Europe

Environmentally benign methods for the industrial production of chemicals are urgently needed. LMU researchers recently described such a procedure for the synthesis of formaldehyde, and have now improved it with the aid of machine learning. Formaldehyde is one of the most important feedstocks employed in the chemical industry, and serves as the point of departure for the synthesis of many more complex chemical products. Industrial production of formaldehyde is currently based on a large-scale procedure which consumes fossil fuels and requires a high energy input. More efficient and more sustainable modes of synthesis are therefore urgently needed, which could make a significant contribution to the mitigation of climate.

Any business in its right mind should be painfully aware of how much money they could bleed via skillful Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, where fraudsters convincingly forge emails, invoices, contracts and letters to socially engineer the people who hold the purse strings. And any human in their right mind should be at least a little freaked out by how easy it now is to churn out convincing deepfake videos – including, say, of you, cast in an adult movie, or of your CEO saying things that… well, they would simply never say. Well, welcome to a hybrid version of those hoodwinks: deepfake audio, which was recently used in what's considered to be the first known case of an AI-generated voice of a CEO to bilk a UK-based energy firm out of €220,000 (USD $243,000). The Wall Street Journal reports that some time in March, the British CEO thought he had gotten a call from the CEO of his business's parent company, which is based in Germany. Whoever placed the call sounded legitimate.

During the day the EC representatives will present the details of the calls for proposals, euRobotics will provide additional information, including presentations on the existing Digital Innovation Hubs, and the proposers will have the possibility to present their project ideas or expertise to the audience, offering them an excellent networking opportunity to complement their consortium, or to join a consortium. Registration is free of charge, but mandatory to get access to the venue. Please have a look at the programme. You can also follow the event via live webstreaming. The recoding will be available after a few days.

Artificial Intelligence is now being used to detect cancer in a pioneering procedure. A new blood test uses AI to quickly scan for brain tumours with 90 per cent accuracy. Scientist hope that this new diagnostic tool could be used by the NHS and hospitals worldwide. Brain tumours are hard to detect and cause symptoms that can be confused with other maladies. These ambiguous symptoms include headaches, memory loss and vision problems, with a scan being the only way to detect the cancerous cells.

To improve evaluation efficiency, a team of researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum München and the University Hospital, LMU Munich, trained a deep neuronal network with almost 20,000 single cell images to classify them. Dr. med Karsten Spiekermann and Simone Schwarz from the Department of Medicine III, University Hospital, LMU Munich, used images which were extracted from blood smears of 100 patients suffering from the aggressive blood disease AML and 100 controls. The new AI-driven approach was then evaluated by comparing its performance with the accuracy of human experts. The result showed that the AI-driven solution is able to identify diagnostic blast cells at least as good as a trained cytologist expert. Deep learning algorithms for image processing require two things: first, an appropriate convolutional neural network architecture with hundreds of thousands of parameters; second, a sufficiently large amount of training data.

With successful adoption of AntWorks' IAP solution, businesses will stand to save millions and realise increased performance and efficiency by automating and processing business data, including unstructured data, which will make up 80% of the world's data by 2025. The partnership will help the GCC become a blueprint for the AI economy in the rest of the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, especially as governments look to diversify and drive revenue from non-oil and gas sectors. "We are deeply honored to partner with The Private Office of Sheikh Saeed bin Ahmed Al Maktoum and SEED Group expanding our reach into the Middle East," said Asheesh Mehra, AntWorks Co-Founder and Group CEO. "We see our partnership with SEED Group as an incredible opportunity to bring AntWorks' leading expertise in artificial intelligence to the GCC - helping the UAE's Ministry of AI realise its 2031 Artificial Intelligence Strategy. This is a market that thrives on innovation and has taken some of the most ambitious steps in the world in adopting the use of AI across government and business as they seek to create new economic, social, and educational opportunities for citizens. We look forward to a powerful and productive relationship that will make straight-through processing a reality across the GCC."

Slowly but surely, artificial intelligence is infiltrating almost every aspect of our lives. It is already busy in the background of many routine tasks, powering virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, recommendations from Amazon and Netflix, and underpinning billions of Google searches each day. But as the technology matures, AI's impact will become more profound, and nowhere is that more apparent than in healthcare. Healthcare's data-heavy nature makes it an ideal candidate for the application of AI across multiple disciplines, from diagnosis and pathology to drug discovery and epidemiology. At the same time, the sensitivity of medical data raises fundamental questions around privacy and security.

A Supreme Court justice has added his voice to calls for the regulation of computer algorithms handling crucial decisions about people's lives. An'expert commission' could help ensure that automated decision making processes have'a capacity for mercy', Lord Sales (Philip Sales QC), said last night. Presenting the British and Irish Legal Information Institute's Sir Henry Brooke Lecture, Lord Sales said the growing role of algorithms and artificial intelligence poses significant legal problems, in particular around the fundamental concept of agency. Existing prejudices could be embedded in hidden rules that are impossible to challenge, he said. 'AI may get to the stage where it will understand the rules of equity and how to recognise hard cases, but we are not there yet.'

The Chancellor of the High Court has urged commercial lawyers to prepare for the disruptive impact of technology on the law, the legal system and legal profession before others "steal a march" on them. Sir Geoffrey Vos said the profession needed "to turn its incredible intellectual fire-power towards the development of the English common law, so that it can effectively tackle the problems thrown up by the use of big data, cryptoassets, on-chain smart contracts, and artificial intelligence". Expressing confidence that the English common law could adapt to these challenges, he added: "My plea is that you do not leave it too late, because there are many other brilliant lawyers in other jurisdictions who are motivated to steal a march on their common law colleagues in the UK." Giving the Commercial Bar Association's annual lecture this week, Sir Geoffrey warned commercial lawyers that it was too late to hope to retire before any of this became a reality. "It is already reality," he said. Rather, he encouraged lawyers "to think imaginatively about the world in which the commercial legal services of the future will be required".

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more common in clinical practice. Increased computing power, greater volumes of data generated, and progress in machine learning promise new possibilities in clinical research and patient care. However these developments also raise certain ethical and legal questions. How will the role of doctors and patients change if AI is used in diagnostic procedures? Who is responsible for the consequences of AI-assisted processes in clinical contexts?