Three New Jersey teens brought home two international awards for their artificial intelligence robot, who competed at the International Robocup Junior Championship in Sydney, Australia earlier this month. The team -- made up of high school juniors Julian Lee of Livingston and Jeffrey Cheng from Bridgewater, and senior Alexander Lisenko, also of Bridgewater -- won the third place World Title for Individual Team Tournament, and the Judge's Award for Best Rescue Engineering Strategy in the Rescue Maze League. The trio belongs to Storming Robots, a New Jersey-based Robotics Learning Lab, and competed against teams of 14- to 19-year-olds from around the world in the July 4-9 contest. "The competition went by quick despite the many hours of work. It was an exciting but stressful experience, which was especially fun due to our great team dynamic," Lee said.

The growing amounts of data that are being generated due to such trends as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have naturally beget the need for data scientists who can collect, analyze and, most importantly, interpret these massive stockpiles of complex information to help their companies more quickly and accurately make better business decisions to give them a competitive edge over competitors and to improve their operations and make them more efficient. That in turn has created something of a land rush in what's become a rapidly expanding data science platform market of more than a dozen vendors that range from established companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft and SAS to an array of smaller, younger pure-plays. The goal of all of these companies is to give these data scientists a single place to develop and run algorithms, use machine learning to help build predictive models and then deploy those models into their businesses' operations. IBM offers such products as SPSS Modeler and SPSS Statistics as well as its two-year-old Data Science Experience, a set of tools around such aspects as machine learning via the vendor's Watson cognitive computing technology and the R programming language, through the open-source RStudio offering. SAS has its Visual Suite for data visualization, prep, analytics and model building, while Microsoft offers its Azure Machine Learning platform as part of the cloud-based Cortana Intelligence Suite and Microsoft R for those who want to code in R. Other names in the space include H2O, RapidMiner, Angoss, Knime and Dataiku.

Paul unlocked the box containing the tape recording that controlled them all. The tape was a small loop that fed continuously between magnetic pickups. On it were recorded the movements of a master machinist turning out a shaft for a fractional horsepower motor. He'd been in on the making of the tape, the master from which this one had been made. He had been sent to one of the machine shops to make the recording. The foreman had pointed out the best man – what was his name? That had been the machinist's name – Rudy Hertz, an old timer, who had been about ready to retire.

We usually think of the term "technology" in very modern, even futuristic contexts. Yet the word has a long history, deriving from the Greek tekhnologia, meaning "science of craft" or "systematic treatment" of actions. These traits have been with us since humans first discovered tools. In fact, the investment-analyst profession emerged from ad hoc investment approaches, using systematic processes to analyze and evaluate the health and value of companies. Increasingly, those processes are being undertaken by what we usually mean when we say "technology": computer hardware and software. Methods of investment analysis and selection, as well as portfolio management, have been heavily influenced by "quants" for decades.

It takes money to make money and right now a lot of that money is going into the development of artificial intelligence. From hedge funds to venture capital firms, everyone in finance has some idea about how data and quantitative analysis will reshape their industry. Firms like Signal Fire track engineers as they move from company to company to draw attention to growing startups. And funds like Numerai and Quantopian are putting faith in quants to determine optimal trading strategies. Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's most robust and reliable money making machines, is going as far as to attempt to automate its internal management processes to ensure the longevity of its $150 billion under management.

Schoolgirl Chloe Bridgewater melted hearts around the world when she sent a handwritten letter to Google asking for a job for when she grows up. Google CEO Sundar Pichai replied telling Chloe that he looks'forward to receiving' her job application and encouraged the young girl to follow her dreams. But now the seven-year-old has bagged her first job as a product tester for children's computing company Kano. Chloe, who lives in Hereford, was inspired to write the letter after seeing images of Google offices filled with comfy bean-bags, go-karts and slides. Now Chloe and her five-year-old sister Hollie have been asked to become product testers for Kano, a company that makes DIY computer kits for children.

The world's biggest money manager on Tuesday announced that it would cut more than 40 jobs, replacing some of its human portfolio managers with artificially intelligent, computerized stock-trading algorithms. Research, after all, has shown that active stock pickers generally underperform the wider stock market, leading customers to balk at the high fees those managers charge. Investors are increasingly seeking cheaper options such as exchange-traded funds, some of which are managed by computers--a trend that helped push BlackRock's assets under management above $5 trillion for the first time recently. The layoffs due to automation are an industry-wide shift. By 2025, financial institutions will reduce their human workforce by 10%--resulting in roughly 230,000 fewer heads--as computers take their place, the financial services consultancy Opimas estimates in a recent report.

In previous articles, we've defined some of the terms being thrown around lately like "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence". These disruptive technologies will soon change the world as we know it. While some pundits predicted that we were years away from a computer that could beat a human expert at "Go", this achievement was recently announced. If a "deep learning" program can now beat a game that has more possible moves than atoms in the known universe, then what's stopping us from unleashing it upon the stock market and making millions? The idea of using computers to trade stocks is hardly new.

A 7-year-old girl was elated when she received a letter back from Google's CEO Sundar Pichai after she expressed her love for computers and robots to him. "Dear Google Boss," Chloe Bridgewater, who lives in Hereford, England, started her letter. "My name is Chloe and I would like a job with Google. I also want to work in a chocolate factory and do swimming in the Olympics," she wrote. "My dad said I can sit on bean bags and go down slides and ride go-karts in a job in Google," she continued before adding her love for tablets and robots.

A 7-year-old's letter seeking a job at Google earned a quick and uplifting response from the search giant's CEO, further proving the power of a good first impression. Andy Bridgewater said he and his 7-year-old daughter were sitting at his desk last week, when she asked him what he did for a living. "I work as a sales manager for a refrigeration company," Bridgewater said, "which I assume is boring to a 7-year-old." So Chloe Bridgewater asked where he would like to work. He then showed her photos of the work at the tech company, which evidently left a mark on her.