Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a strategic imperative with various nations announcing centralized plans and initiatives to remain globally competitive. Automation is on the rise due to recent breakthroughs in deep learning, the availability of big data, decentralized computing via the cloud, and improved AI algorithms. "For governments, there is an urgent need to support both firms and citizens to ensure that they benefit from the AI-powered digital economy. This means preparing workers for rapidly changing job requirements, facilitating AI investment and adoption, and solving for broad-based, productivity-driven economic growth." Globally the most active AI hubs are in Silicon Valley, New York, Beijing, Boston, London, and Shenzhen [1].

The rise of the gaming console has left its mark on living rooms and bedrooms around Britain – but it has also hit the high street. There were around 1,000 amusement arcades in the UK in the 1980s, but that number had halved by 2011, according to the amusements industry trade body, Bacta. Now, the next generation of gaming – virtual reality – is once again making the arcade the prime venue for playing cutting-edge games. Back at the inception of gaming, fans went to video-game arcades. Japanese coin-operated games like Out Run and Street Fighter managed to draw in players once Pac-Man and Donkey Kong fell away, but they could not beat increasingly impressive home consoles such as Sony's PlayStation, which came along in the mid-90s, and Microsoft's Xbox at the turn of the century.

With plans for brand new megacities, allowing women to drive and foreign-run cinemas, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is on a charm offensive trying to promote his country as an international investment destination. The strategy aims at luring foreign money to help the world's biggest oil exporter create a new economy away from oil dependency in order to prevent future instability. On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Riyadh's break-even oil price for 2018 is likely to be around $88 a barrel. North Sea Brent is currently trading down around $74 a barrel. And although the oil price is up considerably from 2014, the director of the IMF's Middle East department Jihad Azour said the focus in Saudi needs to remain on economic and social reforms.

Over 250 people gathered at the City Hall in Cork yesterday for the 7th instalment of the it@Cork Tech Summit 2018, which welcomed tech gurus from the US, UK, Germany and further afield, along with some of Ireland's indigenous foremost tech thought leaders. A broad array of topics were discussed at the event, from the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on healthcare, to the tech industry's responsibility to make social media as safe a space as possible for children. AI is not new but the exponential rise in computer processing power is making the impossible possible. The Summit explored how these technologies, along with crypto currencies, can reduce business costs, elevate success and finance business in new and exciting ways. Attendees at this year's event got the opportunity to meet a live cyborg to see first-hand how humans can be augmented by biohacking with the next generation of embedded sensors and non-medical implants.

You made it to right here, Saturday morning. This week, Nintendo faced a patent infringement investigation over its Switch, Sprint and T-Mobile announce they're together, and the notch rears its ugly head again. All it takes to get your stolen pooch back is an email to a CEO. Apparently, all you need to do to get a hold of Jeff Bezos though is have your puppy stolen by a delivery driver and guess the CEO's email address, according to CNBC. After UK resident Richard Guttfield's black miniature schnauzer was nicked following a dog food delivery, Amazon tracked the driver, an independent contractor, and found the dog at the thief's home.

Webstresser.org, a popular DDoS-for-Hire website service on Wednesday was taken down by authorities from the US, UK, Netherlands, and various other countries in a major international investigation and arrests have been made. The website is blamed for more than four million cyber attacks globally in the past three years and had over 134,000 registered users at the time of the takedown. The operation, dubbed "Operation Power OFF," targeted Webstresser.org, It involved law enforcement agencies from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Serbia, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia, Hongkong, Canada, and United States of America, coordinating with Europol. The domain name was seized by the US Department of Defence.

Mastery of the productivity applications broadly used in business. Microsoft Imagine Academy curricula is organised along learning paths that guide students and educators to earning industry-recognised certifications and skills needed for jobs of tomorrow.

Euronews reporter Paul Hackett travelled to Stockholm to investigate the opportunities for business. He met Dr Daniel Gillblad, a senior researcher and director of the Decisions, Networks and Analytics laboratory at RISE SICS. "It's really, really enormous," Dr Gillblad said. "Right now, Artificial Intelligence can be used to automate business processes, production processes and build smart services. In the long run, the power is going to be absolutely transformative. It's going to change the way we do business."

At Sentiance, we developed a platform that takes in smartphone sensor data such as accelerometer, gyroscope and location information, and extracts behavioral insights. Our AI platform learns about the user's patterns and is able to predict and explain why and when things happen, allowing our customers to coach their users and engage with them in the right way, at the right time. An important component of our platform is the venue mapping algorithm. The goal of the venue mapper is to figure out what venue you are visiting, given an often inaccurate location measurement coming from the smartphone's location subsystem. Figure 1: Left: Venue mapping means estimating which of the neighboring venues a user was actually visiting. Right: Human intuition helps us to quickly discard unlikely venues, such as the lifeguard station when a user is visiting the beach. Although venue mapping is a difficult problem altogether and will be material for a future blog post, a simple sense of human intuition based on the surrounding geography of the area often goes a long way.

Legal AI doc review company, Luminance, is branching out into the regulatory world in order to expand its offering by covering areas such as Brexit impact on contracts and GDPR compliance. The move follows a recent expansion into real estate documentation review, showing the company's initial strategy of focusing only on M&A due diligence is well and truly over, with a mission now to capture a greater share of the NLP-driven doc review market across different practice areas. In other news, the firm has also bagged top New Zealand law firm, Russell McVeagh, as its client base widens to 75 around the world, and operating in 23 countries, which is not bad considering the company only launched in September 2016. Luminance already works with Chapman Tripp, New Zealand's largest full-service commercial law firm. How much each of these firms uses their Luminance review system is currently unknown, but if market feedback is accurate then not all customers are making maximum use of the AI system they have signed up to – at least not yet.