Not long ago, audits could be performed only by teams of accountants manually scouring reams of financial information. But given the explosion of data in today's digital world, it's critical that the audit profession evolves its traditional processes and embraces advanced technology tools--including robotics, automation and cognitive technology. By doing so, it can uncover insights that allow the audit to continue to be relevant and effective in helping investors make important financial decisions. Learn how cognitive technology is changing the financial statement audit. Cognitive technology--also known as artificial intelligence--can go through a vast amount of data faster and more precisely than any person.

Big Blue is bringing its Watson artificial intelligence tools to the enterprise world in a big way, with new tools announced this week for marketing, commerce, supply chains, and human resources. IBM also rolled out a new hybrid cloud database solution, cognitive capabilities for iOS apps, and services for developers using the Slack collaboration platform. The company announced the new products and services at its World of Watson event taking place this week in Las Vegas. The conference is dedicated to promoting IBM's artificial intelligence technologies. One of the key themes of this year's conference is how Watson can help business professionals.

Facebook has developed a special tool to keep countries from seeing stories criticial of their government. The site has been secretly working on a feature that allows it to geographically censor specific posts from people in the country. It appears to have been done as a way of getting back into China, an important market for the company but one with an intense censorship regime. The apparent tool was revealed at a time when Facebook was facing increased scrutiny of how it picks what appears in news feed. It has received special criticism for the way that it allows fake news to flourish on the service, and many have claimed that it helped Donald Trump win the Presidential election.

From tailoring our web searches and targeting advertisements, to detecting spam or fraudulent activity and even enabling driverless cars; over the last decade or so machine learning has infiltrated many aspects of our lives, often in ways that we have come to take for granted. Now there is burgeoning excitement around its potential utility in medicine. Some paint a future in which machine le arning will diagnose disease and displace the work of doctors. But others question the extent and pace of any disruption in healthcare. So when it comes to actual impact on healthcare, where do we draw the line between hype and reality?

The most vexing and important issues of the present and the future likely will be solved using the power of supercomputers, a renowned expert says. In fact, supercomputers already are being used to tackle problems in disciplines such as medicine, education, energy exploration and criminal investigation, explained Katharine Frase. That kind of readily available technology, she said, is leading to increased capabilities in policing and other disciplines "in an actionable way." Frase was the keynote speaker Tuesday at SC16, the top international convention showcasing how high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis are advancing commerce, education, medicine, scientific research, space exploration, weather forecasting and many other disciplines. Frase served as chief technology officer and vice president of public sector at IBM from March 2013 to September 2015.

We are on the verge of a very fast rate of technological change. If you think the Internet and mobile communications have changed the world, just wait. Coming years will be even more disruptive and amazing. When most people ponder technology they default to thoughts about compute power and its limitations. In 1965 Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel theorized that processing power should be capable of doubling every 18-24 months.

The U.K. government has distributed a number of gifts to the country's technology sector. In his first Autumn Statement Wednesday, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond confirmed the U.K. government would invest an additional 2 billion pounds ($2.48 billion) into technology research and development by the end of the current Parliament in 2020. Some of this money will be allocated to a new Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund that will direct it to priority technologies, including robotics and artificial intelligence. Hammond also flagged further investment into the development of autonomous vehicles, and announced plans to invest 400 million pounds into venture capital via the British Business Bank, in order to stem the sale of promising U.K. startups to foreign buyers. "I am taking a first step to tackle the longstanding problem of our fastest growing technology firms being snapped up by bigger companies, rather than growing to scale," said Hammond.

Sephora is one of the earliest retailers to offer a chatbot experience consistent with its chic and modern brand values. The Sephora chatbot is available on Kik, a messaging platform popular with millennials. The team at 1080bots is continually reviewing chatbots to figure out how to create brilliant high-touch ecommerce experiences that represent your brand and deliver on business objectives. The conversation begins with the bot introducing itself and what it's able to do for the user. In this case the bot provides make up tips and reviews.

The underwater search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 found man-made objects on the ocean floor, later revealed to be debris from a nearby shipwreck. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search for the missing plane, said in its operational update Wednesday that sonar from Dong Hai Jiu 101 found the debris. The man-made object turned out to be a metal box likely a part of an ancient shipwreck previously detected during the underwater search. Another site of interest inspected by the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) on board the Chinese vessel Dong Hai Jiu 101 revealed only a rock formation. "Dong Hai Jiu 101 has conducted a total of 13 ROV dives during the swing. Two dives were completed by Dong Hai Jiu 101 in the past week with one sonar contact identified as geology," ATSB said in the statement.

Go master Cho Chikun triumphed Wednesday in his final game against DeepZenGo, a Japanese artificial intelligence system, to win the three-game series 2-1. Cho, 60, has won 74 titles in his long career, the largest number in Japan. He defeated DeepZenGo with the 167th move in the third game of the series, which was played on even terms with no handicaps. DeepZenGo uses deep learning and other advanced technologies. It is being developed with support mainly from Dwango Co., a video-sharing website operator, and the University of Tokyo. "I felt as if I was playing with a human, because (DeepZenGo) has both strong and weak points," Cho said after the final game.