Many people see the potential benefits of artificial intelligence technologies used for government services – but many also aren't convinced governments will use AI tech responsibly, according to a new survey from Accenture. The online survey of more than 6,000 citizens from US, Australia, the UK, Singapore, France and Germany found that more than half (54%) of citizens said they are willing to use AI services delivered by government, with even more expressing willingness when presented with the potential benefits derived from artificial intelligence. For instance, three-quarters (74%) of respondents said they would be willing to use artificial intelligence if it would increase pension or retirement income (such as by improving their personal investment strategy and/or pension scheme), and two-thirds (66%) said they would use a chatbot if it would guarantee faster processing of a tax refund or social service benefits. However, that doesn't mean citizens aren't worried about the government using artificial intelligence responsibly – two-thirds (66%) of respondents indicated a lack of confidence in government's ethical and responsible use of AI. Specifically, only one-third (34%) said they're "confident/very confident" that government would be ethical and responsible in its use of AI; fewer than one in three (29%) said they are "not at all confident" in government using AI ethically and responsibly, and slightly more than one-third (37%) said they are neutral on the point. The survey also determined that regardless of where they lived, citizens have concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in government, including in areas of job security and personal data security.

Twitter is reportedly about to join Google in banning cryptocurrency adverts. The social media site is "preparing to prohibit a range of cryptocurrency advertisements amid looming regulatory intervention in the sector", according to Sky News. The company is expected to prohibit advertising for initial coin offerings, token sales and wallets in order to protect consumers from scams. Google announced last week that it would be culling crypto-investment promotions from its search results from June as part of a crackdown on "deceptive content", a damning verdict on the emerging sector. That decision led to a downward slump in the value of all but two of CoinMarketCap's top 50 digicoins, underlining the volatility of virtual currencies and their susceptibility to wild fluctuations.

Monday's Business section looks at Broadcom's scuttled deal to take over San Diego-based Qualcomm. It turns out Broadcom wildly miscalculated when it came to President Trump, who shot down what would have been the largest technology deal in history. The reverberations have only just begun. Trump dinged the deal on national security grounds -- but not because Broadcom, which is based in Singapore until it moves to the U.S. later this month, posed an immediate threat. The big worry was China, Trump's nemesis in trade.

For more than a decade, the Chinese government has been working to push the Chinese manufacturing sector up the value chain. More recently, the push from the central government has become more formalized, resulting in the 2015 issuance of the State Council manufacturing modernization manifesto: Made in China 2025《中国制造2025》(State Council, July 7, 2015). Made in China 2025 focuses less on the types of products to be manufactured and more on the methods of manufacturing. It is okay to continue making rubber duckies, so long as the process for doing so is modernized. That is, massive automated factories churning out thousands of identical items with minimal human intervention.

Microsoft Corp is focusing on Taiwanese specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) during its current recruitment season, a Microsoft Taiwan official said on Wednesday. Michael Chang (張仁烔), chief executive of the new Microsoft AI research and development center in Taiwan, said the company wants to recruit Taiwanese students because of the hard and soft skills that they possess. "Not only are some Taiwanese skilled at data analysis and coding, but they are also insightful, creative and good team players," Chang said. The talent pool is actually one of the main reasons that Microsoft decided to base its AI research and development center in Taiwan, he said. Microsoft Taiwan president Ken Sun (孫基康) told a news conference on Jan. 10 that the company planned to have a 100-person research team at the center within two years and double that number within five years, with a key focus on Chinese-language input for SwiftKey, user-intent technology and AI forward integration applications.

Christopher Wylie, the man at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, has had his account suspended by Facebook. The whistleblower has accused his former employers of harvesting personal information from more than 50m American Facebook users in order to pass it on to third parties affiliated with the Donald Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election, enabling them to microtarget potential swing voters with tailored party political advertising. Wylie told The Observer that the start-up he once worked for had used data originally collected from the Facebook pages of paid participants in an academic study and those of their wider friendship networks in order to pass it on to Trump's then-campaign manager Steve Bannon for strategic purposes. The whistleblower joined Twitter in the run-up to the story's publication and tweeted yesterday that Facebook had disabled his account. On something they have known privately for 2 years.

We all know how it feels to be low on energy at the end of a long work day. Some call-center agents at insurer MetLife are watched over by software that knows how it sounds. A program called Cogito presents a cheery notification when the toll of hours discussing maternity or bereavement benefits show in a worker's voice. "It's represented by a cute little coffee cup," says Emily Baker, who supervises a group fielding calls about disability claims at MetLife. Her team reports that the cartoon cup is a helpful nudge to sit up straight and speak like the engaged helper MetLife wants them to be.

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds the promise of transforming both static and dynamic security measures to drastically reduce organizational risk exposure. Turning security policies into operational code is a daunting challenge facing agile DevOps today. In the face of constantly evolving attack tools, building a preventative defense requires a large set of contextual data such as historic actuals as well as predictive analytics and advanced modeling. Even if such feat is accomplished, SecOps still needs a reactive, near real-time response based on live threat intelligence to augment it. While AI is more hype than reality today, machine intelligence -- also referred to as predictive machine learning -- driven by a meta-analysis of large data sets that uses correlations and statistics, provides practical measures to reduce the need for human interference in policy decision-making.

In a first, Microsoft researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can translate news from Chinese to English with the same quality and accuracy as a human. Researchers said that their system achieved human parity on a commonly used test set of news stories, which was developed by a group of industry and academic partners. To ensure the results were both accurate and on par with what people would have done, the team hired external bilingual human evaluators, who compared Microsoft's results to two independently produced human reference translations. Xuedong Huang, a technical fellow in charge of Microsoft's speech, natural language and machine translation efforts, called it a major milestone in one of the most challenging natural language processing tasks. "Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had. We just didn't realise we'd be able to hit it so soon," Huang said.

A few days back artificial intelligence driven humanoid robot named Sophia was very much in news. Saudi Arabia awarded it an honorary citizenship and this is something which we never anticipated to happen. However, robots and other humanoids are successfully engaged in activities like shop floor management and other multifaceted jobs. They are the live examples or testimony of the technological advancements. Although the common view is that artificial intelligence would take away jobs but according to the reports by Gartner, research firm the job opportunities will increase by 2020.