Any business that sells goods or services online is vulnerable to attack by fraudsters. This can be using stolen credit card details for purchases online, creating false accounts and even voucher code abuse. The cost of this fraud can be calculated in the multi millions, with chargebacks and related costs plaguing online businesses. In the UK it is the most common crime of all, with 2.47M offences in 2015/16 alone. The traditional approach to tackling this problem is to use heuristic rules and business logic to try to'predict' whether a new transaction that the business is seeing is fraudulent or not.

At Microsoft's recent Worldwide Partner Conference, CEO Satya Nadella laid out his vision for a world in which A.I.-powered chatbots "fundamentally revolutionize how computing is experienced by everybody." Bots, according to Nadella, will become the next interface, shaping our interactions with the applications and devices we rely on. Of course, granting bots more control over our apps and devices naturally requires that we create rules to govern how they operate. Nadella earlier outlined a set of rules for bots that prioritizes empathy, efficiency and assistance. "A.I. must be designed to assist humanity," he wrote.

NAIROBI – Japanese and African leaders on Sunday pledged to fight terrorism and emphasized the importance of rules-based maritime order as they wrapped up a Japan-led international conference on the continent's development. In the Nairobi Declaration adopted at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), the leaders also agreed to promote investment in infrastructure that leads to job creation in the fast-growing region. "Japan's public and private sectors will offer cooperation for the development that is led by Africa itself," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a news conference after wrap-up of the sixth TICAD, convened in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta told the same news conference that Japan does not press its own views on the continent and continues to be a force for African development. The triennial conference was held outside Japan for the first time, as Tokyo seeks to strengthen its economic and political presence in the continent amid China's increasing influence.

NAIROBI – Japanese and African leaders on Sunday pledged to fight terrorism and emphasized the importance of rule-based maritime order as they wrapped up a Japan-led international conference on the continent's development. In the Nairobi Declaration adopted at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), the leaders also agreed to promote investment in infrastructure that leads to job creation in the fast-growing region. The sixth TICAD, convened in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, was held outside Japan for the first time, as Tokyo seeks to strengthen its economic and political presence in the continent amid China's increasing influence. In the declaration, the leaders said they will seek to maintain maritime order based on rules, and strengthen security and safety at sea by international and regional cooperation in accordance with international law. The reference to maritime security comes as tensions remain high in the South China and East China seas amid China's growing assertiveness.

The ability to reason beyond established knowledge allows Organic Chemists to solve synthetic problems and to invent novel transformations. Here, we propose a model which mimics chemical reasoning and formalises reaction prediction as finding missing links in a knowledge graph. We have constructed a knowledge graph containing 14.4 million molecules and 8.2 million binary reactions, which represents the bulk of all chemical reactions ever published in the scientific literature. Our model outperforms a rule-based expert system in the reaction prediction task for 180,000 randomly selected binary reactions. We show that our data-driven model generalises even beyond known reaction types, and is thus capable of effectively (re-) discovering novel transformations (even including transition-metal catalysed reactions). Our model enables computers to infer hypotheses about reactivity and reactions by only considering the intrinsic local structure of the graph, and because each single reaction prediction is typically achieved in a sub-second time frame, our model can be used as a high-throughput generator of reaction hypotheses for reaction discovery.

Instances of reported cybercrime are growing astronomically – and yet many successful attacks are still not reported, or even detected. In response to the escalating threat, detection capabilities are constantly being refined, improved and almost fully re-imagined. As new threats arise, so do technologies that offer a control against these threats. Automating the process without compromising the accuracy or effectiveness of the measures helps to augment the role of a human in security operations. The automation wave is the progression of technology and machine learning into intelligent software that can act to both identify and remediate incidents, leaving security professionals to tackle more complex and relevant issues.

It seems like there isn't a day which goes by at the moment without a new robotic invention in the news, with promises around how these inventions will not only revolutionise our lives, but threaten our jobs. In the outsourcing sector robots are most definitely on the way, or in some cases, already here. And it is, therefore, vital that businesses operating in this sector seriously consider how some robotic processes can enhance their operations – there's no doubt competitors are also considering the same issue. These robotic innovations can be roughly split into two separate areas: robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI). RPA, simply speaking, is a process which enables computer software to partially or fully automate human activities which are manual, repetitive and rule-based.

This meetup is a gathering place for professionals who use or (or want to learn about using) machine learning to solve messy optimization problems where "hard coded" solutions like deterministic grammars and rules-based systems just don't cut it. If you have a working expertise in machine learning, suspect that you may have a problem where you need to develop a program that "learns" from the data to provide an adequate solution, or you just want to learn more about machine learning and how it might benefit you, this is the place to be! Regular meetup topics will run the gauntlet of supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning approaches and range from natural language processing to computer vision and everything in between.

Machine learning has had fruitful applications in finance well before the advent of mobile banking apps, proficient chat bots, or search engines. Given high volume, accurate historical records, and quantitative nature of the finance world, few industries are better suited for artificial intelligence. There are more uses cases of machine learning in finance than ever before, a trend perpetuated by more accessible computing power and more accessible machine learning tools (such as Google's Tensorflow). Today, machine learning has come to play an integral role in many phases of the financial ecosystem, from approving loans, to managing assets, to assessing risks. Yet, few technically-savvy professionals have an accurate view of just how many ways machine learning finds it's way into their daily financial lives.

Wee-Hyong Tok has decades of database systems experience, spanning academia and industry, including deep experience driving and shipping products and services that span distributed engineering teams from Asia and the United States. Before joining Microsoft, Tok worked on in-database analytics, demonstrating how association rule mining can be integrated into a relational database management system, Predator-Miner, which enables users to express data mining operations using SQL queries and provides opportunities for better query optimization and processing. Tok is instrumental in driving data mining boot camps in Asia and was honored as a Microsoft SQL Server Most Valuable Professional for several consecutive years because of his active contribution to the database community in Asia. He has co-authored several books, including the first book on Azure machine learning, Predictive Analytics with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, and has also published more than 20 peer-reviewed academic papers and journals. Tok holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the National University of Singapore.