The public sector should use targeted procurement to boost the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in the UK, according to Lords. In a report, the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence said the UK was "in a strong position to be among the world leaders in the development of artificial intelligence" and the technology, if "handled carefully", could solve complex problems and improve productivity. In evidence, the committee was told the use of AI across government departments and the public sector could save an estimated £4bn a year and "enable more informed policy decisions". The report said the government's annual spend of £45bn on goods and services gave it "immense power in encouraging the adoption of new behaviours and practices in its supply chains". The report said Brexit provided an opportunity to alter EU public procurement rules "to ensure that these rules and thresholds benefit businesses in the UK, in particular when it comes to public sector procurement and the stimulation of a fertile AI development sector, as long as it is still a competitive process".

The public sector should use targeted procurement to boost the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in the UK, according to Lords. In a report, the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence said the UK was "in a strong position to be among the world leaders in the development of artificial intelligence" and the technology, if "handled carefully", could solve complex problems and improve productivity. In evidence, the committee was told the use of AI across government departments and the public sector could save an estimated £4bn a year and "enable more informed policy decisions". The report said the government's annual spend of £45bn on goods and services gave it "immense power in encouraging the adoption of new behaviours and practices in its supply chains". The report said Brexit provided an opportunity to alter EU public procurement rules "to ensure that these rules and thresholds benefit businesses in the UK, in particular when it comes to public sector procurement and the stimulation of a fertile AI development sector, as long as it is still a competitive process".

As the emergence of AI grows stronger, many have begun to conflate this technology with the previous wave of automation that has gone before it. Chris Boos, CEO and founder of Arago refutes this stance, and explains how publishers and other businesses are already practically applying artificial intelligence to their brands. Chris Boos is featured prominently on the homepage of the Arago website, along with an immediate introduction to his own personal mission statement: 'empowering human potential, freeing up time for creativity and innovative thinking through artificial intelligence (AI).' It's a notably human-focussed shop window for the now 23 year old German company, which specialises in helping clients to leverage artificial intelligence to reinvent their business models for the digital age. One anecdote Boos tells us is around the computer game Civilisation, where the turn-based strategy has been used to facilitate greater machine learning within an investment fund. As he talks about the ability of games to educate both children and adults, it's clear that Boos is taking a'ground up' approach to building digital intelligence.

With Edinburgh and Stirling universities making massive strides in machine learning and producing highly qualified data scientists, Scotland is well placed to lead in this field, and meet demand even in the face of the skills shortage affecting much of the UK. The biggest takeaway from the second ScotML night's event is that machine learning in Scotland will play a huge role in all of our lives. Sometimes confused with Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning is a related model based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention. Though the term is nothing new, originating in the late 1950s, it has now become a major buzzword. The main reason for this, because it is applicable in almost every industry imaginable.

"Our work was meant as a demonstration project to show how disease registries could be leveraged to yield the same sorts of insights about personalizing the longitudinal sequence of treatments as one might get from a prospective, multistage randomized trial," Krakow said in emailed comments about the work, which was based on the transplant complication known as graft-vs.-host When a cancer patient has a complex medical history, a little-studied disease and many potential treatment options, published guidelines and studies rarely indicate one clear treatment choice. So in everyday clinical practice, physicians recommend treatments to their patients based on an amalgam of published and anecdotal evidence, and patient-specific characteristics and preferences. Then, they adjust treatment as needed as time goes on. In what Krakow calls "algorithm-informed treatment," a computer would generate a treatment recommendation for a specific time point in an individual patient's therapeutic course.

Here is the fresh list of 10 startups in artificial intelligence and machine learning that are leading the race in the year 2018. These startups come from different backgrounds, such as providing AI services to healthcare, banking, fintech, diagnostics and HR, among others. Over the years startups have been striving to bring unique propositions into the market, and the developments listed by these companies prove it. While there are over 300 startups in the space in India alone, we have picked up these 10 names for this year's list. These startups are about two to three years old and have shown significant development over the years and are likely to do so in the year 2018.

When it comes to making predictions about technology it's easy to end up looking daft. Take Thomas Watson, who was chairman of IBM in 1943 when he boldly claimed: "There's a world market for maybe five computers." Some 75 years later, it's fair to say his forecast was a little out. Or how about the president of the Michigan Savings Bank, who advised his clients not to invest in the Ford Motor Company, saying: "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty -- a fad." My favourite example is an engineer called Robert Metcalfe who grabbed headlines worldwide in the mid-Nineties for predicting that the internet would "catastrophically collapse" in 1996.

Facebook has started asking European and Canadian users to let it use facial recognition technology to identify them in photos and videos. Facebook originally began face-matching users outside Canada in 2011, but stopped doing so for EU citizens the following year after protests from regulators and privacy campaigners. The new request is one of several opt-in permissions being rolled out in advance of a new data privacy law. The move is likely to be controversial. The company is currently embroiled in a privacy scandal related to the use of its members' personal information by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

A group of computer scientists have built a machine learning algorithm that can sniff out fake profiles lurking on social networks. It's likely that you and your Facebook friends have the same mutual friends. And on Twitter, it's also probable that your followers also follow the same people you do too due to common interests. These associations in social networks can be modeled on a graph as edges, where users are the vertices or nodes. The researchers from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and the University of Washington, United States, hunted for fake social media accounts by developing an unsupervised learning algorithm that measures the probability of an edge existing between vertices.

A US online retailer has been reprimanded for promoting an explicit ad for a penis extender strap within video games played by children. UK watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said that Wish.com had behaved "irresponsibly" and must ensure its adverts were properly targeted at appropriate age groups in the future. It marks the third time in five months that the San Francisco-based firm has been found to have breached the rules. In each case it has failed to respond. The powers the ASA has to punish offenders are limited, but it told the BBC it would "continue to apply pressure on Wish.com The latest ruling concerns an advert that appeared on 26 November.