Europe

Leading to 2020 several European countries have launched their national AI strategies, the European Commission put forward a European approach to Artificial Intelligence, a Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence "Made in Europe", laid out the path for Building Trust in Human Centric Artificial Intelligence and set up a High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) which presented their Policy and Investment Recommendations for Trustworthy AI. And in 2020, Artificial Intelligence will continue to be very much a priority for the European Union. The recent paper Artificial Intelligence: Power for Civilisation – and for Better Healthcare that I had the honor to co-author asserts that Europe's goal should be to integrate AI into health-related operations, so as to improve clinical care, drive new therapies and treatments, and make healthcare systems more efficient. Data Front and Centre Europe is currently proving that it is capable of working together and sharing as the enthusiasm resulting from what was originally named the MEGA initiative (standing for Million European Genomes Alliance and proposed by our colleagues at the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine), now renamed as European '1 Million Genomes' Initiative, has clearly demonstrated. There is an undoubted willingness on the part of many Member States, and the regions within them, to collaborate when it comes to data sharing in healthcare, and not just in genomics.

As an aspiring data scientist, the best way for you to increase your skill level is by practicing. And what better way is there for practicing your technical skills than making projects. Personal projects are a really important part of your career's growth. They will take you one step closer to your data science dream. Projects will boost your knowledge, skills, and confidence.

Workday co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri has been a success. He started the human resources technology company in 2005 and has grown it to a stock market valuation over $40 billion. His own net worth is valued by Forbes in the billions. He sees technology playing a big role in the success of all workers in the future. "Blockchain is a technology looking for a problem to solve. We found one to solve, which is credentials," Bhusri told the anchors of CNBC's "Squawk Box" from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday.

ICHEC, the national high-performance computing authority of Ireland, recently participated in the xView2 disaster recovery challenge run by the US Defense Innovation Unit and other Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Recovery (HADR) organisations. Models developed during the challenge including those developed at ICHEC are currently being tested by agencies responding to the ongoing bushfires in Australia. XView2 Challenge is based on using high resolution imagery to see the details of specific damage conditions in overhead imagery of a disaster area. The challenge involved building AI models to locate and classify the severity of damage to buildings using pairs of pre and post disaster satellite images. Models like these allow those responding to disasters to rapidly assess the damage left in their wake, enabling more effective response efforts and potentially saving lives.

This is my brand-new film on the future of work, jobs and education. Are you excited, or are you worried? The next 20 years will bring more change than the previous 300 years. Technology is rebooting the very idea of work, how we work, when we work, where we work, and sooner or later why we work. Computers are no longer stupid.

Sign in to report inappropriate content. Airbus has successfully performed the first fully automatic vision-based take-off using an Airbus Family test aircraft at Toulouse-Blagnac airport. The test crew comprising of two pilots, two flight test engineers and a test flight engineer took off initially at around 10h15 on 18 December and conducted a total of 8 take-offs over a period of four and a half hours.

The value of building data-driven businesses with AI at their core is well known today, and business executives are rushing to implement the technology into their operations and gain a competitive advantage, but it's not as simple as creating a data lake and crafting AI models. A large number of AI companies attempting to implement more AI models or build AI-first businesses have experienced challenges. A December 2018 PwC survey found that only 4% of businesses have successfully implemented AI. That's why today the World Economic Forum released the AI toolkit for Boards of Directors. The AI toolkit for Boards of Directors is being released ahead of the annual WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland where the toolkit will be formally debuted next week.

Russia on Thursday launched an unmanned rocket carrying a life-size humanoid robot that will spend 10 days learning to assist astronauts on the International Space Station. Named Fedor, short for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research, the robot is the first ever sent up by Russia. Fedor blasted off in a Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft at 6:38 am Moscow time (0338 GMT) from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz is set to dock with the space station on Saturday and stay till September 7. Soyuz ships are normally manned on such trips, but on Thursday no humans are travelling in order to test a new emergency rescue system. Instead of cosmonauts, Fedor, also known as Skybot F850, was strapped into a specially adapted pilot's seat, with a small Russian flag in hand.

Calls for an outright ban on face recognition technology are growing louder, but it is already too late. Given its widespread use by tech companies and the police, permanently rolling back the technology is impossible. It was widely reported this week that the European Commission is considering a temporary ban on the use of face recognition in public spaces. The proposed hiatus of up to five years, according to a white paper obtained by news site Politico, would aim to give politicians in Europe time to develop measures to mitigate the potential risks associated with the technology. Several US cities, including San Francisco, are mulling or have enacted similar bans.

Will the proliferation of AI and machine learning reinforce the worldwide digital divide? It's one of the questions the Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) and Global Cities Talent Competitiveness Index (GCTCI) seek to answer by benchmarking the ability of countries and cities to compete for talent. An answer has historically proven elusive, but the 7th annual reports published by Insead, Adecco Group, and Google suggest it might instead provide "significant" opportunities despite the fact that AI skills are "scarce" and "unequally distributed" across nations. "AI is changing many facets of business and society and, if properly used and governed, has potential to foster sustainable development," said Katell Le Goulven, executive director of the Insead Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society. "The GTCI report argues that with multi-stakeholder cooperation the technology could help achieve some of the SDGs [the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals] such as those related to health (via personalized remote diagnosis and big data analysis to track and reduce endemic disease). But it also points to the imperative of closing the global digital skills gap to harness the potential of AI for good."