AI platform Globality is giving small and medium businesses access to broader opportunities. In a post-Brexit, "America First" world, protectionism seems to be back in fashion, and globalization has become something of a dirty word. Since the 1990s, global trade has helped lift over a billion people out of poverty, driven sustained economic growth, lowered consumer prices, and delivered unprecedented freedoms to much of the world's population. Still, middle-income earners have seen their living standards stagnate, while many of the great leaps forward in automation are destroying the jobs of those least able to cope, with vastly greater levels of disruption feared. Large multinational companies still seem to be the greatest beneficiaries of a globalized marketplace. Small and medium-sized businesses, which constitute the bulk of the world's economy and drive most job creation, find it more difficult to make valuable connections that can lead to international trade opportunities and contracts with large organizations.

In a recent speech, Russian president Vladimir Putin made an incredibly prescient statement: "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all of humankind." He went on to highlight both the risks and rewards of AI and concluded by declaring that whatever country comes to dominate this technology will be the "ruler of the world." As someone who closely monitors global events and studies emerging technologies, I think Putin's lofty rhetoric is entirely appropriate. Funding for global AI startups has grown at a 60% compound annual growth rate since 2010. More significantly, the international community is actively discussing the influence AI will exert over both global cooperations and national strength.

More than a half century after he postulated it, (Gordon) Moore's Law is still highly relevant, and the consequences have dramatically revolutionized our world. Intel's current CEO Brian Krzanich provided this mind-boggling evidence: if a 1971 VW Beetle were upgraded at the same speed as a computer chip from the same year, today it would have a maximum speed of 300,000 miles per hour and cost 4 cents. "We're living in a time that I call a technology renaissance," observes Michael Steep, executive director of the Stanford Engineering Center for Disruptive Technology and Digital Cities. "I have not seen the kind of development of technical advances crossing so many different areas of technology ever... These technologies are converging and creating exponential opportunities for both disruption and growth."

This is a group for anyone interested in Artificial Intelligence, how it can be used in the enterprise and what benefits it can bring. This group was started to meet others with an interest in AI technology and to share different experiences. The group is aligned with Neurons.AI - The Online Professional Network for AI, but you don't have to be a member of Neurons to join this meetup ... everyone is welcome to these meetings. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter @Neurons_AI (https://twitter.com/Neurons_AI)and For more information on this and other Neurons.AI meetups please visit http://Chapters.Neurons.AI

If tech experts are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the world. But those same experts don't agree on what kind of effect that transformation will have on the average person. Some believe that humans will be much better off in the hands of advanced AI systems, while others think it will lead to our inevitable downfall. How could a single technology evoke such vastly different responses from people within the tech community? Artificial intelligence is software built to learn or problem solve -- processes typically performed in the human brain.

Today Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are penetrating every aspect of business, from Chatbots being deployed to assist customers to AI-driven platforms being harnessed to automate sales processes. From powering Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana to Google's Allo, AI is promising a better future. At FuGenX, we help businesses build cutting-edge AI solutions that enable them to achieve a first-mover advantage to be a leader in the better future. Our services around AI help you gain high-quality, high-accuracy AI capabilities that enables building highly scalable and cost-effective digital products and solutions. You will certainly achieve the benefit of minimized labor and infrastructure cost.

Leading artificial intelligence company iFlytek Co Ltd is developing an AI-enabled system to assist courts in judging criminal cases, as the company steps up its push to accelerate the commercial application of its technology. The move came after the company was authorized by the Ministry of Science and Technology to build China's first national laboratory for cognitive intelligence. The company, affiliated with the University of Science and Technology of China, a premier school in the country, is partnering with Shanghai High People's Court to test the smart trial system. "We now can use AI to help judges review four types of cases, namely murder, theft, telecom fraud and illegal fundraising," said Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFlytek. "The number will jump to 79 types by the end of this year," he said.

The technological world is getting smarter! And, with the advent of the robot named Sophia who recently got the citizenship of Saudi Arabia, the technology stepped a foot forward. However, it does not stop here as now Google is testing a smart reply robot, which is able to chat with your friends on your behalf and get yourself free. Google uses an AI-based auto-reply system that suggests smart replies and unbinds you from tapping on your smartphone keyboard to keep up with your friends. While Amazon came up with the Amazon Lex for voice recognition lately, the tech giant, Google is working on something more of the robots talking to robots kind of a thing.

Technology and automotive companies touting self-driving cars as the future of transportation may have some work to convince San Franciscans, who keep attacking the vehicles. A third of traffic collisions involving autonomous vehicles in 2018 so far featured humans physically confronting the cars, according to data released by California. In one case, a taxi driver exited his cab and slapped the front passenger window of a General Motors Cruise parked behind him. No one was hurt, though the car sustained a scratch. In another case, a pedestrian hurtled across an intersection despite a "do not walk" sign, shouting as he went, and rammed his body into a different Cruise's rear bumper.

In statistical language we seek to give a lower bound on the performance of any estimator over a class of problems (often called the minimax risk over the class). In the language of information theory, we speak of converse results, which give performance bounds for all communication schemes over a noisy channel. In the statistics literature, one standard approach to proving converse results is via Fano's inequality (see [1, Theorem 2.11.1]). However, recent information-theoretic literature has shown how to obtain sharper converse bounds. The resulting improvements can be significant at finite sample size, and give bounds that are close to optimal, as illustrated in the work of Polyanskiy, Poor and Verdú [2]. The present paper shows how the method of [2], although developed for channel coding problems, gives stronger risk lower bounds for high-dimensional estimation problems, compared to the standard Fano approach. We first describe the general setup, following the treatment and notation of [3, Chapter 2].