The trader was in deep trouble. A millennial who had only recently been allowed to set foot on a Wall Street floor, he made bad bets, and in a panic to recoup his losses, he'd blown through risk limits, losing 4.9 million in a single afternoon. The trader was taking part in a simulation run by Andrew Lo, an MIT finance professor. The goal: find out if top performers can be identified based on how they respond to market volatility. Lo had been invited into the New York-based global investment bank--he wouldn't say which one--after giving a talk to its executives.

NEW YORK: Tech giant Microsoft and large equipment manufacturer Liebherr are collaborating on a new generation of smart refrigerators that would help in shopping and planning meals with intelligent food management. "As part of the Liebherr household appliances division's digital initiative, the duo would develop'SmartDeviceBox' -- a communication module which fits into refrigerators and freezers -- connecting them to the internet," T.J. Hazen, Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft, wrote. The system, which would utilise the same machine learning technology used in Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Cortana, is designed to have a long lifecycle. With this technology, modular units can be integrated and upgraded at any time in existing SmartDevice-ready appliances to create value and comfort for customers through new digital features and solutions, the post on Microsoft blog said. With the refrigerators, stored groceries can be monitored using internal cameras and object recognition technology.

Tech giant Microsoft and large equipment manufacturer Liebherr are collaborating on a new generation of smart refrigerators that would help in shopping and planning meals with intelligent food management. "As part of the Liebherr household appliances division's digital initiative, the duo would develop'SmartDeviceBox', a communication module which fits into refrigerators and freezers, connecting them to the internet," T J Hazen, Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft, wrote. The system, which would utilise the same machine learning technology used in Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Cortana, is designed to have a long lifecycle. With this technology, modular units can be integrated and upgraded at any time in existing SmartDevice-ready appliances to create value and comfort for customers through new digital features and solutions, the post on Microsoft blog said. With the refrigerators, stored groceries can be monitored using internal cameras and object recognition technology.

Automation has disrupted work for centuries. Two hundred years ago in Britain, the Luddites rose in rebellion, smashing the machines that made their weaving skills obsolete. Today it's high status cognitive jobs that are under threat. Earlier this year ROSS, a legal version of IBM's Watson, was launched and hailed as the first artificially intelligent lawyer. Future iterations may put lawyers out of work.

U.S. stocks rose Friday as investors found some positive aspects in a middling employment report. Job growth slowed in August, and traders hope that will persuade the Federal Reserve to wait before raising interest rates. Stocks started the day with big gains following the Labor Department's job report. Energy companies rose more than the rest of the market as oil prices broke out of a four-day slump. The gains were broad, but the stocks that rose the most were utilities, which would stand to benefit if interest rates remain low.

Artificial intelligence is going to have a massive impact on multiple business verticals over time. The displacement of both blue collar and white collar work by machine learning is going to cause major societal displacements in the next 10-20 years[0]. While there is a lot of discussion in the popular press about general purpose AI (aka AGI - which is defined as a machine that can perform any intellectual task a person can), much less emphasis has been placed on near-term specific vertical markets or areas that AI and machine learning (ML) are likely to transform in the coming 5 years. In short, I think AGI is still 10 years away, but vertical products driven by AI will be transformative in the coming years. The areas listed below are underinvested by entrepreneurs and VCs.

Emerging from stealth mode, self-driving car start-up Drive.ai Drive.ai announced today its first commercial foray, a retrofit kit to make fleet vehicles, from delivery trucks to car services, self-driving. The kit includes a sensor array, computer and an LED sign to communicate with pedestrians and other drivers. Self-driving car technology is being developed by most major automakers, automotive equipment suppliers and start-up companies such as Drive.ai. The intent is to eliminate the 95 percent of fatal car accidents every year that are attributable to human error.

People convey meaning by what they say as well as how they say it: Tone, word choice and the length of a phrase are all crucial cues to understanding what's going on in someone's mind. When a psychiatrist or psychologist examines a person, they listen for these signals to get a sense of their wellbeing, drawing on past experience to guide their judgment. Researchers are now applying that same approach, with the help of machine learning, to diagnose people with mental disorders. In 2015, a team of researchers developed an AI model that correctly predicted which members of a group of young people would develop psychosis--a major feature of schizophrenia--by analyzing transcripts of their speech. This model focused on tell-tale verbal tics of psychosis: short sentences, confusing, frequent use of words like "this," "that," and "a," as well as a muddled sense of meaning from one sentence to the next.

Two London trusts have become the first in UK to establish data sharing between their Cerner Health Information Exchanges, covering a population of 1.3 million people. Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Barts Health NHS Trust went live on with the connection 12 July, with clinicians in both acute hospitals able to view a summarised care record from the other site. The visible information for each trust includes discharge summaries, diagnosis, medications, investigations and results. Niall Canavan, Homerton Hospital's director of information technology, said the next step was "to open this data to any contributing partner organisation in east London". Charles Gutteridge, Barts' chief clinical information officer, said the move had been "relatively simple to do, as Homerton also used the Cerner Millennium system, but a really big step forward".

Though I haven't lived there for nearly three decades, I still consider myself a citizen of Los Angeles. That means, among other things, I drive. For me, a car is like a suit or a good exoskeleton. Road trips, going 100 miles per hour on a freeway, racing through Park La Brea--they're all sewn as tightly into my DNA as ice-skating in Central Park is for a New Yorker. Despite that heritage, I've been running an experiment on myself and my hometown. My last three trips there, I didn't rent a car; it's been nothing but taxis, Uber, and one time I borrowed my dad's. Not only did I move through space and time every bit as efficiently--more, if you believe that screwing around on Twitter and email is useful--I took new routes.