Europe's secret weapon in the race against the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence is … ethics. That was the message at the core of the EU's AI strategy unveiled Wednesday and developed by a team of European Commissioners under the supervision of Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip. In its "Charter on AI Ethics," the Commission wants to spell out how to preserve fundamental rights along with the rise of AI. This, the bloc believes, will boost consumer trust in European AI applications and help the Continent -- which lags far behind the U.S. and China in building a state-of-the-art AI industry -- catch up with competitors. The strategy includes a boost to the bloc's annual spending on AI research and development of about 70 percent, to around €500 million, effective immediately.

The NHS to look at options for how "tens of thousands" of staff could best be trained on robotics and artificial intelligence technologies. A review, which is to be led by US cardiologist Dr Eric Topol, will look to identify where the NHS should look to invest in AI and robotics-focused training initiatives. The process will also examine how technology is likely to affect what skills will be required in for healthcare professionals in the coming years. Topol will begin his work by visiting Moorfields Eye Hospital in east London, which is currently examining how machine-learning technology could be used to help analyse eye scans. "While it's hard to predict the future, we know artificial intelligence, digital medicine, and genomics will have an enormous impact for improving the efficiency and precision in healthcare," he said.

Artificial intelligence is finding its way into all parts of the modern-day workforce, driving huge shifts in overall capabilities and offering tremendous opportunities for early adopters. Already, companies across all lines of business are realizing the benefits in areas such as productivity, business processes, content creation, data insights, and personalized customer experiences. I see three main ways in which AI is going to enhance businesses over the next few years. Business And Workplace Transformation Let's start with AI's ability to help people in the workplace collaborate in smarter and faster ways. Likewise, AI is also helping businesses delight their customers with engaging, personalized digital experiences.

Twitter sold data to the Cambridge University researcher who harvested millions of Facebook users' private information without their consent. The social media site confirmed this week it sold public data to Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who created tools that allowed the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to psychologically profile and target voters using Facebook user data. Dr Kogan's firm GSR gathered a'random sample' of public tweets after it paid for one day of access in 2015, Twitter said - years before the recent scandal emerged. The academic insisted he had not violated Twitter's policies and the information had only been used to build'brand reports' and'survey extender tools'. However, concerns remain that GSR could theoretically have correlated Facebook and Twitter data to build up more complete digital profiles of users.

As the domestic football season starts to wrap up, all eyes are turning to the World Cup in Russia. EA, unsurprisingly, wants to celebrate the competition with a video game tie-in -- this year, however, it will be released as a free update for FIFA 18. That's in stark contrast to 2014, when EA released a dedicated game for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and a meagre Ultimate Team expansion for the PS4 and Xbox One. The 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia expansion will include all 32 teams that have qualified for the competition. That includes their players (most of which already exist as part of FIFA 18), national kits and badges.

Welcome to an academia-industry meeting day, AIMday, focused on the use of machine learning in life science and medicine. Machine learning, in which systems automatically learn complex patterns in data, and improve from experience, is becoming an essential tool in healthcare diagnosis, treatment and care, as well as in medical research. AIMday is a concept for industry interaction with academia in the form of open events. Issues and questions raised by industry are posed to researchers and academics who are engaged in relevant research. Although organized by Uppsala University, the event is open to all academics and institutions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dividing the world. Heralding the fourth industrial revolution, is AI a force for good, boosting the UK economy by 10 per cent over the coming decade as predicted by PwC, or the beginning of the end for a raft of manual and knowledge workers? Given the catchall nature of technologies apparently falling within the AI definition, it is hard to validate any predictions right now. AI is not some magic wand that will eradicate manual tasks or transform day-to-day operations – it is simply another step forward in harnessing huge data resources to better understand the business and hence drive new efficiencies. And that is where the problem lies.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's) can move over large areas, identifying damages, and also helps in surveying and rescuing. Researchers from Graz University of Technology, in Syria, Austria have something innovative to do with the drones. They want to change the way we interface with drones. HoloLens, a Microsoft's mixed reality head-mounted display, when combined with drones can create a X-ray vision, enabling us to see straight through walls, and placing the drone where one want it to be. To test the system, the researchers set up a study where participants were asked to perform the remote tasks like reading text on a monitor through the drone's camera.

Companies are working hard to figure out how to extract value from artificial intelligence (more on that below). Some promising early efforts can be found in sales, an activity that generates lots of usable data that lends itself to analysis. The sales team at Snowflake Computing Inc. employs an automated, AI-powered chatbot designed to engage with potential buyers by email or text. Each assistant, developed by Conversica, speaks six languages and works around the clock engaging with prospects and turning over the most advanced leads to humans, CIO Journal's Angus Loten reports. Collective (i) use AI to help sales managers assess the odds a deal will produce results.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. In an interview last year, Treasury Secretary Steven Munchin told Axios that job automation was "not even on our radar screen," citing that the risk was still "50-100 more years away." But even if an employment apocalypse doesn't come to pass, fear of an automated future may be making Americans sicker today, according to a study published recently in the journal of Social Science and Medicine that shows a correlation between automation risk and worsened physical and mental health at the county level. The researchers, who are from Ball State University and Villanova University, used a regression analysis of county-level data about health and the share of total jobs at risk of automation. They calculated the second data set by matching county-level employment data with the risk levels calculated in a frequently cited 2013 Oxford University study that suggested almost 50 percent of jobs could be at risk of automation by 2033.