It's no secret that AI is being applied to virtually everything, but this was a big week for enterprise conversational AI. Salesforce's Einstein debuted a platform for businesses to deploy bots on apps and websites, Facebook Messenger is coming to the web, and Microsoft Word now has a Resume Assistant imbued with intelligence from LinkedIn. It's pretty exciting to see Microsoft begin to incorporate insights from LinkedIn into products like Cortana and Microsoft Word. Using AI to determine the best job title to put on a resume can be powerful, as Indeed demonstrated last month at VB Summit, but the most intriguing part of the assistant may be its ability to surface good examples of work experience derived from LinkedIn public profiles written by humans. Salesforce's bots can be configured to only operate when a business is closed, and if the bot lacks confidence in its answer to a question or a high-value lead lands on your website, the conversation can be routed to an experienced (human) customer service agent.

Rex Sham and his WALL-E-inspired robots are improving fire detection to slash carbon emissions and make the world better. If he were in a movie, Rex Sham would be the bad guy, or at the very least the well-meaning scientist who unwittingly wipes out the human race. In reality, Sham, the co-founder and chief science officer of Insight Robotics, is using his ingenious, WALL-E-like fire-detecting robots to save the planet. What Sham has developed is an automated early warning system that combines a high-precision, pan-tilt robot with thermal imaging sensors and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) vision technology. In its tests of the Computer Vision Wildfire Detection System, the Guangdong Academy of Forestry (Insight Robotics' research partner since 2010) has recorded a 100 per cent detection rate in multiple field trials and deployments.

For artificial intelligence to take hold in Southeast Asia, the region needs more defined business use cases, better data ecosystems, and more concerted talent-development efforts. Artificial intelligence (AI) is still in its early stages in Southeast Asia: the use of machine learning--an AI application in which machines are given access to data to learn from--is just beginning to have an impact on the region. If Southeast Asia wants to catch up to the United States and China, the two major hubs of AI development, it needs to coordinate efforts to put fundamental building blocks in place. All member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are engaging in some level of AI research, with Singapore leading ASEAN in AI experimentation across multiple industries. While such sparks of activity are encouraging, the region requires nations to identify specific business use cases, to create more robust data ecosystems, and to better develop talent and capabilities if it wants to realize its full potential.

A couple of weeks ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told an audience at a Recode-sponsored event that for humanity, the impact of artificial intelligence could be "more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire". In this article, I will explore how artificial intelligence emerges from data and algorithms, and how future advances in computing will aid its development. The term'big data' describes the increasing volume, velocity, and variety of data collected by organizations. It is used as a catch-all term to describe the large data sets that organizations collect. The information in these data sets (including information about an organization's products and services, internal processes, market conditions and competitors, supply chain, trends in consumer preferences, individual consumer preferences, and specific interactions between consumers and products, services, and online portals) can be used in either backward- or forward-looking analysis.

South Korean authorities are adopting some pretty high-tech security measures for the upcoming Winter Olympics, including the deployment of drone-catching-drones and a tactical plane with facial recognition. The drones they're using to patrol the event won't chase away rogue drones that get too close to the venues: they'll cast nets to catch any UAV that shows up on the the security team's radar. More than being worried about photographers taking unauthorized photos of the games, the Pyeongchang Olympics anti-Terrorism and Safety team are apparently concerned about the possibility of terrorists using drones to drop or plant bombs. In fact, team members have also been training to shoot drones out of the sky, in case their own drones aren't enough. North Korea's participation in the games make it less likely for the country to attack, but it's clear that authorities want to be prepared -- after all, terrorists typically attack huge crowds.

Big data and artificial intelligence are at the heart of a platform announced last week by ZhongAn Online Casualty and Property Insurance, China's first internet-only insurer. "Mobile internet and digital technologies are transforming the car industry. So the car insurance industry must change as well," Wang Yu, head of car insurance at ZhongAn, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. The platform will include companies along the car value chain and provide a one-stop shop for buyers and owners. "Imagine shopping for your car and you can take care of matters related to car purchase insurance, loans, after purchase services, investment management and usage-based car insurance (UBI) during one visit," said Wang.

Artificial intelligence (AI) allows us to do valuable thought experiments. Some experts predict AI could eventually replace humans and control human destiny. If AI were to develop a mind of its own, what would be its desires, ambitions, its raison d'être? Will post-human AI continue to develop science and explore the mysteries of the universe? What is the cultural dimension of AI? History shows that cultural values become embedded in our technologies. Would Chinese AI be different from American AI? These are difficult questions to answer, but a good place to start is with China's natural philosophy and worldview. China has long been familiar with the binary logic that is at the heart of AI.

The restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is one of the fundamental building blocks of deep learning. RBM finds wide applications in dimensional reduction, feature extraction, and recommender systems via modeling the probability distributions of a variety of input data including natural images, speech signals, and customer ratings, etc. We build a bridge between RBM and tensor network states (TNS) widely used in quantum many-body physics research. We devise efficient algorithms to translate an RBM into the commonly used TNS. Conversely, we give sufficient and necessary conditions to determine whether a TNS can be transformed into an RBM of given architectures. Revealing these general and constructive connections can cross-fertilize both deep learning and quantum many-body physics. Notably, by exploiting the entanglement entropy bound of TNS, we can rigorously quantify the expressive power of RBM on complex data sets. Insights into TNS and its entanglement capacity can guide the design of more powerful deep learning architectures. On the other hand, RBM can represent quantum many-body states with fewer parameters compared to TNS, which may allow more efficient classical simulations.

AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Cambridge, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of DeepMind, to Seoul, where a legendary Go master faces an unproven AI challenger. As the drama unfolds, questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What will it teach us about humanity?

Dubai: The Dubai Health Authority (DHA) will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to sort out all chest X-ray scans required for mandatory medical fitness for residency purposes. This will streamline the system, cut down processing time and provide a more efficient and consolidated system for issuing results, officials said at Arab Health 2018 on Wednesday. The DHA signed an agreement with Agfa IT Health Care Systems for validation of the first radiology AI algorithm in the UAE. This is part of Dubai Health Strategy 2021 of using AI and smart systems to streamline health care in the emirate. The company has been working closely with the DHA and has already begun validation work with one of the largest medical fitness centres currently processing 17,000 chest X-rays per day for medical fitness.