In this blog post, we'll answer the question, "How did the Brexit vote impact exchange rates between the British Pound and US Dollar?" To do so, we'll use causal inference techniques to estimate the impact of what statisticians call a "treatment," in this case a policy decision. Please note that this is a technical blog post aimed at educating about concepts and tools with public data, not any political or economic implications. The techniques we'll discuss here can apply to all kinds of scenarios, such as the impact of a marketing campaign or product introduction on sales. Causal inference is needed because we don't have a controlled experiment for this scenario. An ideal experiment contains carefully matched groups, except for the explanatory variable being investigated.

The global logistics industry is "unsophisticated" and due for a major shake-up, according to the boss of a cargo-handling giant. Mika Vehvilainen, chief executive of Finnish company Cargotec, expects autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence to disrupt the market in coming years. Speaking to City A.M. on a visit to London for the firm's capital markets day, he said: "If you look at the logistics industry, compared to many other industries, it is frankly quite unsophisticated. The level of digitalisation, automation… is still very low. "This industry will significantly change in the coming years.

Systems that provide automated investment advice from financial firms have been referred to as robo-advisers. While no one in the industry is particularly fond of the term, it has caught on nonetheless. However, the enhanced human advising process -- augmented by machine learning -- that was recently announced by Morgan Stanley goes well beyond the robo label, and may help to finally kill off the term. New York–based Morgan Stanley, in business since 1935, has been known as one of the more human-centric firms in the retail investing industry. It has 16,000 financial advisors (FAs), who historically have maintained strong relationships with their investor clients through such traditional channels as face-to-face meetings and phone calls.

The longer you spend with the entrepreneurs behind the video game industry cluster in Cambridge, the more the forthcoming general election begins to seem a trifling, parochial concern. Compared with the momentous significance of the vote to leave the EU, next month's election barely registers for people such as Mark Gerhard, CEO of Playfusion, a video game company (pictured above) employing 58 people, of whom about 60% are from the EU. Almost all of us are disengaged from it. The cruel thing is that it doesn't affect us; if it goes really bad we can change our situation, we can solve it," he says. For people working in Cambridge's science parks, part of the hi-tech, global knowledge economy, the fallout from the Brexit vote is still the key political issue. Cambridge voted 74% to remain, and the shock of seeing things not go their way remains palpable. Bosses and senior employees in this tech cluster are highly educated and relatively well-off, and have many choices about where they base themselves. For the moment, this is Cambridge, but many are watching and waiting, contemplating their next steps, ready to leave the country should things turn unfavourable. In the months after the Brexit vote, Gerhard (who is originally from South Africa, but has lived here for 19 years and now has citizenship) was so dismayed to feel, as an immigrant, like he no longer belonged, that he contemplated moving to America. The election of Trump put paid to that idea, he says, but he is clear that should Brexit-related developments make it harder for his company to thrive in the UK, he will relocate. "It's not a threat; the reality is that for highly skilled individuals, the world is borderless.

The UK government is due to publish its long awaited Digital Strategy later today, about a year later than originally slated. Existing delays having been compounded by the shock of Brexit. Drafts of the strategy framework seen by TechCrunch suggest its scope and ambition vis-a-vis digital technologies has been pared back and repositioned vs earlier formulations of the plan, dating from December 2015 and June 2016, as the government recalibrated to factor in last summer's referendum vote for the UK to leave the European Union. Since the earlier drafts were penned there has also of course been a change of leadership (and direction) at the top of government. And Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a new cabinet, including digital minister, Matt Hancock, who replaced Ed Vaizey.

The rail industry has come up with a plan that may as well be out of a science-fiction movie to cope with growing demand and overcrowding: charging rail passengers for journeys by fingerprint or iris scan. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG), the organisation representing train operators and Network Rail, claims biometric technology would enable fares to be automatically charged marking the start of an era that could radically accelerate commute times. The technology represents the next step from travellers being able to us smartphones' Bluetooth signals to open station barriers. That will be trialled on Chiltern Railways' route between London Marylebone and Oxford Parkway over the coming months. The use of digital signalling technology will also allow trains to operate closer together, cutting delay, according to the RDG.

The company behind the globally successful Angry Birds video game has chosen London for the site of its first game studio outside Scandinavia, shrugging off any concerns over the future of the City's tech industry in the face of Brexit. In a statement on Monday, Rovio said that it aims to build a team of over 20 in London over the next two years. The studio will be the Finnish developer's fifth. The company currently has three in Espoo, Finland and one in Stockholm, Sweden. "Our business is profitably growing and London is the most logical place for us to found a new studio," said Antti Viitanen, a senior vice president for studios at Rovio.

Nintendo's new Switch gaming console is off to an underwhelming start. The new machine, a tablet-sized device with wireless controllers that can be used anywhere but also connects to TVs, will go on sale 3 March at a price of $300 in the US and £279.99 in the UK, with a brand-new Zelda game as its launch title. None of that, however, was enough to convince investors that it will be a big moneymaker for the Kyoto-based company, whose shares fell 5.8 perc ent to 23,750 yen (£169.96) after Nintendo executives held a presentation in Tokyo on Friday. Nintendo is counting on the Switch to end years of pain at its console division, which released a successor to the popular Wii in 2012 that flopped. After shunning the smartphone market for years, its long-awaited foray into mobile gaming got off to a rough start, with last month's disappointing debut of Super Mario Run.

Earlier this week we warned that as the trend to robotization accelerates, millions of (mostly) low-skilled American jobs will be lost in the next five years, replaced by robots as companies seek to maintain high profit margins in a time of rising wages and growing inflation. One company, however, can not wait that long. British outsourcing giant Capita, a company whose contracts include collecting the BBC license fee, is preparing to fire thousands and replace them with robots after clients cut spending following Brexit vote in a move some fear will be repeated across the country, leading to more than 1 million job losses according to the Guardian. Capita, a FTSE 100-listed firm that also runs the London congestion charge, said it needed to axe 2,000 jobs as part of a cost-cutting drive in response to poor trading. The company said it would use the money it saved to fund investment into robotic workers across the whole company.

These days there's no shortage of things to keep you awake at night, wherever you stand on the political spectrum. For others it's the prospect of Brexit being thwarted. For others still, it's whether the Chinese economy will hold up, what the outcome of the US presidential election will be or the risk of artificial intelligence taking over your job. So what's the best way to handle the inevitable anxiety that goes hand-in-hand with all that uncertainty? Will Borrell studied that anxiety up close after the Brexit vote in the UK earlier this year.