France and Canada share a same awareness of the potential of artificial intelligence and the revolution that it could generate in our everyday usages, our relationship with work and our societies. That is why France and Canada would like to build joint capacity to understand and anticipate these impacts establishing global expertise at a very high level. The international study group mentioned in this statement will assess and organize joint debate on scientific developments in a fully independent manner so as to promote trust in these technologies.

This week we saw a huge milestone with China beating Amazon to successfully establish fully commercialized drone delivery, a new type of online to offline buying experience combining China's Spotify with retail, and artificial intelligence (AI) predicting which roads will flood in advance in order to reduce traffic congestion. China is pushing the boundaries of technological advancement faster than any country on Earth and This Week In China Tech is the place to stay on top of the news that you won't find in the Western media. Aerial photo taken on May 10, 2018 shows a drone carried with parcels, taking off from a branch post office in Weicheng Township, Qingzhen City of southwest China's Guizhou Province. You probably remember how Amazon captured the consumer imagination when they announced their concept for delivery drones at the end of 2016, but they never really materialized. Chinese retailers have now delivered fully operational drone delivery systems, confirming 17 authorized routes last week (article in Chinese).

As many as 42% of pediatric clinical trials end up in failure and inconclusive results. "That means we don't know one way or the other if a drug works or not," says Aparito founder Elin Haf Davies. This isn't just a problem for the big pharma companies who are spending billions of dollars developing successful studies. It's a problem for you, the patient, who pays a mark up on medication to cover these costs--and for taxpayers supporting healthcare services like the NHS. "Society as a whole is losing out," notes Davies, a former research nurse for medical institutions like London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Last week news came out how London was the tech capital of Europe when it comes to venture capital investments, outpacing the likes of Paris, Berlin and Stockholm by a large margin. Today we have a different report, but in the same vein – London is the AI capital of Europe. The Mayor of London, Saniq Khan, commissioned a report on the state of AI companies in the UK's capital and the results show that London is home to double the number of AI companies, compared to Paris and Berlin – combined. According to the report, there are exactly 758 AI companies in London. Roughly 650 companies are headquartered in London.

Researchers at a British university are working on an artificial intelligence (AI) engine that can diagnose illness simply by smelling the breath of a person. Andrea Soltoggio, a member of the data science team at Loughborough University, said the engine is being taught how to identify a range of illness-revealing substances that humans might exhale. "Compared to that of animals, the human sense of smell is far less developed and certainly not used to carry out daily activities. For this reason, humans aren't particularly aware of the richness of information that can be transmitted through the air, and can be perceived by a highly sensitive olfactory system. AI may be about to change that," Soltoggio wrote in an article for online publication Smithsonian.com.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai believes artificial intelligence could have "more profound" implications for humanity than electricity or fire, according to recent comments. Pichai also warned that the development of artificial intelligence could pose as much risk as that of fire if its potential is not harnessed correctly. Pichai went on to warn of the potential dangers associated with developing advanced AI, saying that developers need to learn to harness its benefits in the same way humans did with fire. Google has invested heavily in artificial intelligence research, having acquired the London-based startup DeepMind for £300 million in 2014. DeepMind is often cited by AI experts and academics as the leading pioneer in AI research for its work in developing an algorithm capable of beating human champions at the ancient board game Go, as well as its work with the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK.

It's already been about a week and the SDS organising committee members are still feeling the exhaustion that stays after the completion of a grand event. What had started as a half day workshop in 2014 with less than a hundred participants and born out of the Datalab in InIT ZHAW, is now a day conference gathering around 400 people. The conference has been a flagship event of the Swiss Alliance for Data-Intensive Services (Data Service Alliance), a Switzerland wide network of Data and Service scientists and professionals, for the past 2 years with a strive to get bigger and better each year in terms of content and participation. The main conference was held on the 7th and we had a pre-conference event on Deep Learning co-organized by Fernfachhochschule (FFHS) the day before. There were 3 talks followed by an apero and thereafter the Data Service Alliance General Assembly.

Collaborative robots that work alongside humans -- "cobots" -- are getting cheaper and easier to program. That is encouraging businesses to put them to work at new tasks in bars, restaurants and clinics. In the Netherlands, a cobot scales a 26-foot-high bar to tap bottles of homemade gin, whiskey and limoncello so that bartenders don't need to climb ladders. In Singapore, robots give soft-tissue massages. Cobots made up just 5% of the $14 billion industrial-robot market in 2017, according to research by Minneapolis-based venture-capital firm Loup Ventures.

If you fancy a flutter on the World Cup, you may want to put your money on Brazil. According to more than a million simulations of the tournament, the five-time winners are the favourites to lift the coveted trophy on July 15th. The study, from experts at Goldman Sachs, also predicts England will make it to the quarterfinal stage where they will be knocked out by Germany. The financial firm made the predictions after feeding an AI data on team strategy, the strengths and weaknesses of individual players, and recent team results. Brazil are set to be crowned this year's Fifa World Cup winners, according to a prediction driven by more than one million simulations of the tournament.

So this year's E3, currently underway in Los Angeles, has been good news for gamers but terrible news for a wide variety of fictional planet Earths. In game after game at the big Microsoft and Sony press conferences, developers showed off crumbling cities, violent hordes of survivors in various states of physical and mental decline, and lots of nigh-indistinguishable gunplay. To help you tell one post-apocalyptic wasteland from another, we've sorted the trailers based on which horseman seems most responsible. Nothing says "apocalypse" like "global thermonuclear warfare," so it's no surprise that mushroom clouds play a big role in several of these upcoming games. Fallout 76's new trailer gets pride-of-place for showing a doomed soldier take it all in before the blast wave knocks him or her to the ground for what looks like a pretty slow and painful death, as deaths caused by nuclear weapons go: Fallout 76 turns out to be an online multiplayer game rather than the single-player adventures that have characterized the Fallout series so far.