Reuters – The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to U.S. national security, current and former U.S. officials tell Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years. The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries. The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies on national security grounds.

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." The question for business leaders and marketing professionals is not'if' artificial intelligence will cause a fundamental shift in how we conduct business and talk to our customers. Just look at the rise of Programmatic, sophisticated bid management platforms and algorithms such as Google's RankBrain.

Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize every sector, and will likely eliminate whole categories of jobs in the next few years, said Andrew Ng, a Stanford adjunct professor and former Baidu scientist, at the WSJ D.Live Asia conference.

The ultimate aim of any Financial Institution (FI) is to earn the confidence and faith of their customers but equally important to verify the information customers provide back to them. The regulators are increasingly concentrating on ensuring that banks have robust and effective controls in place for customer due diligence (CDD). Multinational banks need to ensure compliance not only in their home country but also in environments that are more complex and have fewer infrastructures. For Example, Deloitte has highlighted in its "Meeting new expectation" report that AML sanctions-related fines and penalties imposed in 2013 and 2014 quadrupled the total for the previous nine years. Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes KYC and AML compliance to the next level.

The company, Montreal-based Element AI, was founded last October to help companies that might not have much experience in artificial intelligence start using the technology to change the way they do business. It's equal parts general research lab and startup incubator, with employees working to develop new and improved techniques in artificial intelligence that might not be fully realized for years, while also commercializing products and services that can be sold to clients today. It was co-founded by Yoshua Bengio -- one of the pioneers of a type of AI research called machine learning -- along with entrepreneurs Jean-François Gagné and Nicolas Chapados, and the Canadian venture capital fund Real Ventures. In an interview, Bengio and Gagné said the money from the company's funding round will be used to hire 250 new employees by next January. A hundred will be based in Montreal, but an additional 100 employees will be hired for a new office in Toronto, and the remaining 50 for an Element AI office in Asia -- its first international outpost.

More than a third of U.S. jobs could be at "high risk" of automation by the early 2030s, a percentage that's greater than in Britain, Germany and Japan, according to a report released Friday. The analysis, by accounting and consulting firm PwC, emphasized that its estimates are based on the anticipated capabilities of robotics and artificial intelligence, and that the pace and direction of technological progress are "uncertain." It said that in the U.S., 38% of jobs could be at risk of automation, compared with 30% in Britain, 35% in Germany and 21% in Japan. The main reason is not that the U.S. has more jobs in sectors that are universally ripe for automation, the report says; rather, it's that more U.S. jobs in certain sectors are potentially vulnerable than, say, British jobs in the same sectors. For example, the report says the financial and insurance sector has much higher possibility of automation in the U.S. than in Britain.

Grabbing that morning Starbucks fix got a little easier this year, thanks to artificial intelligence. Starbucks launched a new feature in January that allows customers who own iPhones or Amazon Echos to order their coffee through voice-activated assistants. Depending which device they use, customers can also ask check their Starbucks account balances, inquire about seasonal specials and find out which baked treats are available at their local stores. Starbucks has said the use of digital assistants helps it provide more personalized customer experiences. These assistants are also more cost-effective (than the humans who normally would put in customer orders).

Artificial intelligence is not a contact sport. Currently, algorithms mostly just compete to win old Atari games, or accomplish historic board gaming feats like owning five human Go champions at once. These are just practice rounds, though, for the way more complicated (and practical) goal of teaching robots how to navigate human environments. Vicarious, an AI company, has developed a new AI that is absolutely slammin' at Breakout, the paddle vs. brick arcade classic. Its AI, called Schema Networks, even succeeds at tweaked versions of the game--for instance, when the paddle is moved closer to the bricks.

The Pentagon has raised concerns about China's access to artificial-intelligence-based technology developed in the US, according to Reuters. The news agency says a leaked report proposes that export controls be updated to stop Chinese organisations being able to invest in some start-ups. It suggests the move is needed to prevent their advanced algorithms being repurposed for the military by Beijing. One expert said the report sounded credible. "Quite a few people in the US security establishment see China as a likely potential adversary," Prof Trevor Taylor, from the UK's Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, told the BBC.

Picture this: The networking stack on the main pump controller has crashed, and you need to reboot it -- but it's 20 meters underground, on another continent -- and there's no-one on site to hit'reset'. Or you're bowling along the highway and one of the processor cores in your self-driving car gets zapped by a cosmic ray (yes, this could actually happen). The software can't tell whether the resulting error is a transient glitch or a hardware fault, so limits you to 50 kilometers per hour for safety: No fun with a monster truck hurtling up behind you. Chip designers such as ARM and Imagination Technologies are applying industrial safety design techniques to their processor cores so that they can get themselves out of situations like this. You could soon feel the benefit even if you don't run a subterranean pumping station in Azerbaijan, nor yet have a self-driving car in your garage.