Amazon & Google jointly hold over two thirds of the global smart speaker market, but problems ‘made in China’ are on the horizon.

The spread of artificial intelligence will have positive and negative effects. In order for the former to outweigh the latter, companies, politicians and social groups should gave some thought to this and act accordingly.

There are a few Container Orchestration Engines available, such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, DC/OS, Nomad or Swarm, to name a few. On occasion, the optimal solution to deploy your apps requieres picking not one of those, but two or more. Each have their strenghts, and are targetted toward a specific kind of load. For instance, Kubernetes is specially prepared to deploy microservices very dynamically. However, in such a dynamic environment it is hard to handle a persistent database, task which is better handled by system such as DC/OS.

At BBVA Labs, we have been using Akka Actors in different projects for a long time due to its inherent computation distribution capabilities in high load scenarios, using actors as stateless or stateful units of execution that send messages among them in an asynchronous fashion.

In this post, we will cover some of the weak points of working with untyped classic actors and we will show what are the benefits that Akka Typed brings to the scene. Finally, we will present a brief description of session types and the Process DSL API created by Dr. Roland Kuhn. All examples are written using the Scala API.

The head of the BBVA Data & Analytics’ Edge team, José Antonio Rodríguez-Serrano, who coordinates the innovation area in BBVA’s center of excellence in data science, shares his insights into five key questions to understand the implications of this exponential technology in different economical sectors and spheres of society.

Deep Learning techniques are providing amazing results on several Machine Learning fields, but training a complex deep neural network on a large dataset can take a significant amount of time. Therefore accelerate training of Deep Learning models is really crucial, but also challenging.

‘Blockchain’ is still at level 0 in the video game industry, but it has a promising future.

As we have seen in previous articles, the intelligent use of data, with the right talent and the pertinent business strategies for applying creative solutions, can provide insights that help solve a whole gamut of problems and take on board new opportunities. Data places within our grasp an enhanced decision-making ability and a deeper understanding of our clients and what they need. But as in the case of any other tool, these new skills can be put to positive or not so positive use, whether intentionally or not.

The use of virtual assistants, mainly in the form of smart speakers, is rapidly gaining ground. In less than a year, devices such as Echo and Google Home have appeared in households across the globe and users are becoming increasingly comfortable carrying out searches, purchases and even bank transactions using this format, which looks set to become the transactional interface between customers and companies.

Smart speakers are the vanguard of the so-called environmental technology, which transcends the limitations of screens. For the moment, Amazon reigns supreme over a market in which Apple is about to disembark.

We inferred as much in the title to the first article of this series: to key to realizing all the opportunities of this new technological era, lies in these three factors: raw material—data—and the other two are human factors—intelligence and innovation.

Probably the first thing the philosopher would do would be to create a strategy to explore it. Just like when he designed a user’s manual for the human mind with Logic or when he developed a method of thinking critically to examine metaphysics. Aristotles “tried to show that all things in nature belong to certain groups and subgroups,” writes Jonstein Gaarder in Sophie’s World. But first, he counted up the tools he had for this task.

Concepts such as big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science are increasingly at the center of the debate about the digital revolution. But why is everyone talking about them? Do we really understand these concepts, or the implications they have on our evolution as a society?

The world’s tech giants are competing to dominate the field of Artificial Intelligence, which is likely to become the key technology of the digital economy. Who’s leading in this race and what consequences will it have?

Once a year, some 180,000 people meet at the most famous consumer electronics show in the world: the CES in Las Vegas. There, in spectacular fashion, they are shown the latest creations of the biggest brands, the extravagances of the smallest ones and the trends that will define the next wave of audio, image, home and automobile electronic devices.

Artificial intelligence has political, social, economic, military and even philosophical implications. And Twitter provides some good insight on them. Here are eleven key accounts that must be followed in order to understand how machines are learning to think in an increasingly complex way.

The new technologies, and their presence in everyday life, are radically changing the way we look at entertainment, social relationships and work. They have also created new professions that do not yet have a set educational pathway, such as videogame developer.

The number of companies and investors betting on blockchain continues to grow. But how did it come about? What was needed to develop bitcoin, its first practical application? And who were the pioneers of blockchain?

Companies cannot afford to turn their backs on technological progress and technology trends. “Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future,” says the research firm Gartner, in its ‘Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018′.

Gartner predicts that the trends on its list will mark the course of the next decade. They all form part of something the research firm terms the intelligent digital mesh, “an entwining of people, devices, content and services”.

Those three words – intelligent,  digital and mesh – are also the categories into which the research firm divides these essential services. Among them are autonomous robotics, the applications of the Internet of Things and blockchain-based solutions.

Today, a large majority of modern apps or services are RESTful APIs and use API definitions to facilitate communications between them, as it saves us from having to worry about the language and the underlying implementation of the remaining components. APIs make even more sense in microservice or serverless architectures with dozens or hundreds of mutually interacting microservices/functions.

The APIfication phenomenon is by no means restricted to the banking sector. At the API Forum held this week in Madrid, insurance and entertainment companies participated, together with BBVA, to discuss the keys to designing APIs capable of attracting developers.

What is bitcoin? What do the terms node, mining and hash mean? Following are the 10 key terms from the world of blockchain technology that you need to master.

They’re always popular with users of Android mobiles and they’re a fixture on any smartphone. Weather applications allow you to be always informed, in real time, about the meteorological conditions at a given place. Some of these apps are free, others have a cost; some are well known and others are just making a name for themselves in the market.

At BBVA Labs, we follow the test pyramid concept proposed by Mike Cohn. We have a large collection of unit tests that are easy to implement and which are run at every change in code; a collection of acceptance tests which are run whenever the previous tests are passed; and finally, end-to-end tests that are only run to unlock a function.

The complexity of implementing these tests increases as you move up in the pyramid. End-to-end tests, where service integration is also tested, requires putting in place the infrastructure, the services to be tested and the integrated services. Setting up a testing environment, test implementation and execution are significantly more complex than unit tests.

In addition to the cost of running these tests, another problem arises when a service changes the message format. Big bang deployment (deploying the service and its dependents at the same time) is to be avoided as this type of change breaks the continual deployment) . Therefore, for a period of time, the service provider has to offer support for two versions of the message while customers update to the new one, but consumer tests only look at one version of the producer.

At BBVA Labs, we conducted an experiment to reduce the number of services to deploy in tests and to ensure that communication among services from different domains is maintained throughout the software product’s life cycle in a continual deployment system. The decision was made to evaluate current tools to conduct Consumer Driven Contract testing (CDC testing o contract testing) for this experiment.

BBVA today signed a global strategic agreement with Telefónica that will allow the bank to optimize its communications, increase the capacity of its technological network and facilitate operations in the “cloud.”

For decades now, the conceptual terminology of urban planning has been striking. There are smart cities, urbaneering, digital cities, information cities and interconnected cities. These new terms, together with new tools like the internet of things and big data are transforming a debate that began several thousands of years ago in ancient China and the valleys of Mesopotamia. The discussion of the future of cities is far from new, as it entails some of humanity’s oldest concerns. What is unique today – as we’ll see – is not the novelty of the concepts but their potential.

We know there are planets of a size similar to the Earth and at a distance from their sun that make them inhabitable. It´s also possible that there are vestiges of life on Mars, in the ice-covered oceans covered of Europa – a satellite of Jupiter – or on Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn. Sending spaceships manned by robots to study the solar system, recreating the conditions of life on Mars inside a mine, or trying to reproduce a living organism in a laboratory – as Dan Brown relates in his latest bestseller – are some of the scientific experiments that are now being performed to solve the enigma of the origin of life.

In a conversation with journalist Gloria Lomana at the Forbes Summit, BBVA’s Group Executive Chairman offered his view of the transformation being provoked by the digital revolution. According to Francisco González, this fourth industrial revolution is going to change the world and offer opportunities to everyone.

BBVA Group Executive Chairman Francisco González presided over the first edition of the Spanish Computer Science Society (SCIE) – BBVA Foundation Research Awards. These accolades recognized the work of six young Ph.D. recipients who are conducting high-level research in Spain.

Futurist Jerome Glenn, CEO of Millennium Project, urges companies and governments to be proactive in the face of technological advances and outlines three different scenarios in which artificial intelligence can determine the course of society.

Managing internal data appropriately can be the key to optimizing a company’s human resources – from predicting whether a candidate will be successful to combating brain drain.

BBVA’s Group Executive Chairman said that developing the best banking application in the world (according to Forrester) has been a work that “has taken many years.” To get to this point, Francisco González underscored that “the most important thing was when we adopted ‘agile’ work methodologies that allow us to deliver upgrades every three months.” The application helps customers make better financial decisions and manage their financial lives better. Ultimately, he stated, we “want to be the best adviser of our customers.”

This article is the second part about serverless, where we will cover the integration of one of the most interesting products implementing this technology (Fission) in OpenShift, RedHat’s PaaS platform.

Prior to this article, this analysis of serverless architectures or FaaS (Function as a Service) was prepared, to introduce this technology together with its value in business developments.

Social bots are increasingly present online. They are often responsible for spreading fake or misleading news on platforms Facebook and Twitter and can influence the topics that are discussed on these social networks. According to a study by Indiana University (United States), covered by El País, between 9% and 15% of Twitter accounts are controlled by these programmed bots.

Serverless architecture, also known as FaaS (Functions as a Service) enables the execution of an application via ephemeral, stateless containers; these are created at the moment an event is produced that sets off this application. Contrary to what the term suggests, serverless does not mean “without a server.” Rather, these are used as an anonymous element of the infrastructure, supported by the advantages of cloud computing.
Here, leaving aside the hype that accompanies the term serverless, we explore in this post the possibilities it offers in architecture and applications development. We also study the principal alternatives for use in public and private clouds.

Neural networks training is a time consuming activity, the amount of computation needed is usually high even for today standards. There are two ways to reduce the time needed, use more powerful machines or use more machines.

The first approach can be achieved using dedicated hardware like GPUs or maybe FPGAs or TPUs in the future. But it can also be done by splitting the task between more general purpose hardware like the one used in cloud systems.

This document summarizes the conclusions reached after researching the use of distributed neural networks.

It’s always new times for innovation. It has always been and it will always be. It’s in our nature to challenge the model to stress the rules. Even our own model.

BBVA launches Urban Discovery, an interactive tool open to everyone that analyzes the cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Mexico City through the prism of their commercial activity. The analysis led to the creation of new maps that redraw urban borders and identify the most touristic and residential areas or those where young people go shopping.

Madrid tourists spend more near monuments and museums than those in Barcelona. People living in Vila de Gràcia in Barcelona have the same lifestyle as those in the Madrid neighborhood of Malasaña. Sant Antoni and Poble Sec are places that are popular to go out to dinner and then for a drink, and in Madrid, the Lavapies neighborhood is undergoing a transformation toward more cultural activity.

The financial sector has undergone tremendous change in the past few years thanks to the adoption of emerging technologies such as the smartphone.

Since August 1, there has been more than one bitcoin in the crypto-currency markets. On that day, bitcoin cash debuted in the ever-expanding world of blockchain-based virtual currencies. These are the five keys to the new crypto-currency.

“Can machines think?” This is one of the questions that appear in unedited letters that were found in a warehouse at the University of Manchester. They were written by the “father” of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing.

Many big data experts share valuable insights on Twitter.  These are the ten essential names that must be followed to state up to date on this technology.

Machines are getting smarter: trading trillions of dollars in stocks around the world, driving cars, performing surgical operations (570,000 last year), managing and running entire hotels, making cocktails on cruise ships in the Caribbean… truly, we are living in the age of the machine.

Seven Israeli startups took part in “Pitch Day” at the BBVA Innovation Center, where they presented the fintech proposals with which they seek to collaborate in the transformation of financial services, with the help of digital institutions like BBVA.

Regulators, technology providers and experts analyzed the role of cloud computing in the development and consolidation of digital banking during the Latin American Regulators seminar organized by BBVA Bancomer and the IDB.

“Data is the fuel of the new economy and big data is its engine”, said BBVA Executive Board Director José Manuel González-Páramo, during a talk at John Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. With these words, he summarized the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is also causing a radical transformation of the financial sector. This revolution is causing us to “rethink traditional retail banking.”

The creation model is the way the BBVA Group works to create amazing experiences for its customers. As the way customers engage with the bank evolves, so does BBVA, anticipating their needs. It’s a development model that involves designers, software engineers, data analysis experts, banking experts… all focused on delivering solutions for customers within nine months.