The European Union must take a more robust position in defence of free trade. A shift has occurred in the trade policy of the United States and protectionism is on the rise worldwide. This transformed situation allows greater room for the European Union and permits it an enhanced role in international trade and in influencing the future direction of trade. On Wednesday the European Commission published its Reflection Paper on Globalisation. In Finland, exports play a key role as a growth driver and an engine for the country's economy.

A new study releases this week by UK-based Juniper Research supports our prediction that chatbots will redefine the customer service industry, with healthcare and banking industries expected to benefit the most. The new report titled "Chatbots: Retail, eCommerce, Banking & Healthcare 2017-2022," estimates that chatbots will help businesses save more than $8 billion per year by 2022, which is a huge increase from the $20 million estimated for this year. Call centers and customer service departments should already be investing in these new conversational technologies if they want to stay competitive and cost-effective as companies across industries grow their investment in building chatbots to help service customers faster, across any channel, device or platform, 24 7. Advancements in technology continue to transform customer service interactions. From improvements in loyalty and brand reputation to new revenue streams, the pathway to real-time self-service in customer service brings huge opportunities to forward-thinking businesses. Juniper also forecasts that the success rate of bot interactions in healthcare sector, completed without the assistance of a human agent, will increase from the current 12% to over 75% in 2022.

Artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and big data are fuelling venture capital (VC) investment into London's technology sector, according to research from the founders of London Tech Week. Analysis of VC flows into the capital's tech sector found that AI and machine learning have proved particularly attractive, securing £85.75m in 2016 – 20 times the £3m raised in 2011. The sectors have collectively attracted £207m in VC funding over the last five years, with companies such as Deep Mind and Magic Pony leading the charge. Meanwhile, after raising just £40,000 in 2014 and £70,000 in 2015, more than £14m was ploughed into London companies developing robotics and drone technology last year. However, financial technology (fintech) has attracted more funding that any other tech sub-sector, amounting to £2bn in VC investment over the last five years.

Language in social media is extremely dynamic: new words emerge, trend and disappear, while the meaning of existing words can fluctuate over time. This work addresses several important tasks of visualizing and predicting short term text representation shift, i.e. the change in a word's contextual semantics. We study the relationship between short-term concept drift and representation shift on a large social media corpus — VKontakte collected during the Russia-Ukraine crisis in 2014 — 2015. We visualize short-term representation shift for example keywords and build predictive models to forecast short-term shifts in meaning from previous meaning as well as from concept drift. We show that short-term representation shift can be accurately predicted up to several weeks in advance and that visualization provides insight into meaning change. Our approach can be used to explore and characterize specific aspects of the streaming corpus during crisis events and potentially improve other downstream classification tasks including real-time event forecasting in social media.

Researchers are training artificial intelligence to identify tuberculosis on chest X-rays, an initiative that could help screening and evaluation efforts in TB-prevalent areas lacking access to radiologists. The findings are part of a study published online in the journal Radiology. "An artificial intelligence solution that could interpret radiographs for the presence of TB in a cost-effective way could expand the reach of early identification and treatment in developing nations," study co-author Paras Lakhani, MD, from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, wrote in the journal. For the study, Lakhani and his colleague, Baskaran Sundaram, MD, obtained 1,007 X-rays of patients with and without active TB. The cases consisted of multiple chest X-ray datasets from the National Institutes of Health, the Belarus Tuberculosis Portal, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

UK police are trialling a computer system that can piece together what might have happened at a crime scene. The idea is that the system, called VALCRI, will be able to do the laborious parts of a crime analyst's job in seconds, freeing them to focus on the case, while also provoking new lines of enquiry and possible narratives that may have been missed. "Everyone thinks policing is about connecting the dots, but that's the easy bit," says William Wong, who leads the project at Middlesex University London. "The hard part is working out which dots need to be connected." VALCRI's main job is to help generate plausible ideas about how, when and why a crime was committed as well as who did it.

The AI will help custody sergeants decide whether suspects should be sent into the criminal justice system. It has been called the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART) and will be launched within the next three months, Durham police told Sky News. It will classify the suspects as either low, medium, or high risk of reoffending, contributing to whether they are released or remanded in custody. A scientific randomised trial of the forecasts found that only 2% of low-risk suspects turned out to be at high-risk of reoffending. However, it also found that 12% of those forecast as high risk turned out to be low risk.

When asked, which businesses are most likely to benefit from artificial intelligence, UK consumers agreed the top three industries to be benefiting are engineering (45%), administration (40%) and customer service (31%.) Finance (29%), sales (26%) and marketing (22%) followed closely behind; each deemed'admin heavy' and therefore apt to benefit from automation. Project management and human resources close the list, with 20% and 16% respectively.

One of the major benefits of our self-driving future is just how much more gosh-darn productive we're all going to be. Instead of wasting brain power driving our cars to work, we'll sit back and let the ride do it for us. Suddenly, that time can be harnessed for our leisure or, more likely, to cram even more work into our days. But what will happen to all the people like me, who get sick at the thought of sitting in a car? I'm not much of a car guy, because when I think about cars, my overriding memory is vomiting on the side of the highway.

Paris, France, 2 May, 2017 – We are on the threshold of an extraordinary development that makes the automation heart beat faster. Recent announcements by both Facebook and tech pioneer Elon Musk to build brain interfaces are great examples. But together with the expanding possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), emotions run higher and higher. A new report from SogetiLabs'The Frankenstein Factor: the Anatomy of Fear of AI' recommends taking these emotions seriously and pleads for a therapeutic approach. A focus on IT efficiency and effectiveness should be accompanied by a focus on human existence.