots in a single step, using a commercially available 3D printer.

No one's quite sure on just when people will be able to summon a self-driving car and go wherever they need to go. Too many variables--how the technology advances, how regulations are developed, what consumer acceptance looks like--remain for anyone to say, but that's not keeping Volvo from offering a date: 2020. The Swedes synonymous with safety want to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious injuries in their cars by the end of the decade. Because airbags, automatic braking and other active tech can only do so much, Volvo plans to use automated driving to do it. Next year, it plans to see how that tech works in the real world when it puts 100 customers in robocars for an extended beta test in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Volvo is about to embark on one of the greatest adventures in the history of self-driving cars... at leat, if everything goes according to plan. It's planning an experiment in China (reportedly the country's biggest to date) that will have as many as 100 autonomous vehicles driving on public streets in regular traffic conditions. Real-life tests aren't completely novel -- just ask Google. However, this would both offer a rare chance at a large-scale test and give Volvo a toehold in China's increasingly hot self-driving car space.

Maluuba, a deep learning company which raised a 9 million series A in January, has opened a research and development lab with a focus on developing proprietary algorithms to solve language problems. The research lab will be led by Maluuba's CTO, Kaheer Suleman, and will be staffed by 13 deep learning research scientists. Maluuba has partnered with Yoshua Bengio, a machine learning and neural computation expert from the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) and a Canada Research Chair in statistical learning algorithms. Maluuba has also partnered with reinforcement learning expert Richard Sutton, a principal investigator from the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning and an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellow. "For a computer to understand humans speaking in natural language and respond appropriately, it needs to capture and represent a large amount of knowledge that is not just words, but also common sense and context about the topic being discussed by the human," said Sam Pasupalak, co-founder and CEO of Maluuba.