In his office in Paris's National Assembly, Cédric Villani opens a parcel: it contains a metallic spider. "Lovely," he says, putting it on a shelf, where a collection of spider-shaped objects sits next to his scientific decorations and a photo of him with Mark Zuckerberg. Villani is on a mission. Well, on several missions: the French mathematician, winner of the 2010 Fields Medal – often described as maths' Nobel Prize – sits as an MP for Emmanuel Macron's party La République en Marche, teaches at the University of Lyon, and is running for the Paris 2020 mayoralty. But the expert in mathematical analysis, famous for his academic achievements as well as for wearing spider-shaped pins on his three-piece suits, has a bigger goal: making France a leader in artificial intelligence. Appointed by the French president to set out a national AI strategy, in 2018 Villani published a report, "AI for Humanity", setting clear lines for the sector: "We must valorise our research, define our industrial priorities, work on the ethical and legal framework and on AI training," Villani says, sat among his spiders – one as big a pillow – in his office.

While it's fun to consider all of the fanciful things that advanced AI systems could allow us to do, we can't ignore the very real value in the seeming mundane systems of the present. These systems, if fully realized, could free us from hours of drudgery and allow us to truly spend our time on tasks we deem worthwhile. Imagine no lines at the DMV. Imagine filing your taxes in seconds. This vision is possible, and in the coming months and years, the world's leaders are planning to nudge us down that road ever faster.

The integration of artificial intelligence and the financial industry has always been a match made in heaven--high volumes, the quantitative aspect of finances, need for expediency and accuracy are ideal for the unique skill-set of AI. But, can it impact the high-risk, high-return world of hedge funds? Several companies think so including Hong Kong-based Aidyia. What is a hedge fund? Today, there are more than 10,000 hedge funds that manage approximately $3 trillion in assets.

The piece describes an A.I. research program whose accuracy matched or slightly surpassed human physicians in diagnosing common childhood diseases like influenza. The software was trained on the medical histories, lab tests and other clinical data in more than 600,000 electronic health records of children in southern China. It was an encouraging demonstration. But the experimental system relied on the easy access to personal data in China, where privacy regulations are less restrictive, and was confined to diagnosing common ailments. That step-by-step approach is the counsel for business in a new book by Thomas Davenport, "The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work" (MIT Press).

Natural language processing, aka NLP, is a broad and rapidly evolving segment of today's emerging digital technologies often generalized as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Wikipedia defines NLP as " a subfield of AI concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data." By harnessing NLP, AI can successfully imitate human speech, form naturally-flowing sentences and give human-to-machine interactions a personal touch. Perhaps because both concepts are related to words and languages, natural language processing is often confused with text mining: advanced analysis technique used to filter large amounts of research and extract the relevant info. Text mining is more than just a search tool; its algorithms can understand complex concepts and identify patterns and trends across million of articles to provide valuable information with unmistakable novelty factor.

The Nintendo Switch game console. If you're reading, chances are you already own the Nintendo Switch ($299) or are thinking of picking one up. As you likely know, Nintendo Switch is a unique hybrid console that's both a portable gaming system, like a Nintendo 3DS, as well as a home console, which snaps into a docking station (included) to connect to your television. There are several exclusive games for the platform -- including best-sellers like "Super Mario Odyssey," "Diablo 3: Eternal Collection," "Mario Rabbids: Kingdom Battle," and "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" – which you can buy in cartridge form or download digitally from the Nintendo eShop online store. Underneath the console's kickstand on the back, you can snap in a microSD memory card to store more downloaded content, should the 32GB of internal storage not be enough for you.

Underscoring the importance of local participation in forest improvement, the analysis shows that if grazing lands are snatched away from farming communities for afforestation, forest protection is unlikely. Land stewardship is the key. There is context to this, as Rana explained, in case of JFM where the state is in control, parcels of land where trees are planted are fenced in, restricting access to grazing grounds for cattle. JFM (a Forest Development Agency program funded by the national government) was the flagship community participatory initiative for forests in India starting in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, JFM interventions were begun in several of the study FMRs to involve communities in forest regeneration and protection.

A team of researchers who have built an artificially-intelligent writer say they are withholding the technology as it might be used for "malicious" purposes. OpenAI, based in San Francisco, is a research institute backed by Silicon Valley luminaries including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. It shared some new research on using machine learning to create a system capable of producing natural language, but in doing so the team expressed concern the tool could be used to mass-produce convincing fake news. Which, to put it another way, is of course also an admission that what its system puts out there is unreliable, made-up rubbish. Still, when it works well, the results are impressively realistic in tone - which is why I've shared a sample of it below.

The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed "deepfakes for text" – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse. OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, and others, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discuss the ramifications of the technological breakthrough. At its core, GPT2 is a text generator. The AI system is fed text, anything from a few words to a whole page, and asked to write the next few sentences based on its predictions of what should come next. The system is pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible, both in terms of the quality of the output, and the wide variety of potential uses.

Finland knows it doesn't have the resources to compete with China or the United States for artificial intelligence supremacy, so it's trying to outsmart them. "People are comparing this to electricity – it touches every single sector of human life," says Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa. From its foundations as a pulp mill 153 years ago, Nokia is now one of the companies helping to drive a very quiet, very Finnish AI revolution. Last May, the small Scandinavian country announced the launch of Elements of AI, a first-of-its-kind online course that forms part of an ambitious plan to turn Finland into an AI powerhouse. To date, more than 130,000 people have completed the course.