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SONAL SHAH: It's also about how do we make data more useful for people to use and to solve problems in their communities? TANYA OTT: Okay, that is a big job. Who is this superhuman who fills it? TANYA OTT: We'll tell you, in a moment. But first, let me say, you're listening to the Press Room, where we talk about some of the biggest issues facing businesses today. I'm Tanya Ott and joining me today are Bill Eggers … I am the executive director and a professor of practice at Georgetown University's Beeck Center. TANYA OTT: Bill and Sonal are coauthors of The CDO Playbook – a guide for Chief Data Officers. For the last decade, government has been focused on making data more open and easily [accessible] to the public.

Knowing when and where a person is, was, and will be can enable magical customer experiences. Flybits today announced that it's raised $35 million in series C funding led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Mastercard, Citi Ventures, and Reinventure, along with existing partners Portag3 Ventures, TD Bank, and Information Venture Partners. The fresh funding brings its total raised to $50 million, and it comes as Flybits notches 300% growth in 2019 and gears up to hire across sales, engineering, and business development teams and offices, including adding solutions engineers, sales executives, business development reps, and engineers. "Customers are already used to seeing content and recommendations based on their behavior," said CEO Hossein Rahnama. But Flybits leverages an unlimited amount to create far more personalized and relevant recommendations than ever before, all in an effort to help financial institutions deliver real time lifestyle banking that gets at their customers' deeper needs.

Elon Musk doesn't think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It's a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot. And depending on which part of the two-hour presentation you caught, it's either a state-of-the-art tool for understanding the brain, a clinical advance for people with neurological disorders, or the next step in human evolution. The chip is custom-built to receive and process the electrical action potentials--"spikes"--that signal activity in the interconnected neurons that make up the brain.

Some Uber drivers in New York City want to see a decrease in the commission taken by the company. SAN FRANCISCO -- Gig economy workers are increasingly ubiquitous, shuttling us to appointments and delivering our food while working for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and others. Thanks in large part to the app-based tech boom emanating from this city, 36% of U.S. workers participate in the gig economy, according to Gallup. But not all gigs are created equal, Gallup adds, noting that so-called "contingent gig workers" experience their workplace "like regular employees do, just without the benefits of a traditional job -- benefits, pay and security." California lawmakers are weighing what is considered a pro-worker bill that, if passed into law, would set a national precedent that fundamentally redefines the relationship between worker and boss by forcing corporations to pay up.

Elon Musk's secretive "brain-machine interface" startup, Neuralink, stepped out of the shadows on Tuesday evening, revealing its progress in creating a wireless implantable device that can – theoretically – read your mind. At an event at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Musk touted the startup's achievements since he founded it in 2017 with the goal of staving off what he considers to be an "existential threat": artificial intelligence (AI) surpassing human intelligence. Two years later, Neuralink claims to have achieved major advances toward Musk's goal of having human and machine intelligence work in "symbiosis". Neurolink says it has designed very small "threads" – smaller than a human hair – that can be injected into the brain to detect the activity of neurons. It also says it has developed a robot to insert those threads in the brain, under the direction of a neurosurgeon.

Summary: Despite our concerns about China taking the lead in AI, our own government efforts mostly through DARPA continue powerful leadership and funding to maintain our lead. Here's their plan to maintain that lead over the next decade. Think all those great ideas that have powered AI/ML for the last 10 years came from Silicon Valley and a few universities? Hard as it may be to admit it's the seed money in the billions that our government has spent that got pretty much all of these breakthroughs to the doorway of commercial acceptability. Dozens of articles bemoan the huge investments that China is making in AI with the threat that they will pull ahead.

According to the new market research report "Artificial Intelligence Market by Offering (Hardware, Software, Services), Technology (Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Context-Aware Computing, Computer Vision), End-User Industry, and Geography - Global Forecast to 2025", published by MarketsandMarkets, the Artificial Intelligence Market is expected to be valued at USD 21.5 billion in 2018 and is likely to reach USD 190.6 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 36.6% during the forecast period. Major drivers for the market are growing big data, the increasing adoption of cloud-based applications and services, and an increase in demand for intelligent virtual assistants. The major restraint for the market is the limited number of AI technology experts. Critical challenges facing the AI market include concerns regarding data privacy and the unreliability of AI algorithms. Underlying opportunities in the artificial intelligence market include improving operational efficiency in the manufacturing industry and the adoption of AI to improve customer service.

Elon Musk, the futurist billionaire behind SpaceX and Tesla, outlined his plans to connect humans' brains directly to computers on Tuesday night, describing a campaign to create "symbiosis with artificial intelligence." He said the first prototype could be implanted in a person by the end of next year. Arriving at that goal "will take a long time," Musk said in a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, noting that securing federal approval for implanted neural devices is difficult. But testing on animals is already underway, and "a monkey has been able to control the computer with his brain," he said. Musk founded Neuralink Corp. in July 2016 to create "ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers."

In a statement, CLDC says that it will work with Rui Xin to develop a consumer financial platform. CLDC expects to provide value-added consumer financial services to insurance consumers of Rui Xin and its partners. In addition, CLDC and Rui Xin will explore opportunities for collaboration in areas such as insurance consumer acquisition, development of insurance products, expansion of insurance business, and customisation of consumer financial solutions. Moreover, CLDC will benefit from Rui Xin and its partners' advanced technological capabilities in big data and artificial intelligence to improve its risk management and enhance its customer experience. In its turn, Rui Xin will be able to explore new business opportunities and increase its competency to eventually expand its customer base in the insurance industry by benefiting from CLDC's financial service expertise, bank credit facility resources, and client base in certain regional markets.

An artificial intelligence system created by researchers at the University of California has solved the Rubik's Cube in just over a second. DeepCubeA, as the algorithm was called, completed the 3D logic puzzle which has been taxing humans since it was invented in 1974. "It learned on its own," said report author Prof Pierre Baldi. The researchers noted that its strategy was very different from the way humans tackle the puzzle. "My best guess is that the AI's form of reasoning is completely different from a human's," said Prof Baldi, who is professor of computer science at University of California, Irvine.