Altada Technology Solutions, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions supporting improved data-driven decision making in the asset management community, is expanding on a global basis with the addition of a London office. Through 2021, the company has added offices in New York, San Francisco, Malta, Dublin and Barcelona. Altada was founded in 2018 in Cork, Ireland with a view to ensuring the ethical and responsible use of AI. Its financial services solutions cover investment and portfolio management, and are built on technology that allows firms to analyse key variables in a fast and accurate way, and provide sentiment and valuation analyses that help decision makers efficiently allocate investments. Altada's London office, its first in the UK, is a step in its business growth strategy.

A group of anonymous Walmart workers have raised concerns about the anti-shoplifting technology used to monitor the company's self-checkout kiosks. A group that calls themselves'Concerned Home Office Associates' has circulated a video documenting the system's flaws, including frequent failures to identify unscanned items, and incorrectly identifying personal items potentially shoplifted. In an email sent to company management at Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, the group claims to be'past their breaking point,' saying the system's frequent false positives are irritating customers and putting workers at greater risk of COVID-19 exposure by unnecessarily having to verify customer's purchases at unsafe distances. An anonymous group of Walmart employees have raised concerns about anti-theft technology used at self-checkout kiosks, saying it's'a fake AI that just pretends to safeguard' 'It's like a noisy tech, a fake AI that just pretends to safeguard,' one of the Walmart employees, who asked to remain anonymous, told Wired. The system was originally designed by Everseen--an artificial intelligence and technology firm based in Cork, Ireland--and relies on overhead cameras, or'digital eyes,' that film customers as they scan objects into the register.

In January, my coworker received a peculiar email. The message, which she forwarded to me, was from a handful of corporate Walmart employees calling themselves the "Concerned Home Office Associates." While it's not unusual for journalists to receive anonymous tips, they don't usually come with their own slickly produced videos. The employees said they were "past their breaking point," with Everseen, a small artificial intelligence firm based in Cork, Ireland, whose technology Walmart began using in 2017. Walmart uses Everseen in thousands of stores to prevent shoplifting at registers and self-checkout kiosks.

Artificial Intelligence and related fields like deep learning and machine learning have come to dominate discussions about where our society is headed, with debate often polarised between declaring AI to be the savior of society or its potential downfall. The truth lies somewhere in the middle: AI won't destroy our civilization, but we can't cede responsibility for saving it to AI, either. In any case, AI-related technologies are versatile and powerful and can provide the basis for change in our world. We caught up with some leading experts in the field to ask them for their view on the future of AI. Prof. Barry O'Sullivan is Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Computer Science, at University College Cork, Ireland.

WAVTEQ, the economic development business attraction consulting group, has secured support from InterTradeIreland(ITI) to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) team. The new AI division will commence R&D activity into a fully automated corporate intelligence research platform. ITI funding will provide additional employment in the fields of artificial intelligence and data analytics, with new appointments to WAVTEQ's dedicated software engineering team, based in Cork, Ireland, expected within the next two months. In February 2018, this expanded team will move into a new state of the art facility at Fota Business Park, Cork.

Denis is Lead Technologist for IoT with Johnson Controls Innovation Group based in Cork, Ireland. His current role means collaborating extensively between technical and sales teams to drive further commercialisation opportunity through technology (both our own and partners/startups) into our sales channels, specifically looking at the emerging Smart Building market. The projects include our existing technologies – Building Security, Retail, HVAC and Building Energy - and emerging technologies such as IoT, AR and Machine Learning, then taking key input from numerous stakeholders and processes to deliver ROI for customers and partners from these solutions. Denis speaks on the national and international circuit for Johnson Controls at numerous technology conferences. Denis held a position of Principal Data Architect with EMC from 2010 to 2015, spending 2011 in Silicon Valley.

New artificial intelligence software designed to spot new child sexual abuse media online could help police catch child abusers. The toolkit, described in a paper published in Digital Investigation, automatically detects new child sexual abuse photos and videos in online peer-to-peer networks. The research behind this technology was conducted in the international research project iCOP - Identifying and Catching Originators in P2P Networks - founded by the European Commission Safer Internet Program by researchers at Lancaster University, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and University College Cork, Ireland. There are hundreds of searches for child abuse images every second worldwide, resulting in hundreds of thousands of child sexual abuse images and videos being shared every year. The people who produce child sexual abuse media are often abusers themselves - the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children found that 16 percent of the people who possess such media had directly and physically abused children.

This painting appears in Angela Gilmour's "Boolean Logic" series, which went on display in Cork, Ireland, last fall. Long before the smartwatch or Google search, there was George Boole. Born in 1815 in the U.K., the mathematician invented a system of logic distilling complicated actions into simpler values -- "true" or "false," "on" or "off" -- thereby inventing the foundations of the digital age. This system, dubbed "Boolean logic" after the mathematician, was used in the development of the first electrical circuits, the parent technology to computers. Artist Angela Gilmour, who is based in Ireland, saw these principles up close while working as a process and product development engineer in the computer manufacturing industry.