Mastercard has announcedplans to launch an artificial intelligence (AI) bot platform that allows consumers to transact, manage finances, and shop via messaging platforms. The Mastercard bot for banks will extend Mastercard services to customers on messaging platforms and make financial information and decisions part of consumers' everyday lives. In the pilot phase, Mastercard is partnering with Kasisto, the company that powers branded virtual assistants and smart bots for financial services and is a current participant in the Mastercard Start Path Global program. The Mastercard bot is powered by KAI Banking, a conversational AI platform with deep knowledge in financial services. It can fulfill customer requests and solve problems on messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and SMS, enabling financial institutions to create entirely new consumer experiences – ones that are as easy and natural as texting a friend.

"It's not just a normal update," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said during a press briefing Tuesday at the company's swanky San Francisco headquarters. "This is a radical redesign and rebuild of the app from scratch." Uber's premise is simple: It pairs drivers with passengers via smartphone app. In the past seven years, it has gone from a small startup to one of the largest ride-hailing services on the planet, operating in more than 70 countries. With a valuation of $68 billion, Uber is also the world's highest-valued venture-backed company.

Solving the world's biggest problems requires creativity and perseverance -- and innovators around the globe are taking up the challenge. From a device that alerts medical workers when to re-bandage a wound to a wheelchair specifically designed for people in developing nations, these inventions are making a massive difference for those who need it most. While certainly not an exhaustive list, here are nine ingenious innovations that made an impact in October. An estimated 2.3 billion people worldwide live with poor vision due to refractive errors, with many living in low-income regions without access to regular health care. The Folding Phoropter, a cost-effective eye-screening tool, hopes to make essential eye health more accessible to these populations.

The UK fintech market is experiencing a new wave of innovation. Developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning are giving rise to a new generation of fintech startups. Prop trading houses and hedge funds have been using machine learning techniques for years to beat financial markets. It's interesting to see A.I. making its way into mainstream fintech. Companies are leveraging the technology to make sense of large volumes of data, making financial products and services more accessible for the end user.

BOT TO THE FUTURE: Mastercard wants to make commerce'more conversational' Mastercard has unveiled plans to launch artificial intelligence (AI) bots for its merchant and bank partners, allowing consumers to use chat, messaging and natural language interfaces to shop and manage their finances. Mastercard KAI, the payments giant's bot for banks, will allow consumers to ask the bot questions about their accounts, review purchase history, monitor spending levels and receive contextual offers. Meanwhile, the Mastercard Bot for Merchants will allow consumer to shop and transact on messaging platforms and then check out with the Masterpass global digital payment service. According to research firm Gartner, nearly US$2bn in online sales will be performed exclusively through mobile digital assistants by the end of 2016. Kiki Del Valle, SVP at Mastercard, explained to NFC World the company was aiming to make commerce "more conversational by combining secure digital payments and artificial intelligence technology".

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.

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There's a proud tradition of "bedroom technology" that's meant to keep you up all night, but a new device from Hello has something else in mind. It's a smart sleep aid that you can control with your voice, like an Amazon Echo or Google Home. And it contains a surprising number of bells and whistles geared toward improving your shuteye. SEE ALSO: Use your iPhone's bedtime mode to get your sleep schedule on track Sense with Voice, as the device is called, is a new version of Hello's existing sleep gadget. It launched Tuesday, priced at $149.