The companies that are out there in the market, in order to serve their objectives better, need significant funding. In particular, for startups, fundraising is crucial to harness their rich potential to contribute to the growth of their respective industry and market. Without a funding source, a business, specially technology-business will flounder under the weight of its own debt. With the advancements in technology, the requirements, assets, and liabilities of such firms have grown exponentially in recent years. Amid this, funding works as a fuel on which a business runs and excels. When it comes to technologies like omnipresent AI or artificial intelligence, the pressure naturally increases to thrive in the market where big techs like Google, Microsoft, and significant others are operating.

Artificial intelligence is gaining traction in areas of social responsibility. From climate change to social polarization to epidemics, humankind has been seeking new solutions to old but persistent problems. From a technological point of view, the amount of daily data produced in the digital universe now allows for state-of-the-art approaches, which may lead to innovative solutions in these underserved areas. AI for social good turned into a reality for us at Tryolabs after we collaborated with an NGO to improve upon how African lions are tracked, which helps with species preservation. We will go into more detail on that timely case, especially as wildlife conservation faces the immense challenges posed by devastating megafires threatening the lives of millions of animals in historic ways.

The 57-year-old mystery of an infamous prison break from Alcatraz may have finally been solved using artificial-intelligence and facial-recognition technology. Rothco, the Irish creative agency owned by Accenture Interactive, teamed up with AI specialists at Identv to analyse a picture of two escapees and have, for the first time, confirmed their identities. On 11 June 1962, three prisoners – Frank Morris, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin – broke out of their cells and escaped from the prison on Alcatraz Island, near San Francisco Bay. The trio's extraordinary escape, in which they used sharpened spoons to dig through the walls and made papier-mâché dummies to fool the guards, was made famous in the 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz. The prison, which shut down in 1963, was famed for being supposedly impossible to escape from.

After carrying out a successful pilot at its Bagdad copper operation, Freeport McMoRan says it is rolling out a program across its North America and South America mines involving the use of data science, machine learning and integrated functional teams. The program, aimed at addressing bottlenecks, providing cost benefits and driving improved overall performance, was announced in its December quarter results this week. It said: "During 2019, FCX (Freeport) advanced initiatives in its North America and South America mining operations to enhance productivity, expand margins and reduce the capital intensity of the business through the utilisation of new technology applications in combination with a more interactive operating structure." It said the Bagdad mine (Arizona, USA) pilot program, initiated in late 2018, was "highly successful" in utilising these innovative technologies and it would build on this for the implementation across its other mines in North and South America. According to a report in the Financial Times, the system at Bagdad found that the mine was producing seven distinct types of ore and that the processing method, which involves flotation, could be adjusted to recover more copper by adjusting the PH level.

This week, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty called for AI to get its own regulation system. Alphabet CEO Pichai stated that it was "too important not to", going on to expand by explaining that sectors within AI technology, such as autonomous cars and healthtech, needed their own sets of rules. IBM CEO Rometty joined the discussion with the idea of'precision regulation', stating that it is not the technology itself, but how it is used that should be regulated, using facial recognition as an example of technology that can harm people's privacy as well as having its benefits, such as catching criminals. Asheesh Mehra, co-founder and CEO at AntWorks, explains why regulating AI is important. Without it, the technology won't take the world by storm These announcements have come in spite of recent setbacks in the sphere; just last week it was revealed that the European Commission were considering a five year ban on facial recognition, and Google's last attempt to assemble an AI ethics board lasted under two weeks due to controversy over who was appointed.

We investigate how reinforcement learning can be used to train level-designing agents. This represents a new approach to procedural content generation in games, where level design is framed as a game, and the content generator itself is learned. By seeing the design problem as a sequential task, we can use reinforcement learning to learn how to take the next action so that the expected final level quality is maximized. This approach can be used when few or no examples exist to train from, and the trained generator is very fast. We investigate three different ways of transforming two-dimensional level design problems into Markov decision processes and apply these to three game environments.

The capability and spread of such systems have reached the point where they are beginning to touch much of everyday life. However, regulators grapple with how to deal with autonomous systems, for example how could we certify an Unmanned Aerial System for autonomous use in civilian airspace? We here analyse what is needed in order to provide verified reliable behaviour of an autonomous system, analyse what can be done as the state-of-the-art in automated verification, and propose a roadmap towards developing regulatory guidelines, including articulating challenges to researchers, to engineers, and to regulators. Case studies in seven distinct domains illustrate the article. Keywords: autonomous systems; certification; verification; Artificial Intelligence 1 Introduction Since the dawn of human history, humans have designed, implemented and adopted tools to make it easier to perform tasks, often improving efficiency, safety, or security.

"We are already at the point where you can't tell the difference between deepfakes and the real thing," Professor Hao Li of the University of Southern California tells the BBC. We are at the computer scientist's deepfake installation at the World Economic Forum in Davos which gives a hint of what he means. Like other deepfake tools, his software creates computer-manipulated videos of people - often politicians or celebrities - that are designed to look real. Most often this involves "face swapping", whereby the face of a celebrity is overlaid onto the likeness of someone else. As I sit, a camera films my face and projects it onto a screen in front of me; my features are then digitally mapped.

If Sunspring is anything to go by, artificial intelligence in film-making has some way to go. This short film, made as an entry to Sci-Fi London's 48-hour film-making competition in 2016, was written entirely by an AI. The director, Oscar Sharp, fed a few hundred sci-fi screenplays into a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (the type of software behind predictive text in a smartphone), then told it to write its own. The result was almost, but not quite, incoherent nonsense, riddled with cryptic nonsequiturs, bizarre turns of phrase and unfathomable stage directions such as "he is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor". All of which Sharp and his actors filmed with sincere commitment.

The value of building data-driven businesses with AI at their core is well known today, and business executives are rushing to implement the technology into their operations and gain a competitive advantage, but it's not as simple as creating a data lake and crafting AI models. A large number of AI companies attempting to implement more AI models or build AI-first businesses have experienced challenges. A December 2018 PwC survey found that only 4% of businesses have successfully implemented AI. That's why today the World Economic Forum released the AI toolkit for Boards of Directors. The AI toolkit for Boards of Directors is being released ahead of the annual WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland where the toolkit will be formally debuted next week.