Mastering the art of data: the skills that will get you noticed

It’s almost a decade since a much-shared Harvard Business Review article declared data scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century. But is working with data still as novel or as exciting as it was then?

The rise of digital currencies in the emerging world

As of September 7, 2021, El Salvador will officially recognise Bitcoin as legal currency. This is a remarkable move, and one that will likely stimulate a huge amount of economic growth as Salvadoreans leapfrog from a largely cash-based society straight to a system characterised by the frictionless, finger-snap efficiency of digital currency.

Trump’s plans to ban Chinese app WeChat blocked

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban WeChat over concerns the ban would threaten users’ first amendment rights

Oracle returns to growth

The software maker’s quarterly revenue exceeded analysts’ expectations, as remote working drove greater demand for its cloud-computing services

Facebook opens Parisian lab to explore artificial intelligence

The social media giant has established a new AI research team in Paris, as it looks to make good on the EU’s AI research community

Facebook is keen to immerse itself in artificial intelligence, as it could help the company develop tools such as its news feed. It has announced it is to open a lab to research the technology in Paris

Facebook has underlined its commitment to artificial intelligence with the announcement that it will open its first AI lab outside of its native US, this time in Paris; adding to its existing teams in Menlo Park and New York. The Paris team builds on Facebook’s AI Research programme – or FAIR – so that the company might more easily “sort through all this information so you can better understand the world around you and more effectively communicate with the people who are important to you,” according to a statement.

Home to some of the highest experts in the field, France has been chosen as an ideal destination for the project

Facebook’s bet on AI is important, with the company increasingly struggling to keep tabs on the millions of posts and photos that are uploaded each day to the social media site by its more than one billion users. “[The] Paris team will work on ambitious long-term research projects in image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, and the kinds of physical and logical infrastructure required to run these AI systems. It’s our hope that this research will ultimately help us make services like News Feed, photos and search even better and enable an entirely new set of ways to connect and share.”

Currently, the focus falls on computing photo uploads, and on making sure newsfeeds are more closely in keeping with individual preferences. However, Facebook sources have stated that the logical next step is language processing, which, if successful, would give machines the capacity to process complex sentences.

Home to some of the highest experts in the field, France has been chosen as an ideal destination for the project, as the company strives to make meaningful progress in the field. Though the project has been underway for little over a year, Facebook has talked-up its achievements so far on this front, and suggested that it could soon emerge as a leading name in AI technology.