This article was written by Kwon Sok Oh, a Financial Analyst at I Know First. Israel currently has over 7000 thousand startups, living up to its reputation as the "startup nation." Israel is considered the most venture capital intense country, with the highest investment funds per capita in the world. Israel's unique combination of innovative and entrepreneurial mentality, technology-oriented ecosystem, government support, and international investment has driven the proliferation of the startup environment. Over 350 multinational companies, including technology giants, such as Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Samsung, and global financial institutions, such as JP Morgan, Citibank, and Barclays, have established R&D Centers in Israel to take advantage of the advent of novel startups and innovative technologies that solve existing problems.

BEIJING (CHINA DAILY/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - China may be ranked seventh globally when it comes to the number of professionals working in the cutting-edge industry of artificial intelligence (AI), but the country is predicted to climb the rankings in the next decade. More than 50,000 AI technical professionals are working in China. India, Britain, Canada, Australia and France took second to sixth place in the rankings, according to the report based on LinkedIn user data. "The core technique of AI is closely related to computer science, in which the US has maintained an absolute advantage in the past 20 years," said LinkedIn China's vice-president Wang Di. Researcher Li Hui at the Shanghai Institute for Science of Science said that AI talent in the US is mainly concentrated in such primary technical fields as chips, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision and imaging, and far surpasses its Chinese counterparts in numbers. The LinkedIn report found that about one in six employees in the field in the US were born before 1970, compared with only one in 25 in China.

Top Pentagon official Michael Griffin sat down a few weeks ago with Air Force scientists at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to discuss the future of quantum computing in the U.S. military. Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has listed quantum computers and related applications among the Pentagon's must-do R&D investments. Quantum computing is one area where the Pentagon worries that it is playing catchup while China continues to leap ahead. The technology is being developed for many civilian applications and the military sees it as potentially game-changing for information and space warfare. The U.S. Air Force particularly is focused on on what is known as quantum information science.

The benefits of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are widely acknowledged, but there are concerns about the extent of these benefits and AV risks and unintended consequences. In this article, we first examine AVs and different categories of the technological risks associated with them. We then explore strategies that can be adopted to address these risks, and explore emerging responses by governments for addressing AV risks. Our analyses reveal that, thus far, governments have in most instances avoided stringent measures in order to promote AV developments and the majority of responses are non-binding and focus on creating councils or working groups to better explore AV implications. The US has been active in introducing legislations to address issues related to privacy and cybersecurity. The UK and Germany, in particular, have enacted laws to address liability issues; other countries mostly acknowledge these issues, but have yet to implement specific strategies. To address privacy and cybersecurity risks strategies ranging from introduction or amendment of non-AV specific legislation to creating working groups have been adopted. Much less attention has been paid to issues such as environmental and employment risks, although a few governments have begun programmes to retrain workers who might be negatively affected.

In what is being called the start of the cognitive era for computing, IBM's new Watson computer program is able to mine data to think and solve problems. Significantly, it learns from its mistakes. Watson is already being used by businesses to deliver a competitive advantage. Examples include ANZ, one of Australia's largest banks, the energy company Woodside, and Melbourne's Deakin University. While artificial intelligence (AI) has benefits, there are also concerns.

Information about the built environment at scale provides actionable insight that can transform a broad spectrum of industries, by enabling companies to deliver better, more targeted services to customers, telecommunications operators to perform accurate infrastructure planning, and government agencies to conduct regional planning and management. This is the vision behind Geoscape, a location-intelligence product conceived by PSMA Australia and developed in partnership with DigitalGlobe, a Maxar company, that delivers detailed information about buildings and their attributes, trees and land cover for every address in Australia. The data for each building in Geoscape includes the presence or absence of solar panels. This information is important for the insurance industry because solar panels may pose a fire hazard and thus affect insurance premiums. For firefighters, knowing if a structure has solar panels can also help them stay safe.

Imagine a world where smart pantries sense when you are running out of your favourite food and order more of it, without you lifting a finger. Where intelligent robots roam your supermarket, ever at your service. Where dynamic food pricing changes minute-to-minute depending on the weather outside, or what the store down the road is offering. Amazon workers'refuse' to build tech for US immigration It may sound like a seismic shift in our food retail world, but these technological frontiers are real and the food sector is gearing up in a big way. What is less certain is what impact such changes will have on our health.

Computational tools to support this through proof checking, automatic theorem proving, and computer algebra are well-established, though they require formal, computationally explicit, content as input. However, the existing mathematical literature, particularly informal mathematical dialogues, and expository texts, is opaque to such systems, which cannot currently handle the variety of activities typically involved in producing such knowledge and proofs, such as, for example, exposition and argument that concerns making conjectures, forming concepts, and discussing examples and counterexamples. Our goal is to bridge this gap through devising an expressive modelling language that is closely related to the way mathematics is actually done. Our approach to modelling such content is inspired by the general-purpose argument modelling formalism Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT), introduced by Reed and Budzynska (2010). As its name suggests, IAT anchors logical inferences in discourse. IAT has been applied to mediation (Janier and Reed, 2017), debates (Budzynska et al, 2014b), and to paradoxes in ethotic argumentation (Budzynska, 2013), along with other real-world dialogues (Budzynska et al, 2013).

Since man hunted and got a taste for the meat of the Auroch, later domesticated into the ancestors of modern cattle breeds, the market for beef has grown steadily. The last 10 years have not been so kind, with plummeting beef consumption and higher prices. There is some light, as meat intense diets like paleo and keto have turned some consumers back to beef, but just at the point when the cattle industry has become more consolidated, sophisticated and consumer focused it is ironically facing some of the greatest existential threats to its 10,000 years existence. Touted as sustainable, welfare friendly or conversely dismissed as'fake meat' the clear intent of growing meat on petri dishes is to displace the consumption of red-meat. Despite concerns of how'friendly' the technology really is, meat producers such as Cargill and Tyson foods have invested in startups in this market. Environmentalists advocating'Meatless Mondays' and other initiatives at consumer level have been unremitting in their attacks on the meat industry. These action groups have used sometimes dubious data to support their contention that cattle, and specifically beef uses more water, more resources and emits more greenhouses gases then other human choices. Their relentless attack appears to be having an effect on red meat consumption in the US and Europe.

Slime molds are among the world's strangest organisms. Long mistaken for fungi, they are now classed as a type of amoeba. As single-celled organisms, they have neither neurons nor brains. Yet for about a decade, scientists have debated whether slime molds have the capacity to learn about their environments and adjust their behavior accordingly. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.