Vantage replaces the bank's two-decade-old Commercial Electronic Office Portal and aims to bring a "consumer-like experience" to Wells' commercial and corporate clients, an executive said. Wells Fargo on Monday announced the launch of a new commercial banking platform -- a revamp the San Francisco-based bank says leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to help clients personalize their accounts. The platform, called Vantage, replaces the bank's Commercial Electronic Office Portal, or CEO Portal, which it launched over two decades ago to serve its commercial banking and corporate and investment banking clients. Vantage is designed to meet the evolving needs of corporate and commercial clients, said Reetika Grewal, head of digital for Wells Fargo commercial banking and corporate and investment banking. The bank is in the process of migrating CEO Portal users to Vantage accounts, Grewal added.

The novel computer software looks at retinal structure and blood vessels on images of the inside of the eye that have been correlated with cognitive changes. The findings, appearing last week in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, provide proof-of-concept that machine learning analysis of certain types of retinal images has the potential to offer a non-invasive way to detect Alzheimer's disease in symptomatic individuals. "Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease often relies on symptoms and cognitive testing," said senior author Sharon Fekrat, M.D., retina specialist at the Duke Eye Center. "Additional tests to confirm the diagnosis are invasive, expensive, and carry some risk. Having a more accessible method to identify Alzheimer's could help patients in many ways, including improving diagnostic precision, allowing entry into clinical trials earlier in the disease course, and planning for necessary lifestyle adjustments."

The novel computer software looks at retinal structure and blood vessels on images of the inside of the eye that have been correlated with cognitive changes. The findings, appearing last week in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, provide proof-of-concept that machine learning analysis of certain types of retinal images has the potential to offer a non-invasive way to detect Alzheimer's disease in symptomatic individuals. "Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease often relies on symptoms and cognitive testing," said senior author Sharon Fekrat, M.D., retina specialist at the Duke Eye Center. "Additional tests to confirm the diagnosis are invasive, expensive, and carry some risk. Having a more accessible method to identify Alzheimer's could help patients in many ways, including improving diagnostic precision, allowing entry into clinical trials earlier in the disease course, and planning for necessary lifestyle adjustments."

New Jersey's attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, has instructed prosecutors across the state to stop using Clearview AI, a private facial recognition software. Clearview AI's tools allow law enforcement officials to upload a photo of an unknown person they'd like to identify, and see a list of matches culled from a database of over 3 billion photos. The photos are taken from a variety of controversial sources, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and even Venmo. New Jersey attorney general Gurbir S. Grewal told the state's prosecutor's to stop using Clearview AI, private facial recognition software that he worried might compromise the integrity of the state's investigations Grewal decided to issue the ban after seeing Clearview had used footage from a 2019 sting operation in New Jersey promoting its own services, something even he hadn't been aware of at the time. 'I was surprised they used my image and the office to promote the product online," Grewal told the New York Times. 'I was troubled they were sharing information about ongoing criminal prosecutions.' After investigating the issue, Gerwal confirmed one of the 19 people arrested in the sting had been identified using Clearview, but since all the cases were ongoing, he felt uncomfortable with them being used in promotional material. Another report in the Times, on the controversial practices used to generate the company's massive database, further worried Grewal and prompted him to issue the ban. 'Until this week, I had not heard of Clearview AI," he said.

A study released in December found that 82% of U.S. commercial banks plan to increase fintech investment over the next three years; 86% of bank senior managers surveyed said they intend to boost fintech funding imminently. The research was commissioned by the global fintech provider Fraedom. The research firm Statista predicts U.S. fintech companies will receive $4.7 billion from all types of investors in 2018. Some of the areas of fintech likely to draw investment are the buzzwords of 2017. "We're seeing different ways of enabling funding or lending and measuring creditworthiness," said Jennifer Byrne at Quesnay, a company that connects fintechs with traditional firms.

Brief Recognition: Elena Grewal leads a team of data scientists responsible for the user's online and offline travel experience at Airbnb. Her team partners with the product team to understand and optimize all parts of the product, using experimentation and machine learning in a wide variety of contexts. Prior to Airbnb, Elena was a doctoral candidate in the Economics of Education program at the Stanford University School of Education. She received a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, with distinction, from Yale University, and a Masters degree in Economics at Stanford University. She was also the recipient of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship.

Among other things, CareSkore wants to use machine learning to anticipate mortality. However, the newly endowed platform is more than just a Facebook poll that tells you how you'll meet your end this Christmas by being squashed by a falling piano. Storm ventures, Cota Capital, Rising Tide Fund and Liquid 2 Ventures are rallying behind the Y Combinator graduate with today's 4.5 million seed round. CareSkore is combining clinical, socio-economic, demographic, and behavioral data to paint a holistic picture of patients that doctors and insurance companies can use to provide better preventative care. The platform is leveraging Google's TensorFlow and Hadoop to cut through massive third party data sets and generate insights by finding relationships between environmental and clinical data.