In order to establish the UK as an artificial intelligence (AI) "research hotspot," the government is using money from its new AI Sector Deal to fund 1,000 AI PhDs and 8,000 specialist computer science teachers by 2025. Including contributions from more than 50 tech companies and other organizations, the AI Sector Deal will be worth some £1 billion ($1.4 billion), and includes £300 million of new private sector investment, according to a Thursday press release. The investment is primarily focused on AI research. "By boosting AI skills and data driven technologies we will make sure that we continue to build a Britain that is shaping the future," Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Matt Hancock said in the press release. SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) Part of the goal is to make sure every secondary school has a qualified computer science teacher to educate students with the tech skills they'll need in the future.

Industrial technology and engine specialist Rolls-Royce has joined forces with the Alan Turing Institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute to further its industrial artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital capabilities. The first of these partnerships was revealed by Internet of Business in its coverage of the UK's £1 billion Sector Deal for AI last week, but further details have since emerged. Business secretary Greg Clark is eager to present the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), signed between Rolls-Royce and the Alan Turing Institute, as being indicative of the UK government's new AI ambitions: "Advances in science, technology, and data are changing the way we live and work. Through our modern Industrial Strategy, and its landmark AI Sector Deal, we want to ensure the UK continues to be at the heart of this growing industry, reap the economic benefits, and deliver the transformational nature of this technology to people across the country. This agreement between The Alan Turing Institute and Rolls-Royce will make a valuable contribution in this pioneering field, bringing together the best minds from both institutions to develop the innovative AI solutions of tomorrow. Building on the pioneering work of its namesake, the Alan Turing Institute is the UK's not-for-profit institute for data science. The research body was formed by some of the country's leading universities and seeks to promote data science in the'age of algorithms'. Neil Crockett, chief digital officer, Rolls-Royce, commented:"This collaboration is about delivering real-world impact from AI technologies, but on an industrial scale.

It has been an incredible few years watching artificial intelligence (AI) emerge from the world of academia to become a mainstream business practice, and even being mentioned in Teen Vogue. AI is arguably the biggest technology opportunity for the UK economy today, so it's good to see the government taking this seriously by making it a core part of its modern industrial strategy. Last Thursday, the government agreed its AI sector deal with international tech firms, which will see £1bn of investment put into the industry. The step-changes in the capacity to collect and process massive amounts of data, combined with unprecedented accessibility of scalable cloud computing power and a wave of global entrepreneurship, has unlocked the AI technology developed in the 1950s, leading to massive innovation. AI already enables me to plan traffic-free journeys, play the perfect next music track, unlock my iPhone using my face, set a timer using my voice – and soon, hopefully, drive better.

Self-driving robots could be delivering lunch to your desk by the end of this year. Starship Technologies plans to launch 1,000 bots to corporate and academic campuses in Europe and the US within the year. It could become one of the biggest autonomous delivery services in the world with armies of robots carrying out a multitude of tasks. Created by the people who founded Skype, the company has raised around $17 million (£12 million) in venture capital funding. Cute robots could be delivering lunch to your desk by the end of this year.

Its chief economist has hinted that analysis of people's music choices could be a useful tool and give a "window on their soul". In a speech about new possibilities in data analytics, Andy Haldane said data on downloads from Spotify had been used to gain an insight into people's mood. Book lists, TV choices and even computer games could also be used to gauge consumer confidence. He said: "To give one recent example, data on music downloads from Spotify has been used, in tandem with semantic search techniques applied to the words of songs, to provide an indicator of people's sentiment." He said the results did at least as well in tracking consumer spending as the well-regarded Michigan survey of consumer confidence in the US.

With machine learning models that ascribe human intuition and intelligence to digital platforms, traditional financial institutions can slash costs, reduce manpower, improve the banking experience and stay competitive. Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!Banking consumers are demanding more individualized experiences as they become increasingly accepting of new technologies. In the era where tech giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon dominate, people have become accustomed to seeing personalized offers built on data that they voluntarily provide, and now it's a common expectation. This affords banks and credit unions the opportunity to meet their customers' needs and set themselves apart. A few leading banks are doing just that -- expanding on the artificial intelligence system used by voice-powered devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple's Siri to improve service and enhance the customer experience.

Google has announced it is offering NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs for its HPC and machine learning cloud customers. But how will the company square this with its TPU cloud offering? Google's deployment of the V100 follows that of Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, who have offered this GPU in their respective clouds for some time. Amazon was the first provider to make it available to cloud customers, when it rolled out its V100 instances in October 2017. The V100 is currently NVIDIA's most advanced accelerator, offering 7.5 teraflops of double precision performance for HPC and 125 teraflops of tensor mixed precision performance for machine learning.

Synechron, a global financial services consulting and technology services provider, has today revealed the top trends it expects to see in financial services technology in 2018. These priorities touch on six key themes - Innovation, User Experience (UX) Design, Risk, Regulatory Technology (RegTech), Data, and the Cloud - that cut horizontally across the business and therefore are driving enterprise financial services decision-making. Based on Synechron's work with the world's largest global tier one investment banks and insurance companies, the company has identified the following top priorities for 2018. Innovation - will focus on taking proven new technologies from pilot to production Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to dominate in 2018. Where last year was focused on blockchain-pilots, 2018 will be focused on production.

ABU DHABI – Japan and its top trade partner in the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates, agreed on Monday to expand economic, political and defense cooperation. Tokyo and Abu Dhabi also signed an investment protection agreement, capping off a two-day visit by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the oil-rich Gulf state. Abe arrived late Sunday on the first leg of a Middle East tour that will also take him to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. In a joint statement, the two countries praised growing trade between them. They "stressed the importance of further enhancing trade, investments, and business such as renewable energy, sustainable water desalination … artificial intelligence, health care and medical equipment," the statement said.

The advancements in technology is enabling businesses across the world to better target their audiences. We live in the digital age where companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram and more, collect information which feeds and informs their algorithms, potentially advancing their knowledge of us to an almost uncomfortably intrusive extreme. When it comes to digital AI and algorithmic predictions, when do we say enough is enough? The purpose of an algorithm is to sort, predict and filter any types of information in a similar way that the human brain does. Websites across the internet are using this to their benefit, and you've probably noticed Google predicting your searches and Netflix recommending what to watch.