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.

Jean took NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp pr... between Sept 23 to Dec 18, 2015. The post was based on his first class project(due at 2nd week of the program). Check out the full report here! You will find all the details of the code behind the analysis and the visualisations. For this project, we wish to present and explore the data provided by Lending Club.

Digital transformation reshapes every aspect of a business, and over recent years this has evolved to become a central component of modern business strategy. There are three fundamental effects of digital innovation: experience and engagement, business innovation, and the secondary effects that result from increased digital capabilities. Over the coming months, as digital technology continues to evolve, I believe organisations will be forced to explore the secondary effects of digital disruption and use technology to reimagine their business and embrace new ways of working in a more efficient, innovative and agile way. Existing digital technology platforms will evolve Digital platforms, interoperable sets of services brought together to create applications, provide the basic building blocks for a [digital] business. There will be growth in each of the five major digital technology platform types to enable the new capabilities and models that characterise today's digital business.

Artificial intelligence is learning to take on an increasing number of sophisticated tasks. Google Deepmind's AI is now able to imitate human speech, and just this past August IBM's Watson successfully diagnosed a rare case of leukemia. Rather than viewing these advances as threats to job security, we can look at them as opportunities for AI to fill in critical gaps in existing service providers, such as mental healthcare professionals. In the US alone, nearly eight percent of the population suffers from depression (that's about one in every 13 American adults), and yet about 45 percent of this population does not seek professional care due to the costs. There are many barriers to getting quality mental healthcare, from searching for a provider who's within your insurance network to screening multiple potential therapists in order to find someone you feel comfortable speaking with.

It is this time of year again where most of us willingly and willfully make fools out of ourselves trying to predict the future of our industry. The momentous electoral events we have witnessed and those coming up in 2017 remind me that, even more so for the next 12 months, macro risks will rule and influence the state of financial services and fintech. I will limit myself to comments pertaining to the US and Europe. I have already attempted to decipher a Trump presidency in a previous post, see here. Suffice it to say there will be winners and losers in the five sectors of the industry – lending, capital markets, asset management, payments and insurance.

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A Chilean startup that has built artificial intelligence software to help recreate animal-based foods using plants is looking toward U.S. multinationals after signing deals at home to sell its products, the company's founders said. NotCo, founded around a year ago by three Chileans, has already persuaded Cencosud's Jumbo supermarkets to stock its'Not Mayo' across Chile, and has signed a deal to supply a national food manufacturer with one of its products, said Chief Executive Matias Muchnick. The company has also spoken to international companies including Hershey, Coca-Cola and Mars about creating new versions of chocolate and soda. "We want to promote these products as mainstream. It will only have an impact if meat-eaters who don't care about sustainability buy them," said Muchnick, adding that they can be retailed at the same price as the non-vegan version.