Spotting traffic jams outside Wal-Marts can help traders looking to bet on the success of Black Friday sales each year – and it’s easier to do this from space than sending analysts to car parks.
 Some data providers have been feeding transcripts of calls with company executives into a natural language processor – an area of artificial intelligence that the Turing test foresaw – to figure out if they have gained or lost confidence in their business.
 Trades might have had gut feelings about this before, but now they can get graphs.
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 What we’re doing is trying to harness a very small edge and doing it over a long period in a large number of markets.
” The statistics expert said the plunging cost of computer power and data storage, crossed with a “quite extraordinary” proliferation of recorded data, have helped breathe life into concepts like artificial intelligence for big investors.
 “The trading phase at the moment is making better use of the signals we already know about.
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 Developments in disciplines such as engineering and computer science have contributed to the field, according to the former academic based in Oxford, where Man Group this week jointly sponsored a new research professorship in machine learning at the university.
 driverless car The artificial intelligence used in driverless cars could have applications in finance Credit: Google Dr Ledford said the technology has applications in driverless cars, which must learn how to drive in novel conditions, and identifying stars from telescope images.
 Indeed, he has adapted the methods used in the Zooniverse project, which asked thousands of volunteers to help teach a computer to spot supernovae, to build a new way of spotting useful trends in the City’s daily avalanche of analyst research.