A new institute dedicated to teaching Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications to university students has been launched in Abu Dhabi on Monday (July 15). This is the first-of-its-kind-institute in the UAE will also train government and industries in AI science and applications. With a Dh160 million five-year-fund for AI projects, Khalifa University of Science and Technology launched the Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems Institute (AI Institute) which will focus on AI, data science, robotics, next generation networks, semiconductor technologies and cybersecurity. The AI Institute will bring all the university's research in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), cyber-security, data science and information and communication technologies under a single umbrella. "Khalifa University's AI Institute, a single umbrella that gathers activities of six research centres, reflects our commitment to research in next generation digital technologies that are priority areas for the UAE's economy," Dr Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, executive vice-president of Khalifa University of Science and Technology said during the launch of the AI Institute.

The companies racing to deploy autonomous cars on the world's roads took a reality check in the 2010s, but multimillion-dollar development efforts remain ongoing across the automotive and tech industries. German supplier Bosch is notably moving full speed ahead with its quest to make driverless cars a reality. Kay Stepper, Bosch's senior vice president of automated driving, sat down with Digital Trends to talk about the state of autonomous driving in 2020, and what's next for the artificial intelligence technology that powers the prototypes it's testing. Bosch has never made a car, so it brings its innovations to the market through partnerships with automakers. It chose Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler to test autonomous technology in real-world conditions via a ridesharing pilot program in San Jose, California, close to one of the company's research centers.

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Countries are rapidly developing "killer robots" - machines with artificial intelligence (AI) that independently kill - but are moving at a snail's pace on agreeing global rules over their use in future wars, warn technology and human rights experts. From drones and missiles to tanks and submarines, semi-autonomous weapons systems have been used for decades to eliminate targets in modern day warfare - but they all have human supervision. Nations such as the United States, Russia and Israel are now investing in developing lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) which can identify, target, and kill a person all on their own - but to date there are no international laws governing their use. "Some kind of human control is necessary ... Only humans can make context-specific judgements of distinction, proportionality and precautions in combat," said Peter Maurer, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The European Commission is considering a temporary ban on the use of facial recognition technology, according to a draft proposal for regulating artificial intelligence obtained by Euroactiv. Creating rules to ensure AI is'trustworthy and human' has been an early flagship policy promise of the new Commission, led by president Ursula von der Leyen. But the leaked proposal suggests the EU's executive body is in fact leaning towards tweaks of existing rules and sector/app specific risk-assessments and requirements, rather than anything as firm as blanket sectoral requirements or bans. The leaked Commission white paper floats the idea of a three-to-five-year period in which the use of facial recognition technology could be prohibited in public places -- to give EU lawmakers time to devise ways to assess and manage risks around the use of the technology, such as to people's privacy rights or the risk of discriminatory impacts from biased algorithms. "This would safeguard the rights of individuals, in particular against any possible abuse of the technology," the Commission writes, adding that: "It would be necessary to foresee some exceptions, notably for activities in the context of research and development and for security purposes."

Creating successful #AI tools and ensuring their adoption requires a diversity of skills and perspectives. Microsoft's Jo Amato-Tuck and Kate Rosenshine discuss some of the biggest factors.

Icelandic artist Björk is using artificial intelligence (AI), created with Microsoft's help, to play a non-stop composition in the lobby of a New York hotel. The AI plays selections from Björk's choral music based on what it sees in the sky through a rooftop camera.

The new decade opened with some intriguing news: The journal Nature reported that artificial intelligence was better at identifying breast cancers on mammograms than radiologists. Researchers at Google Health teamed up with academic medical centers in the United States and Britain to train an AI system using tens of thousands of mammograms. To understand why, it helps to have a sense of how AI systems learn. In this case, the system was trained with images labeled as either "cancer" or "not cancer." From them, it learned to deduce features -- such as shape, density and edges -- that are associated with the cancer label.

Warner Bros has signed a deal with an artificial intelligence company to help it with movie releases. The studio has confirmed it will be using a'revolutionary new AI-driven project management system', launched last year by Cynelytic, a Los Angeles-based AI and cloud tech company. The platform provides forecasting and financial modelling information, predicting box office revenues of potential movie projects. It also has the potential to assist in working out the value of certain stars, and also in scheduling when a movie should be released. According to Business Wire, 'the platform reduces executives' time spent on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead focuses on generating actionable insights for packaging, green-lighting, marketing and distribution decisions in real time'.

The Genesis GV80 luxury SUV has a lot riding on its broad shoulders. The BMW X5 and Mercedes-Benz GLE rival carries the future of Hyundai's fledgling luxury offshoot in Australia and beyond. Expected to arrive locally mid-year, it joins the new Genesis G70 and G80 sedan duo to fill an important void for Hyundai's luxury brand. Its bold exterior design cues, including a bluff grille, 22-inch wheels and split LED lights will appear on its more conservative four-door cousins in the near future. The interior brings a choice of five or seven seats in the South Korean home market, along with a whopping 14.5-inch digital display stacked with technology to rival Europe's best.

Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have evolved an artificial intelligence-aided method to automate reading of legal judgements. A research team at the institute's Department of Computer Science and Engineering has developed two deep neural models to understand the rhetorical roles of sentences in a legal case judgement, an IIT KGP statement said here. This could be unique in India where the country uses a Common Law system that prioritises the doctrine of legal precedence over statutory law and where legal documents are often written in an unstructured way, a member of the team said. "Taking 50 judgments from the Supreme Court of India, we have segmented these by first labelling sentences with the help of three senior law students from IIT Kharagpur's Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law," Saptarshi Ghosh, professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, who is leading the research team, said. "We then performed extensive analysis of the human- assigned labels, and developed a high quality gold standard corpus to train the machine to carry out the task," Ghosh said.