The incoming European Commission's policy agenda is arguably its most ambitious to date. During its five year term, the Commission will seek legally binding commitments to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, unlock €1 trillion in green transition financing by 2030, and take a global leadership role in the governance of artificial intelligence, among other headline goals. It will also launch Horizon Europe, its largest ever research and innovation programme, with a clearly defined range of impact targets. In February, the Science Business Annual Network Conference will bring together over 300 stakeholders for two main purposes: first, to take stock of latest developments around the key pillars of the new agenda; and second, to explore their implications for the science, technology and innovation communities that will have a critical role to play in driving progress. By extension, it will address the challenge of developing the next generation(s) of researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs who will have a leading role to play in delivering a climate-neutral, sustainable Europe by 2050.

Consumers must be safeguarded from artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) which is "advancing at a remarkable pace", says a European parliamentary committee. A draft resolution, approved by the European Parliament's Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) on 23 January, proposes that humans should always be ultimately responsible for, and able to overrule, decisions, especially in medical, legal and accounting contexts. It also sets out how to make use of the technology more transparent and accountable. IMCO chair Petra De Sutter said the committee welcomed the potential of rapid advances in AI technology, but at the same time wanted to highlight important issues that needed to be addressed. The resolution makes clear that while free-flowing data will be essential for the creation of innovative services, the importance of protecting personal data under GDPR, and of using only high-quality and unbiased data sets is equally important.

Calling data as the new oil, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during her Budget speech announced the launch of a new policy to set up data centre parks for enabling digitisation of all public institutions in the country. While announcing the allocation of Rs 6,000 crore to the BharatNet programme, Sitharaman also said that advanced technology such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, cloud computing, drones are disrupting the existent business models and rewriting the world economic order. "Data now is clearly the new oil. I propose a policy to set up data centre farms throughout the country. The idea is to skilfully incorporate data in every step of the value chain," she said.

America's intelligence collectors are already using AI in ways big and small, to scan the news for dangerous developments, send alerts to ships about rapidly changing conditions, and speed up the NSA's regulatory compliance efforts. But before the IC can use AI to its full potential, it must be hardened against attack. The humans who use it -- analysts, policy-makers and leaders -- must better understand how advanced AI systems reach their conclusions. Dean Souleles is working to put AI into practice at different points across the U.S. intelligence community, in line with the ODNI's year-old strategy. The chief technology advisor to the principal deputy to the Director of National Intelligence wasn't allowed to discuss everything that he's doing, but he could talk about a few examples.

"Research in Translation" is a series that showcases the most cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence, or AI, technology. Does the relationship between power and AI mean that all people will be monitored all the time? We have become obsessed with automated facial-recognition technology. There is something about the capacity to remotely identify and track a person through space that piques terror within us. But with the continuing development of computer vision and video analytics, facial recognition may ultimately turn out to be one of the more benign applications of camera surveillance.

Facebook has settled a long-running legal dispute about the way it scans and tags people's photos. It will pay $550m (£421m) to a group of users in Illinois, who argued that its facial recognition tool was in violation of the state's privacy laws. The case has been ongoing since 2015, and the settlement was announced in its quarterly earnings. It comes as facial recognition use by the police, and in public spaces, comes under intense scrutiny. The lawsuit against Facebook was given the go-ahead in 2018 when a federal judge ruled it could be heard as a class action (group) case.

Artificial intelligence is frequently discussed yet it's too early to show real gains. AI's major headwind is the cost of the investment, which will skew returns in the short-term. When the turnaround occurs, however, companies who are making the investment can expect to be rewarded disproportionately with a wide performance gap. In a recent report, McKinsey predicts AI leaders will see up to double the cash flow. We can see some evidence of this in Alphabet's revenue segment, Other Bets, which includes many AI projects with a loss of $3.35 billion in 2018.

The recent issues of Australian and Amazon wildfires have raised a burning question – the technology that has been a major facilitator to human evolution and growth, could it not do anything to predict, manage or control such destruction? Its high time that technologies like AI, data science and 5G connectivity should take charge of climatic advancement as well. The latest development in these technologies has shown some significant traits that can work for the betterment of the environment. Let's see how they can serve nature and climate. As noted by a report, the problem with climate change is that time is not on the side of humans -- mankind has to find and implement some solutions relatively fast.

In the early 2000s a group of scientists at Stanford University, California, revived a grisly procedure used in the 1950s known as parabiosis. They paired living mice, young with old, peeled back their skin and stitched together their sides so the two animals shared the same blood circulatory system. A month later, they found signs of rejuvenation in the muscles and livers of the old mice. The findings, published in 2005, turned the minds of scientists, entrepreneurs and the public to the potential of young blood to rejuvenate ageing people. By 2016, enough interest had grown to prompt a US-based startup called Ambrosia to start offering pricey infusions of young plasma – the cell-free component of blood. The procedure came under fire from the US Food and Drug Administration early last year both for its lack of proven clinical benefit and for potential safety issues; Ambrosia closed, though it has recently reopened.

About the Event As the digital transformation in financial services accelerates, it is a must-do for leading firms to gain a competitive advantage by being data literate, having access to the right data mixed with the right analytics strategies. Financial Services organizations are looking to lead with data to uncover transformational insights and enrich every decision across all aspects of their operations. Learn how Qlik is at the forefront of 3rd Generation of Business Intelligence, leveraging AI to drive data literacy across organizations, from the edge to the point of decision. Spend the day with Qlik on Wednesday, February 26 with the top leaders in Financial Services. Our agenda is packed with perspectives, best practices and use cases that explore how new and traditional data sources can blend together to better inform profitability, sales performance, risk management, and customer experiences.