Finance, VC & PE

Big Data & Society, Volume 13, Issue 3, July-September 2026. We offer a genealogy of recent artificial intelligence infrastructure investment, situating it within a longer-term strategy by Big Cloud firms to construct and dominate the cloud computing market. Based on an analysis of 12 years of financial data and ...

China’s innovation ecosystem has witnessed a resurgence, minting 67 new unicorn start-ups in the first half of 2026 – the biggest increase in almost five years – as AI and robotics kick off a new investment cycle. The growth translates into an average of one new unicorn – private companies valued at US$1 billion or more – in less than every three days and was the highest since the second half of 2021 when 76 new unicorns were created, according to a Monday report by ITJuzi, a start-up...

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A police investigation is underway after students at Lake Zurich High School were reported to have used AI to generate sexually explicit images of female classmates, with school officials calling it "disturbing." Lake Zurich Community Unit ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1574#7494)

Autonomous negotiation agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as insurance and procurement. While cryptographic techniques protect explicitly disclosed constraint values, they fail to address a subtler threat: behavioral privacy leakage, where an adversary infers private constraints from observable negotiation dynamics such as concession trajectories, timing, and convergence patterns. This paper investigates behavioral differential privacy in multi-round negotiation protoc

TOPICS Artificial Intelligence Fintech Fiscal Policies Governance and Anti-Corruption All Topics Research Flagship Publications World Economic Outlook Global Financial Stability Report Fiscal Monitor ...

BEIJING, July 7, 2026 — China’s economy stayed resilient in early 2026, supported by strong high-tech investment and exports, according to the World Bank’s latest China Economic Update, Rebalancing ...

How to apply effective governance to harness the benefits of A.I. and mitigate its risks ...

Nations have long invested in domestic infrastructure to advance their economies, protect and use their data, and take advantage of technology opportunities in areas such as transportation, communications, commerce, entertainment and healthcare. AI, the most important technology of our time, is turbocharging innovation across every facet of society. Countries are investing in AI capabilities so […]

Big Data & Society, Volume 13, Issue 3, July-September 2026. This article examines AI-based video surveillance systems in public spaces. We investigate a case of AI-based camera technology designed to detect falls into the water and prevent drowning accidents at the harbor front of a large Scandinavian city. This ...

The global robotaxi sector is on track to become a US$1 trillion market by 2040, according to Morgan Stanley, with Chinese players like Baidu, Xpeng and WeRide primed to be regional front-runners alongside global leaders Tesla and Waymo. In a research note on Friday, the US investment bank forecast that falling manufacturing costs in China would act as a “major underappreciated accelerant” for the industry. Driven by cheaper supply chains, the cost of parts per vehicle for Chinese-made robotaxi.

Access Now joins more than 20 human rights organizations and individuals in condemning Pegasus spyware attack against Stelios Kouloglou, Greek journalist and then-Member of the European Parliament The post Same government, more victims: Access Now calls for an urgent investigation into hacking of MEP appeared first on Access Now .

CDT Europe is publishing a joint statement with civil society organisations and individual signatories calling on the EU institutions to regulate spyware technologies after the 2026 Citizen Lab revelations. On 3 July 2026, a forensic analysis by the Citizen Lab revealed that Stelios Kouloglou, former Member of the European Parliament and investigative journalist, was targeted […] The post Joint Statement: Pegasus in the European Parliament, the EU Must Act Now appeared first on Center for Democr

[New Report] 2026 State of Fintech in Europe – Exploring Payments, Wealth, Lending, and more

TOPICS Artificial Intelligence Fintech Fiscal Policies Governance and Anti-Corruption All Topics Research Flagship Publications World Economic Outlook Global Financial Stability Report Fiscal Monitor ...

How to apply effective governance to harness the benefits of A.I. and mitigate its risks ...

Indore: A local resident was defrauded of approximately Rs 1.80 lakh by cybercriminals who used AI-generated voice to impersonate his relative living abroad. "The Indore crime branch has launched an investigation into the case after the vi ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1566#7485)

A key challenge in Arabic NLP is the scarcity of dialectal data relative to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), causing LLMs to overproduce MSA and struggle with dialectally accurate generation. From an interpretability perspective, this raises a fundamental question: where and how are dialectal features encoded within model internals, and can these representations be leveraged to improve dialect generation without fine-tuning? This study investigates two complementary inference-time approaches that s

Frontier-AI governance today faces a problem structurally analogous to the one banking regulation faced pre-2008, and which post-2008 reforms (Basel III, Dodd-Frank) have since addressed. Two gaps recur: discovering a risk is not tantamount to acting on it, and individual-model review is unlike managing correlated build-up across the sector. Drawing on the Basel III framework and the U.S. financial-stability architecture, I propose a macro-prudential early warning and response system ("MEWRS") f

The Defence Investment Plan provides £5 billion for drone warfare.

Accurate and efficient dataset valuation is essential for enabling fair and transparent data marketplaces, especially when multiple contributors provide data for training multi-task models. Most existing valuation methods, however, are limited to single-task settings, overlooking scenarios where a buyer aims to optimize performance across multiple downstream tasks. Moreover, traditional valuation approaches, such as Shapley-based or retraining-based methods, are computationally expensive and poo

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly adopted into everyday life, with most investment and development concentrated in the U.S. In response to rapid AI integration and scant federal guidelines, U.S. states have formed AI committees charged with studying AI-related societal trade-offs. We analyzed the 18 existing state-level AI committee reports to understand how policymakers discuss AI-related benefits and risks. We then compared the risks surfaced by policymakers to an esta

The rapid growth of publicly available digital information has rendered manual open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis insufficient for modern intelligence, cybersecurity, and cyber investigation. Large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems, capable of tool use, multi-step reasoning, and iterative intelligence generation, have emerged as promising solutions, yet evaluation frameworks have not kept pace with reported capabilities. This survey systematically reviews 74 studies and makes

Decentralised federated learning, based on peer-to-peer communication, is increasingly proposed for on-device training of machine learning models, promising a privacy-preserving, communication-efficient training process with no risk of single-point failure. However, the role of structural and temporal inhomogeneities in such fully decentralised settings remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate their effects when model parameters are locally averaged during aggregation. We show that the de

In the previous episode of Tech Odyssey, we visited Portugal Ventures to see how a public venture capital institution supports early-stage startups in Portugal. This time, we moved further upstream — to Coimbra, a small city where university research, applied R&D, and entrepreneurship are closely connected. Coimbra is better known for history than startups. The […]

Kling AI, Kuaishou’s AI video generation business, raised nearly $3 billion in external funding on July 2, with its post-money valuation expected to reach $18 billion. The financing will support Kling AI’s transition to independent commercial operations. The round was co-led by CPE, Guofang Venture Capital, BlueFive, Tencent, CITIC Securities and Zhongguancun Science City Fund […]

Kuaishou’s AI video generation platform, Kling AI, is reportedly close to completing a $3 billion funding round, with Tencent participating in the investment. Upon completion, Kling AI is expected to be valued at $18 billion. In May, foreign media reported that Kuaishou was planning to spin off Kling AI and launch an IPO as early […]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a sprawling residential proxy service operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies [NASDAQ: ALAR]. The action comes roughly two weeks after KrebsOnSecurity published findings from multiple security firms connecting NetNut to the Popa botnet, a collection of at least two million devices that have been compromised by malicious software wi

Local pairwise comparisons are a standard tool for learning how people want decision rules to work, e.g., in participatory design or alignment. However, their use builds in two strong assumptions: that local comparisons are sufficient evidence about how a person wants an automated decision rule to behave, and that people can always answer those comparisons decisively. We investigate how these assumptions may be compromised under internal pluralism: the idea that an individual evaluates decision

Public LLM leaderboards optimise for global average performance and do not capture the specific cognitive demands of financial-services work: a model that leads on MMLU-Pro may underperform on document-grounded compliance reasoning, and a coding leader may handle multi-turn customer interactions poorly. We present a meta-benchmarking framework that organises 452 publicly reported benchmarks into 41 O*NET Generalized Work Activities and aggregates those into 38 BIAN banking business domains spann

The Securities and Exchange Commission (the "Commission" or the "SEC") requests public comment on exchange-traded funds ("ETFs") seeking to invest in innovative asset classes or engage in novel investment strategies. We seek comment on ways to facilitate innovation in the ETF space while protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.

Carbon emissions drive climate change, and carbon credits mitigate climate deterioration and environmental damage while assisting organizations in managing their carbon footprint. Fully utilizing carbon credits remains challenging. This study enhances understanding of the engineering practices for carbon credits to develop responsible fintech solutions and provide insights for carbon emission management. We review the negative impacts of organizations’ strategy of evading carbon management throu

Una nueva investigación muestra la utilidad de este sistema de lucha contra la desinformación, pero detecta su fracaso en momentos polarizados como unas elecciones

This paper explores resource allocation complexities during health emergencies, focusing on pervasive racial disparities, notably affecting black communities. It aims to investigate alternatives to the Most Lives Saved approach, particularly its potential to exacerbate disparities. To analyse resource allocation strategies, the essay reviews the Dual-Principled System proposed by Bruce and Tallman (B+T) in 2021. B+T’s proposal critiques previous methods like the Area Deprivation Index and

NVIDIA and its partners are investing in American manufacturing, supply chains, energy grids and skilled workforces so the U.S. can produce the infrastructure needed for better healthcare, breakthrough scientific discovery, stronger industrial productivity and global technology leadership.

Recent advances in AI have heightened scholars' and policy makers' concern with social influence and behavioral contagion in online communities. We conduct a field experiment on Reddit to investigate the extent to which online users are susceptible to positive behavioral stimuli from other users and artificial agents. We let apparent human and bot accounts give symbolic awards to users with one of four rationales: praising the recipient's logical argument, emotional sensitivity, or moral integri

“ The lowest-cost place to put AI will be in space, and that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk told the World Economic Forum in Davos this past January, as his company was preparing to go public . Later that month, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission for an orbital data center constellation of up to 1 million satellites in low Earth orbit, 500 to 2,000 kilometers above Earth. And just three days before the IPO,

Digital forensic investigations of network intrusions require analytical outputs that are traceable, reproducible, and court-defensible - requirements existing machine learning pipelines do not satisfy, since they treat original evidence as training data and produce opaque classifications without instance-level justification. This paper presents a forensic-oriented intrusion detection framework resolving both problems simultaneously, integrating synthetic data generation, binary classification,

Human motion forecasting in unconstrained real-world videos remains challenging due to the ambiguity of future behaviors and the presence of noisy multimodal observations. While facial affect potentially provides complementary behavioral cues, its practical utility and mechanistic boundaries within motion forecasting frameworks remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a systematic study investigating the utility and temporal limitations of affect-conditioned forecasting in-the-wild. We

Postural balance is essential for both humans and robots, as failures increase fall risk and limit robotic performance in real-world settings. Although humans and robots share fundamental balancing mechanics, biological complexity limits the isolation of individual muscle functions and direct principle transfer to robots. In this study, we use EPA-Walker, a bio-inspired robot actuated by electric motors and pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs), as a physical platform to investigate perturbed stan