Otsimo provides free games for autistic children to help improve attention spans using machine learning and gamification. Autistic spectrum disorders, or ASDs, impose huge costs, both human and economic, on sufferers, their families, and the community. The human toll, in terms of care and impaired relationships, is almost impossible to quantify. Looking at the US alone, the economic expenditure last year was estimated at about $268bn. The exact causes of the pathology are still unknown, and there is no medical solution except for early and intensive education, which can at least reduce the symptoms.

At some point in the course of pregnancy, a woman is likely to suspect that the baby she is incubating has somehow hijacked her brain. New research suggests that, in some sense, she's right, and that pregnancy itself is altering her brain like no other experience she's had since adolescence. The places where a pregnant woman's brain shrinks are very specific, the research says. The structural renovations wrought by pregnancy appear to overlap almost perfectly with the brain regions that play a key role in how we understand and interpret the actions, intentions and feelings of others. And the brain of a first-time mother stays changed -- for at least two years after she has given birth, according to the new research, published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Pregnant women did not lose intellectual ground, the researchers found: as a group, their working memory and memory for words was no better or worse than before pregnancy.

The TechCrunch conference is an event that swoops in on the startup scenes of the US and Europe, gathering for appraisal the technology world's rising movers, shakers and innovators. It's widely regarded as the place to get a feel for what's happening at the industry's grassroots – which is exactly what PwC Innovation Manager Marina Paronetto headed to London to do. As it turns out, it was the brains behind the machine – artificial intelligence – that was the star of 2016's show. It was said in sarcasm, but MC Jordan Crook couldn't have been more accurate when she said that TechCrunch's theme for its latest Disrupt conference was artificial intelligence. From what I saw, every solution on show here featured an element of AI.

Whether by accident or design, the details of Google's plans for artificial intelligence (AI) have been elusive. In some cases, there's no real mystery, just nothing all that exciting to talk about. AI technology is the foundation of the company's search engine, and the most obvious reason for Google's high-profile, $400M acquisition of DeepMind in 2014 is to use the UK firm's expertise in deep learning--a subset of AI research, but more on that later--to bolster that core capability. But the Googleplex has absorbed other bright minds from the field of AI, as well as some of the most buzzed-about companies in robotics, with only some of that collective braintrust officially allocated to driverless cars, delivery drones or other publicly announced robotics or AI-related projects. What, exactly, are Google's AI experts up to?

As we look to a New Year, it is hard to say what 2017 has in store thanks to the level of uncertainty that 2016 leaves in its wake. One thing for certain, however, is that 2017 is set to be an eventful and thrilling ride for FinTech with many factors and potential obstacles on the horizon which still challenge the sector. In today's society people are effectively running their whole lives from their mobiles: reading the news, online banking, heating their home and maintaining relationships. Payments are a part of that so it is expected that the numbers to climb further next year. Smartphone sales are reaching saturation point in developed markets, and the growth of technology adoption today are now firmly fixated on emerging and developing nations.

You might go to a cutting-edge machine learning research conference like NIPS hoping to find some mathematical insight that will help you take your deep learning system's performance to the next level. Unfortunately, as Andrew Ng reiterated to a live crowd of 1,000 attendees this past Monday, there is no secret AI equation that will let you escape your machine learning woes. All you need is some rigor, and much of what Ng covered is his remarkable NIPS 2016 presentation titled "The Nuts and Bolts of Building Applications using Deep Learning" is not rocket science. Andrew Ng delivers a powerful message at NIPS 2016. Andrew Ng's lecture at NIPS 2016 in Barcelona was phenomenal -- truly one of the best presentations I have seen in a long time.

Knowmail, a company building a Personalized Artificial Intelligence platform to help employees communicate and collaborate better, announced it closed a new $3.5 million investment led by CE Ventures with managing partner Tayman Kan also joining the board. This round also includes existing shareholders AfterDox, Plus Ventures, 2B Angels, INE Ventures and notable private investors. The additional funding will be utilized to continue building out Knowmail's functionality and expand its customer base globally. Founded in 2014, Knowmail is led by Haim Senior (CEO), previously executive at EMC, seasoned entrepreneur Oded Avital (COO) and previous Verint Systems ASG director Avi Mandelberg (CTO) in order to, in their own words, "liberate corporate employees from slavery created by information overload". "We are thrilled to lead this latest round of funding for Knowmail and strongly believe in the team and vision."

Pizza Hut, recognized as the pizza restaurant company which serves and delivers more pizzas than any other pizza company in the world, is expanding its ordering capabilities to include Alexa Voice Service on Amazon Echo, Amazon Tap, Echo Dot, Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablets. With a simple phrase, and not a single phone or laptop lifted, Pizza Hut's new skill brings ease and convenience to the ordering experience for pizza-loving homes across the country. The Pizza Hut skill differs from any pizza brand in the space by providing Alexa users with the convenience of ordering not only your favourites and past orders, but also directly from a menu of the most popular items from Pizza Hut. "Pizza Hut has and always will be devoted to serving customers pizza anywhere, anyhow, and anyway, and using the latest technology is no exception," says Doug Terfehr, Senior Director, Public Relations and Partnerships for Pizza Hut. "Amazon is great to work with and the Pizza Hut skill on Alexa is unlike any other pizza brand with flexible ordering from a menu of options without lifting a finger."

Artificial Intelligence in the context of Alternative Asset management will manifest itself across a number of dimensions; the need to understand the vast quantities of data being generated by economic activity moving online, the ubiquity of networks for conducting these online transactions, and the emergence of algorithms for seeking investment opportunities and making investment decisions. There has already been a rise in the number of Quantitative Funds – such as Aidyia- relying on machine intelligence, neural networks and the ability to mine Big Data to compete alongside the likes of Renaissance Technologies, DE Shaw, Two Sigma and a host of other brand name funds such as Bridgewater Associates and Point72 Asset Management that investigating the scope for AI to generate Alpha. The rise of this machine intelligence can be broken down into two categories: "Active" AI uses technology to seek out opportunities for hedge fund alpha by analyzing data in unconventional ways, uncovering hidden correlations in market data or interpreting "signals" in the marketplace which then generate trading ideas. "Passive" AI takes place in the post-trade arena, opening up time-series of data, connecting flows between markets, counter parties and assets to support Portfolio Managers and Traders in their decision making. By using AI to open up post trade data more aggressively, funds could find their optimal financing mix or most credit-worthy counter parties by searching the market for news that may impact their credit rating or actively size/shape trading portfolio positions in real-time.

Within the silos of incumbent financial services, so-called fintech companies are good at picking off one thing only and doing it well. This approach is also taken within data science, where a lot of the properly intelligent work is about understanding the domain (problem) and how best to use the information/data for the problem you have. In doing so, a fintech approach – collaboration, open-sourcing code – is helping to gradually change the culture of finance, even in some hitherto heavily guarded domains. Dr Tristan Fletcher, research director, Thought Machine, said: "Without this specialisation and domain knowledge, it's very hard to rise above the noise. However, the algorithms themselves are often applicable in many areas or problems, and we are probably seeing decreasing specialisation here. "Fintech lends itself particularly to specialisation because there are many well-packaged problems that need to be solved and can be clearly delineated – KYC, AML, credit checking etc.