"In two years, China will be ahead of the United States in AI (artificial intelligence)," states Denis Barrier, CEO of global venture firm Cathay Innovation. If so, China will largely determine how this technology transforms the world. Today's contest is more than a race for dominance in a new technology -- it's one between authoritarianism and democracy. "AI is the world's next big inflection point," says Ajeet Singh, CEO of ThoughtSpot in Palo Alto. Artificial intelligence is machine learning, which self-learns programmed tasks, using data, and the more it gets, the more learned it becomes.

This post was featured in our Cognilytica Newsletter, with additional details. When people hear about the race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominance, they often think that the main competition is between the US and China. After all, the US and China have most of the largest and most well funded AI companies on the planet, and the pace of funding, company growth, and adoption doesn't seem to be slowing anytime soon. However, if you look closely, you'll see that many other countries have a stake in the AI race, and indeed, some countries have AI efforts, funding, technologies, and intellectual property that make them serious contenders in the jostling for AI dominance. In this newsletter, we'll take a look at how countries are strategically positioned with regards to their AI capabilities and ambitions, and see if AI is truly like that of the space race or simply like any other technology trend we've seen come and go.

Uber has been seeking ways to lower development costs and losses in its autonomous-vehicle unit following a fatal crash involving one of its cars earlier this year in Arizona. Last year, the Uber division spent about $750 million on self-driving car development before making cuts this year, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent months, Uber has closed its Arizona autonomous-vehicle operations and laid off about 400 test drivers, some of whom it will rehire after undergoing new training. Uber also has taken its self-driving vehicles off the roads in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pittsburgh and Toronto while investigators look into the circumstances of the Arizona crash. For ride-sharing concerns like Uber and Lyft Inc., autonomous vehicles could cut their biggest expense: paying human drivers.

In the U.S., 15,498 of the more than 88,000 dams in the country are categorized as having high hazard potential--meaning that if they fail, they could kill people. As of 2015, some 2,000 of these high hazard dams are in need of repair. With a hefty price tag estimated at around $20 billion, those repairs aren't going to happen overnight. A project out of the Columbia Water Center aims to help guide the process of repairing or decommissioning these dams. The team is pinpointing the riskiest dams, using climate models, GIS data, and artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood that rainfall will overtop a dam and cause significant downstream damages to population and critical infrastructure.

In the U.S., 15,498 of the more than 88,000 dams in the country are categorized as having high hazard potential--meaning that if they fail, they could kill people. As of 2015, some 2,000 of these high hazard dams are in need of repair. With a hefty price tag estimated at around $20 billion, those repairs aren't going to happen overnight. A project out of the Columbia Water Center aims to help guide the process of repairing or decommissioning these dams. The team is pinpointing the riskiest dams, using climate models, GIS data, and artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood that rainfall will overtop a dam and cause significant downstream damages to population and critical infrastructure.

For four years I've waited for a spiritual successor to Never Alone. Part game, part documentary, E-Line Media and Upper One Games managed to adapt traditional Inupiaq folklore into an accessible platformer while educating players about the culture in question. It was flawed, but beautiful and memorable. Memorable enough, I guess, that the BBC got in touch and asked E-Line to do it again. At Gamescom this week I got to take a look at Beyond Blue, a spiritual successor to Never Alone and a companion piece to the BBC documentary Blue Planet 2. As you might expect from the Blue Planet 2 pairing, Beyond Blue takes you deep under the ocean.

Common-sense and background knowledge is required to understand natural language, but in most neural natural language understanding (NLU) systems, this knowledge must be acquired from training corpora during learning, and then it is static at test time. We introduce a new architecture for the dynamic integration of explicit background knowledge in NLU models. A general-purpose reading module reads background knowledge in the form of free-text statements (together with task-specific text inputs) and yields refined word representations to a task-specific NLU architecture that reprocesses the task inputs with these representations. Experiments on document question answering (DQA) and recognizing textual entailment (RTE) demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the approach. Analysis shows that our model learns to exploit knowledge in a semantically appropriate way.

Alphabet is broken out into its core Google business and a number of other subsidiaries, which it deems "Other Bets." The majority of Google's business comes from advertising revenues, which the company generates through its search engine as well as a number of other Google-affiliated and partnership websites. Outside of search and advertising, Google generates revenue from products including cloud and enterprise, consumer hardware, mapping, and YouTube. In addition to Google, Alphabet encompasses a host of other subsidiaries called "Other Bets." These companies are more experimental in nature, and as a result are not material to Alphabet's bottom line.

The stern of a US destroyer that was blown off the ship by a Japanese mine 75 years ago, killing 71, has been found off Alaska. The fragment of the USS Abner Read was found in the Bering Sea off the Aleutian island of Kiska, where it sank after being torn off by an explosion while conducting an anti-submarine patrol. The remaining crew managed to save the ship, which was repaired after the attack. On July 17, a NOAA-funded team of scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the University of Delaware discovered the missing 75- foot stern section in 290 feet of water off of Kiska, one of only two United States territories to be occupied by foreign forces in the last 200 years. After sonar mounted to the side of the research ship Norseman II identified a promising target, the team sent down a deep-diving, remotely operated vehicle to capture live video for confirmation.

An Amazon office building at 27 Melcher St. in Boston, which houses some of the 1,200 Amazon corporate staff who work in the greater Boston area. The newly refurbished building was formerly a Necco wafer candy factory. Amazon has 17 tech hubs in North America outside Seattle that employ more than 17,500 corporate, as opposed to warehouse and fulfillment, staff. That number is anticipated to rise to 26,200 by 2023. Here's where they are -- and why. Why: Silicon Valley is here, in addition to Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley and other universities with strong computer science and engineering programs.