Having your favourite TV show or movie interrupted by adverts is already frustrating, but things could soon be getting worse for Netflix users. At its'Upfront' event on Wednesday, the streaming giant revealed that it would be incorporating adverts made with'generative AI'. Arriving in 2026, these AI-generated adverts will begin to appear not only during mid-content breaks but also when users press pause. And the only way to get rid of these annoying intrusions will be to pay for the more expensive ad-free subscriptions. But in a further twist, Netflix says AI would be used'instantly marry advertisers' ads with the worlds of our shows'.

Predictive modeling in healthcare continues to be an active actuarial research topic as more insurance companies aim to maximize the potential of Machine Learning approaches to increase their productivity and efficiency. In this paper, the authors deployed three regression-based ensemble ML models that combine variations of decision trees through Extreme Gradient Boosting, Gradient-boosting Machine, and Random Forest) methods in predicting medical insurance costs. Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods SHapley Additive exPlanations and Individual Conditional Expectation plots were deployed to discover and explain the key determinant factors that influence medical insurance premium prices in the dataset. The dataset used comprised 986 records and is publicly available in the KAGGLE repository. The models were evaluated using four performance evaluation metrics, including R-squared, Mean Absolute Error, Root Mean Squared Error, and Mean Absolute Percentage Error. The results show that all models produced impressive outcomes; however, the XGBoost model achieved a better overall performance although it also expanded more computational resources, while the RF model recorded a lesser prediction error and consumed far fewer computing resources than the XGBoost model. Furthermore, we compared the outcome of both XAi methods in identifying the key determinant features that influenced the PremiumPrices for each model and whereas both XAi methods produced similar outcomes, we found that the ICE plots showed in more detail the interactions between each variable than the SHAP analysis which seemed to be more high-level. It is the aim of the authors that the contributions of this study will help policymakers, insurers, and potential medical insurance buyers in their decision-making process for selecting the right policies that meet their specific needs.

In 2017, the luxury business was marked by technology-driven disruption, a recovering global economy, and the narratives of the consumer "experience" and "transformation" economies. What can we expect in 2018? Automation has impacted numerous areas of the economy and society such as finance and transportation. The luxury business is no exception. With automated commerce, more advanced algorithms in retail business and smarter devices will mean outsourcing some of the fashion experience for the affluent consumer for whom time is the ultimate luxury, or the forward-thinking shopper who wants to be the trendsetter.

Nest's home security camera is supposed to be so smart that it can identify people it's been introduced to. That skill comes from facial-recognition technology made by Nest's sibling company, Google. The Nest Cam IQ camera is so slick that it carries a premium price - $300 (£299) - plus a $10 (£8) monthly subscription to run the facial-recognition program and other features, such as 10-day video storage. Journalists who put the technology to the test found it wasn't easy to pull the wool over this camera's prying eyes. Nest's new home security camera is supposed to be so smart that it can identify people it's been introduced to.