Artificial Intelligence or AI as it is commonly referred to, is often depicted in science fiction as a threat to humanity. In Sci-Fi dramas, it is the machine that has taken on a life of its own and gone wrong. Usually from its own initiative, the sci-fi buff the risk and challenges among other things is to stop and end a certain threat. The one indisputable fact that experts are unable to argue and can commonly agree to is that computers live on data. The other fact experts and novice alike can agree upon is that AI is a machine or as Dr. Zhou describes "a tool" whose use of data and the source of the data are the possible risks and challenges for our present and future societies.

Chinese technology giant Alibaba recently developed an AI system for diagnosing the COVID-19 (coronavirus). Alibaba's like Amazon, Microsoft, a video game company, and a nation-wide healthcare network all rolled into one with every branch being fed solutions from the company's world-class AI department. Our Couch Conferences bring together industry experts to discuss what's next Per a report from Nikkei's Asian Review (h/t TechSpot), Alibaba claims its new system can detect coronavirus in CT scans of patients' chests with 96% accuracy against viral pneumonia cases. And it only takes 20 seconds for the AI to make a determination – according to the report, humans generally take about 15 minutes to diagnose the illness as there can be upwards of 300 images to evaluate. The system was trained on images and data from 5,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and has already been tested in hospitals throughout China.

As the United States enters its second month of COVID-19, the availability of data on the pandemic that will define a generation has become almost overwhelming. Websites abound with tables, graphics and projections on how different aspects of the crisis are unfolding. Some use data to make their case for a far-flung theory, others display it in a way that tells an easy-to-interpret story of how a community, state or even country is combating this threat. Last month, I shared seven data visualizations that did a good job explaining one portion of the story. Since then, there have been too many new graphics developed to pick just a handful more.

Hyderabad: The field of Artificial Intelligence is moving forward in breakneck speed with major breakthroughs taking every passing day. Earlier this week on Wednesday, the Business Insider India website reported that a website known as Imgflip built a meme generator called'This Meme Does Not Exist', which harnesses the power of machine learning to generate new memes by using 48 most popular meme templates and creating new captions at the click of the mouse. On Thursday, OpenAI, a San Francisco-based research laboratory, unveiled Jukebox, a neural network that can create music, along with lyrics and vocals, as per a blog published on the research lab's official website. The researchers at the OpenAI lab trained multiple machine learning models that were fed with a dataset of over 1.2 million songs over made by combing through the web, which were then paired with their corresponding lyrics and metadata that includes the name of the artist, genre of the album, year of release, along with the playlist keywords linked to the song and the common moods. It then performs data augmentation by downmixing the right and left channels randomly to produce Mono audio.

Kai-Fu Lee has mapped out the challenging artificial intelligence race between America and China in his book AI Superpowers. He has a diversified background working in the field for 35 years. He has interesting viewpoints from holding prominent positions in the US at Google and Apple. Lee is currently CEO/Chairman at Sinovation Ventures in China and held the position of President at Google China. AlphaGo is a deep mind AI computer(super powered machine that runs on power, data and algorithms) acquired by Google in 2014.

The COVID-19 Coronavirus era began from its epicenter in China and has spread over all the cities and countries of the world. Might be there is no country which hasn't got the effects of this life taking virus. "The novel coronavirus to date has infected more than 30 lacs people out of which more than 2 lacs have died and 9 lacs are recovered." All these figures are from the WHO reports. The governments of all countries have imposed lockdowns due to which the economic activity has slowed throughout the world.

This week is the eighth annual International Workshop on OpenCL, SYCL, Vulkan, and SPIR-V, and the event is available online for the very first time in its history thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. One of the event organizers, and the conference chair, is Simon McIntosh-Smith, who is a professor of high performance computing at Bristol University in Great Britain and also the head of its Microelectronics Group. Among other things, McIntosh-Smith was a microprocessor architect at STMicroeletronics, where he designed SIMD units for the dual-core, superscalar Chameleon and SH5 set-top box ASICs back in the late 1990s. McIntosh-Smith moved to Pixelfusion in 1999, which created the first general purpose GPU – arguably eight or nine years before Nvidia did it with its Tesla GPUs, where he was an architect on the 1,536-core chip and software manager for two years. In 2002, McIntosh-Smith was one of the co-founders of ClearSpeed, which created floating point math accelerators used in HPC systems before GPU accelerators came along, and was first director of architecture and applications and then vice president of applications.

The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is in negotiations with several unnamed federal agencies and three US states to provide contact tracing services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Company founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That confirmed the negotiations were ongoing but declined to specify which agencies or states are considering the company's services. Ton-That said the company has seen growing demand for technical solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic and considers it a good opportunity to expand its business. 'What we understand now is we're in the stage where if we are to open up the economy in a way that's safe for everybody, that we need to be able to test quickly and also trace the people who have been infected and find out who they've been in contact with,' Ton-That told NBC News. Clearview has provided access to its facial recognition software to more than 2,220 different government and law enforcement agencies around the country, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the New York Police Department, the US Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency and more.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. China has amassed a vast collection of information about its people in recent years as the Chinese Communist Party continues to deploy its surveillance apparatus to exercise control over its 1.4 billion inhabitants at the expense of privacy. In recent years, China has spent billions to purchase the latest technology like facial recognition, artificial intelligence and other digital technologies to add to its network of monitoring systems.

South Korea's infectious disease experts said Thursday that dead virus fragments were the likely cause of over 260 people here testing positive again for the novel coronavirus days and even weeks after marking full recoveries. Oh Myoung-don, who leads the central clinical committee for emerging disease control, said the committee members found little reason to believe that those cases could be COVID-19 reinfections or reactivations, which would have made global efforts to contain the virus much more daunting. "The tests detected the ribonucleic acid of the dead virus," said Oh, a Seoul National University hospital doctor, at a press conference Thursday held at the National Medical Center. He went on to explain that in PCR tests, or polymerase chain reaction tests, used for COVID-19 diagnosis, genetic materials of the virus amplify during testing, whether it is from a live virus or just from fragments of dead virus cells that can take months to clear from recovered patients. The PCR tests cannot distinguish whether the virus is alive or dead, he added, and this can lead to false positives.