The US House Oversight and Reform IT Subcommittee today released the results of a months-long investigation into Federal investment and oversight in artificial intelligence. There's a lot to unpack here, and most of it is bad. TL;DR: If the Trump administration doesn't make drastic changes China will pass us in AI R&D spending this year, and will likely lead the globe in AI technologies long before the 2030 deadline its government issued last year. On a day when the leaders of the free world openly laughed at US President Donald Trump as he claimed to have accomplished more than "almost any other" administration in US history, a bipartisan effort back home to make the White House care about the future took the form of a research paper. Congressman Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, and Representative Robin Kelly, an Illinois Democrat, published "Rise of the Machines: Artificial Intelligence and its Growing Impact on U.S. Policy," after spending the majority of 2018 holding subcommittee hearings to interview AI experts.

The AI-powered document and data abstraction company has announced it is entering the Non-Performing Loan (NPL) market, though a partnership with 8G Capital Partners. Leverton will support both buyers and sellers of NPL portfolios, using artificial intelligence to conduct due diligence and closing transactions, as well as post-acquisition portfolio management. NPL transactions are highly complex and involve myriads of documents, ranging from loan agreements to security documents and collateral documentation such as title deeds, planning permits, plans. However, many transactions are still being brought to the market without complete knowledge of what each portfolio entails. Leverton said its deep learning technology can be trained to automatically identify and extract relevant information from various types of documents and contracts including loan agreements and collateral documents in over 30 languages.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been a buzzword in recent years, given its role in shaping smart cities and consumer lifestyle across Asia Pacific. According to IDC, the region – seen as the frontline for IoT adoption – will account for 8.6 billion of 29.5 billion connected devices globally by 2020. Industries are increasingly realising how IoT can accelerate digital transformation in organisations, enhance data connectivity and exchange across the network, and provide new opportunities for virtual and physical systems to become more integrated. Across the region, companies have been applying contemporary data science techniques to deliver applications, products and services through smartphones. The combination of IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and predictive analytics is currently creating big economic value for organisations across the region.

Unfairly trained Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can reinforce bias, therefore AI systems must be trained fairly. Experts say AI fairness is a dataset issue for each specific machine learning model. AI fairness is a newly recognized challenge. The big cloud providers are in the process of developing and announcing tools to help address AI fairness. Facebook announced internal software tools development to search for bias in training datasets in May 2018.

Video game development is a tougher job than people might think, with the pervasiveness of working practices like crunch prompting a global movement towards unionisation. But for Rasheed Abueideh, a Palestinian software engineer who makes games in his spare time, there are additional challenges. Any minute you could be killed on the road because there is always a gun loaded and pointed at your head. I am in the office in Ramallah, so usually when there are clashes near us we work with tear gas around us, and we are crying. And we call that'work under pressure'." Abueideh is the designer of Liyla and the Shadows of War, a short mobile game in which the player character helps his wife and daughter, Liyla, escape from Gaza. Liyla is fictional, but the game features real events: strikes on schools, the death of four children playing on a beach. When Liyla was first released on the App Store, Apple refused to categorise it as a game, feeding into a historical precedent that Apple prefers games to be frivolous. The game ends with Liyla's death. "I would be cheating if I made a different ending," Abueideh says. "This is what's really happening, and this is what I really want everybody to know." Abueideh is a father of four young children himself. Sometimes, when holding one of them in his arms, he has flashbacks to images of other Palestinian parents holding their child's dead body. When he let his children play Liyla, they asked him: "Why did they kill her?

Ten years ago, there was a revolution in the way video games told stories. Games such as Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed and Yakuza began to combine freely explorable open-world environments with story missions and side quests, allowing players to drop in and out of the main plotlines as they wished – or abandon them altogether. The experience of playing narrative video games changed forever. So where can we expect narrative games to go next? At the Celsius 232 festival, we sat down with five experienced narrative designers: Witcher 3 writer Jakub Szamałek, comic book and games writers Dan and Nik Abnett, Bungie narrative designer Margaret Stohl and Tom Jubert, writer of Faster Than Light and The Talos Principle.

AI robots and self-driving cars might steal the headlines, but the next big leap in technology will be advances in voice services, according to Google's head of search, Ben Gomes, who says that a better understanding of common language is crucial to the future of the internet. "Speech recognition and the understanding of language is core to the future of search and information," said Gomes . "But there are lots of hard problems such as understanding how a reference works, understanding what'he', 'she' or'it' refers to in a sentence. It's not at all a trivial problem to solve in language and that's just one of the millions of problems to solve in language." Gomes was speaking to the Guardian ahead of Google's 20th anniversary on 24 September, more than seven years after Google launched its first voice service as simple speech-to-text for search. Now built into Google's search and its AI voice assistant which is embedded in billions of smartphones around the globe, voice recognition has become essential in developing countries with low literacy rates.

In the summer of 1995, a second-year grad student called Sergey Brin was giving a tour of Stanford University to prospective students. Larry Page, an engineering graduate from the University of Michigan, was one of those being shown around the Palo Alto, California campus. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious," Larry Page said of the encounter. "He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too." "We both found each other obnoxious," said Sergey Brin.

A pair of Japanese robots have captured stunning photographs of the surface of an asteroid as they landed on it. The cookie tin-shaped robots successfully reached the Ryugu asteroid yesterday, a day after they were released from the Hayabusa2 probe, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency confirmed. The stunning photos show the craggy surface of the asteroid and were beamed back 180 million miles to Earth by the probe. This stunning picture of the asteroid's surface was taken by one of the rovers as it jumped on it Rover-1B's took this shot of the asteroid's craggy surface following its three-and-half year journey The rovers are being used by Japan's space agency to search for clues of the origins of the solar system. The rover mission is the world's first moving, robotic observation of an asteroid surface, according to the agency.

The NHS describes motor neurone disease (MND) as: 'An uncommon condition that affects the brain and nerves. It causes weakness that gets worse over time.' The weakness is caused by the deterioration of motor neurons, upper motor neurons that travel from the brain down the spinal cord, and lower motor neurons that spread out to the face, throat and limbs. It was first discovered in 1865 by a French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, hence why MND is sometimes known as Charcot's disease. In the UK, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is referred to as Motor Neurone Disease, while in the US, ALS is referred to as a specific subset of MND, which is defined as a group of neurological disorders.