Between 2013 and 2016, U.S. farmers and ranchers weathered a 45% dip in net farm income -- the largest since the Great Depression -- while the number of mouths to feed grew sharply by the day. The global population is expected to increase by 2.2 billion by 2050, and the world's farmers will have to grow about 70% more food than is now produced. If you ask Microsoft, the solution lies in technology. The tech giant's FarmBeats program, which launched in preview today on Azure Marketplace ahead of Ignite 2019, is a multi-year effort to bring robust data analytics to the agriculture sector. With a backend built on Azure and compatibility with hardware from a range of top manufacturers, it aims to promote what Ranveer Chandra, FarmBeats project lead and chief scientist at Azure Global, calls "data-driven" farming techniques. The International Food Policy Research Institute claims these can boost farm productivity by as much as 67% while reducing resource usage.

This is the fourth in a series of articles I am writing about Māori ethics with AI, Data sovereignty and Robotics. Article 3: Māori Ethical considerations with Artificial Intelligence Systems; Article 2: Māori ethics associated with AI systems architecture and Article 1: Māori cultural considerations with Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. The next planned articles are"Indigenising the Internet" and "Tikanga and Facial Recognition". At the conclusion of this article, are the English, Māori and a Translation into English of the Māori version of te Treaty of Waitangi. There is an international debate about whether we regulate Artificial Intelligence (AI) or assume that AI systems developments will be the better of the wider community.

Four years ago, I stood in the darkened operations center in front of a wall of blinking screens, arms crossed and squinting at video footage on one of them. The commander asked me for the second time, signaling toward the figure on the screen. I looked over and reviewed a mental checklist of the individual's pattern of life over more than a decade. I weighed this against his latest movements, reflected on the screen in real time. The commander took a step toward me and started again, "Kara. We are running out of time. I had a decision to make. Using a machine to determine the validity of the target and take action is a nonstarter. But not everyone agrees on the details. Though the machines I dealt with that day were only semi-autonomous, it is not difficult to imagine a world where fully autonomous weapons are programmed to make a lethal decision. Institutions, countries, industry, and society must choose when and how to govern this technology in today's world, where semi-autonomous ...

Back in October 2017, publication of the Hall & Pesenti review, Growing the Artificial Intelligence Industry in the UK, caused something of a stir – if subsequent actions are anything to go by. Seven months after the independent, government commissioned study hit ministers' desks, the AI Sector Deal was announced. Trumpeted as a £1 billion Whitehall vote of confidence in the industry – which has deep, historic roots in the UK – closer examination revealed it to be a more conservative £300 million of public funds backed by a promise of £700 million from industrial and academic partnerships. It still provided a welcome boost to the country's ambitions, even if the announcement itself was fumbled by the mandarins of SW1. At a Westminster eForum event in February 2018, the Deal was trailed for publication in early March. However, policymakers sat on it until May, when it finally emerged days after the EU had published its own AI strategy to the tune of €20 billion – a pointless and frustrating own goal for the UK.

We introduce the use of a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for influenza prediction at the state- and city-level in the US, and experiment with the inclusion of real-time flu-related Internet search data. We find that a GRU has lower prediction error than current state-of-the-art methods for data-driven influenza prediction at time horizons of over two weeks. In contrast with other machine learning approaches, the inclusion of real-time Internet search data does not improve GRU predictions.

The chief executive of technology giant IBM has urged Australian business leaders to plan for dramatic changes to their organisations and the workforce caused by artificial intelligence and advances in quantum computing. Ginni Rometty, who has run the $US120 billion company since 2012 and is in Australia to sign an AI deal with Woodside Petroleum and attend other customer meetings, said business leaders must change their approach to hiring or risk being left behind. Ms Rometty gave a keynote address at a cloud computing conference in Sydney on Tuesday, alongside Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman who told the event he expects AI technology to slice maintenance costs in its plants by 30 per cent a year - or around $300 million. Mr Coleman said this is one of several applications being developed with IBM that also include automating production and improving cybersecurity. Westpac Banking Corp chief executive Brian Hartzer also spoke at the event.

Woodside and IBM will work together to re-imagine the way work is done using next-generation technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing to help Woodside realize its vision of an "intelligent plant." Announced today at IBM's Cloud Innovation Exchange in Sydney by Woodside CEO Peter Coleman and IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty, the collaboration will include Woodside becoming a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which is a collaborative industrial-academic laboratory focused on advancing fundamental AI research. Woodside will also join the IBM Q Network, making it the first commercial organization in Australia to join IBM's quantum computing network. Woodside and IBM will use quantum computing to conduct deep computational simulations across the value chain of Woodside's business. During the past five years Woodside and IBM have worked together to implement cognitive solutions, enabling advances in health and safety, planning and operations, and project engineering.

Today's IT teams are dealing with a growing mountain of data. What's more, they're finding themselves having to use a multitude of tools in order to monitor and manage that data. In situations of technical outages, this can make it incredibly difficult and time-intensive to identify and resolve underlying issues. Anyone in business knows that even just a tiny amount of down-time can have a serious and costly impact on the bottom line. And it's the IT team that bears the brunt of the burden.

Cisco recently announced how its three most recent acquisitions will add value to its Cisco Contact Center help desk solution that's currently used by more than three million agents in over 30,000 enterprises. The announcement was made at the 10th annual Cisco Contact Center Summit on September 19, 2019, in Hollywood, Florida, which was attended by 1,100 Cisco salespersons, partners, and customers. Cisco's Contact Center is an integrated communications application suite that delivers intelligent call routing, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multi-channel contact management to contact center agents over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Cisco has been enhancing the capabilities of its contact center offerings by acquiring various products over the past year or so, and integrating those offerings' features and functionalities to its feature stack. Beginning in May 2018, Cisco finished its acquisition of business intelligence (BI) specialist Accompany.

New technological advancements are shortening the way of life span of prevailing tech. Hence, there's a continuous demand for workers to stay up to date. It has become essential to survival in the industry. New upcoming technologies are making tech systems faster, agile and superior. Which technologies are going to be the movers and shakers on the world of tech in 2020?