Movies are more than just blockbusters hit with explosions and superpowers, it's the main idea behind the movie that changes people and injects a notion in the viewer's head. To illustrate, the movie Joker wasn't a hero vs villain film, fighting with superpowers and wreaking havoc on New York City. It portrayed how there is a distinct chasm between the rich and the poor, the lucky and the unlucky, and how mental illness can distort a person's morality and value system. So, movies are more than just an activity for enjoyment and amusement, it plays an imperative role in shaping our view on the world and communal consciousness. In short, movies educate people and spread ideas in ways a paperback book early does today.

When we came out of the financial crisis of 2008, cloud computing kicked into high gear and started to become a pervasive, transformational technology. The current COVID-19 crisis could provide a similar inflection point for AI applications. While the implications of AI continue to be debated on the world stage, the rapid onset of a global health crisis and concomitant recession will accelerate its impact. Times of crisis bring rapid change. Efforts to harness AI technologies to discover new drugs – either vaccine or treatment – have kicked into hyperdrive.

The world's leading medical researchers are rushing to find a treatment for COVID-19 with the help of the most powerful and advanced supercomputers in the world. Researchers aross the globe are submitting potential treatments and cures to the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The consortium, using a network of supercomputers and laboratotires, can run through simulations to narrow down or rule out drug compounds to use in a cure much faster than traditional methods. "It's a means by which one can begin to analyze tremendously complex or large problems," says Vice President of Technical Computing at IBM Cognitive Systems Dave Turek. "Pharmaceutical companies may have billions of compounds that could be potential drugs."

Chinese AI startups have raised at least $420 million this month, defying a steep drop in fundraising in China's tech sector amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Why it matters: China's AI firms have grown off the back the government's drive to become a leader in the technology by 2020 but haven't been immune to the outbreak of the flu-like virus. Details: Speech recognition firm AISpeech, AI chipmaker Intellifusion, and machine learning firm 4Paradigm have collectively raised $429 million since the beginning of April. Context: Despite signs of a recovery in investor sentiment, the Covid-19 outbreak will likely have a significant impact on China'a AI firms, and the tech sector as a whole. Christopher Udemans is a Shanghai-based technology reporter.

This blog post is a summary and analysis of the speech given by Yuval Harari at Davos in January 2020. "The automation revolution is not a watershed that settles down again but a cascade of bigger and bigger disruptions." When Yuval Harari speaks, people tend to listen. Not least when it comes to the impact of artificial intelligence and automation on every walk of life from politics to biology, government and education. His position is wide-ranging but boils down to a few essential arguments.

San Francisco – Long maligned as job-stealers and aspiring overlords, robots are being increasingly relied on as fast, efficient, contagion-proof champions in the war against the deadly coronavirus. One team of robots temporarily cared for patients in a makeshift hospital in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the COVID-19 outbreak began. Meals were served, temperatures taken and communications handled by machines, one of them named "Cloud Ginger" by its maker CloudMinds, which has operations in Beijing and California. "It provided useful information, conversational engagement, entertainment with dancing, and even led patients through stretching exercises," CloudMinds president Karl Zhao said of the humanoid robot. "The smart field hospital was completely run by robots."

A report reveals the controversial face recognition software Clearview AI was developed with help from far-right extremists. The Huffington Post claims founder Hoan Ton-That has close ties with several extremists, attended dinners organized by alt-right groups and had employees famous for hate speech. It includes Charles Johnson, owner of a crowdfunding platform for white supremacists and Jack Posobiec, who led the Pizzagate campaign, along with Peter Thiel and his associate Jeff Giesa who is said to donate to alt-right causes, the Huffington Post claims. The report claims to have videos, messages and emails linking the Clearview founder to these individuals as well as evidence suggesting the technology was designed specifically to'identify every illegal alien in the country.' Ton-That has commented on these allegations in an email to DailyMail.com,

The US has tested more than 1.2 million Americans for coronavirus, but some have received negative results despite being infected. The coronavirus is a disease that forms in the lungs, but it sometimes sits in a cavity between the nose and throat where a swab is unable to reach. Although the RT-polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) detection is the'gold standard' for testing, it can produce a false negative if the sample is not taken properly. Experts also believe that because hospitals and drive-thru testing sites are being flooded by people, healthcare workers are also rushing to tend to as many individuals as possible and are not grabbing the samples properly. The coronavirus is a disease that forms in the lungs, but it sometimes sits in a cavity between the nose and throat where a swab is unable to reach.

Around one in five children suffer from anxiety and depression, collectively known as "internalizing disorders." But because children under the age of eight can't reliably articulate their emotional suffering, adults need to be able to infer their mental state, and recognise potential mental health problems. Waiting lists for appointments with psychologists, insurance issues, and failure to recognise the symptoms by parents all contribute to children missing out on vital treatment. "We need quick, objective tests to catch kids when they are suffering," says Ellen McGinnis, a clinical psychologist at the University of Vermont Medical Center's Vermont Center for Children, Youth and Families and lead author of the study. "The majority of kids under eight are undiagnosed."

Dr. Qin will introduce ...from the Abcus to Artificial Intelligence of history and share the ideas and strategies for the future of Artificial Intelligence and computer science learning. Please join us on our Facebook page for an interactive CS lesson!