AI and cyber security firm Darktrace has raised $50 million in funding at a valuation of $1.65 billion. The investment is led by European private equity firm Vitruvian Partners with participation from existing investors KKR and 1011 Ventures. Darktrace uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to automatically detect cyber threats to its customers' networks. The Cambrige-headquartered business claims that its Antigena product can respond automatically to cybersecurity issues within two seconds. Its roster of customers includes eight major international airports including London Gatwick.

A new digital accelerator aims to transform the way the NHS accesses its specialists. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long since left its science fiction roots behind and has become immersed in manufacturing, supply chain, retail and business. However, one space where it is set to really make a tangible, life-saving impact is in healthcare. Already there are applications in place that are providing essential care to people in underserved or developing areas, improving patient data care and management, and transforming diagnoses and patient care. According to research undertaken by Frost & Sullivan, AI in the healthcare market is predicted to hit $6.16 billion by 2022.

Climate change has a direct impact on the agrarian societies, the frequency of natural disasters and the overall ecology of the planet. Using artificial intelligence, countries like Norway and India have made significant development in increasing their crop yields (30% increase in groundnut yields) and production of flexible and autonomous renewable energy grids and circuits. AI has also helped scientists map cyclones, atmospheric rivers, and weather fronts with 89 to 99 percent accuracy. These things were often hard to identify and predict beforehand, until now. Today, issues like water conservation, agriculture, biodiversity, and climate change are increasingly getting addressed by AI-powered terrestrial machines and geospatial satellites.

When discussing ways of ensuring European competitiveness in the age of artificial intelligence, we often talk about encouraging and incentivizing existing European companies to start utilizing artificial intelligence. This is very important challenge to tackle for Europe to remain competitive and an issue that has spurred a variety of activities in Finland as well. AI can be a significant competitive advantage for companies that adopt it early, take AI to the core of their business and commit to it. While AI can deliver great results in terms of e.g. In many sectors, small businesses can challenge large traditional companies using new types of artificial intelligence solutions. These solutions not only improve the quality of services and reduce costs but also create completely new industries and services.

There's a cognitive quirk humans have that seems deceptively elementary. For example: every morning, you see a man in his 30s walking a boisterous collie. Then one day, a white-haired lady with striking resemblance comes down the street with the same dog. Subconsciously we immediately make a series of deductions: the man and woman might be from the same household. The lady may be the man's mother, or some other close relative.

TIANJIN, CHINA – The award-winning film "Tree" offers a rare multisensory virtual reality experience of becoming a rainforest tree from a seedling in just 15 minutes. Reading a short speech into a microphone analyzes your voice and tells who you are -- your sex, height, skull type, personality and emotional state. A high-resolution video camera identifies you from 500 meters away. These computational imaging and artificial intelligence-driven technologies were all on display at the World Economic Forum's conference in Tianjin, China, last week. Some 2,500 leaders from politics, academia and a range of business sectors, including many startups, from around the world gathered in the city for the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2018 -- often dubbed the "Summer Davos" -- where they experienced these advanced technologies and discussed how those such as AI and blockchain will influence society in the coming years.

"If you want a job for the next few years, work in technology. If you want a job for life, work in cybersecurity." The field of cybersecurity will soon face some dire, but somewhat conflicting, views on the availability of qualified cybersecurity professionals over the next four or five years. Global Information Security Workforce Study from the Center for Cyber Safety and Education, predicts a shortfall of 1.8 million cybersecurity workers by 2022. The cybersecurity workforce gap will hit 1.8 million by 2022.

Training robots to do simple tasks with so-called deep learning has met with limited success, but a San Francisco startup offers a glimmer of hope for future work. Kindred, a three-year-old startup, Thursday offered up a research paper presented at the 2nd Conference on Robot Learning in Zürich, Switzerland. The thrust of the paper is that roboticists need to establish some basic benchmarks about how machine learning, and particularly deep learning, perform before real-world progress can be made. The paper doesn't prove machine learning can teach a robot to move; rather, it suggests there are ways to systematically identify the challenges to doing so, as a basis for future work. In the report, "Benchmarking Reinforcement Learning Algorithms on Real-World Robots," posted on arXiv on September 20th, the authors, A. Rupam Mahmood, Dmytro Korenkevych, Gautham Vasan, William Ma, and James Bergstra, took three commercially available robots and had them move in space to a target location.

Proponents of 5G say it will offer ultra-fast connections, speedier data downloads, and be able to handle millions more connections than 4G mobile networks can cope with today. One use for 5G is self-driving cars, but will they really need it? The telecoms industry envisions autonomous cars equipped with hundreds of sensors collecting and receiving information all at once over a network. It calls this concept "Vehicle-to-everything" (V2X). To achieve this, the car needs to detect blind spots and avoid collisions with people, animals or other vehicles on the road.

Success in fashion retail was once predicated on having an instinct for the next big thing. But in an omnichannel, social media-saturated consumer environment, human powers of divination alone – even those informed by trend forecasters – are not enough. The best fashion businesses are increasingly combining human with artificial intelligence (AI) to improve customer service, identify consumer trends, offer greater personalisation and to ensure their supply chain is as responsive as it can be. Last month, Marks & Spencer announced it was replacing switchboard staff with AI technology to increase the speed it deals with customer complaints and queries. The system recognises human speech and routes calls to relevant departments, and will be used in all 640 M&S UK stores by the end of this month, as well as its 13 UK call centres.