As a national health system, the VA has amassed a significant amount of data--possibly giving it a leg up because lack of trustworthy and accessible data has traditionally been one of the major roadblocks to AI development. In other health technology news: a website helps patients with rare diseases find more information about them. Modern Healthcare: VA Dives Into Artificial Intelligence R&D The Department of Veterans Affairs has opened a new artificial intelligence institute to pursue research and inform national strategy. The National Artificial Intelligence Institute, a joint initiative of the VA's office of research and development and the VA secretary's center for strategic partnerships, will work with public and private partners to carry out AI research and development projects, including efforts to apply AI to identify veterans at high risk for suicide or to help reduce patient wait times. The Washington Post: Rare Diseases Lack Data But This Website Aims To Help Achondrogenesis, Noonan syndrome and sialadenitis aren't household names.

An expert on artificial intelligence has called for all algorithms that make life-changing decisions – in areas from job applications to immigration into the UK – to be halted immediately. Prof Noel Sharkey, who is also a leading figure in a global campaign against "killer robots", said algorithms were so "infected with biases" that their decision-making processes could not be fair or trusted. A moratorium must be imposed on all "life-changing decision-making algorithms" in Britain, he said. Sharkey has suggested testing AI decision-making machines in the same way as new pharmaceutical drugs are vigorously checked before they are allowed on to the market. In an interview with the Guardian, the Sheffield University robotics/AI pioneer said he was deeply concerned over a series of examples of machine-learning systems being loaded with bias.

A drone with a machine gun attached can hit targets with high precision, according to its makers. Turkey is set to become the first country to have the drone, when it gets a delivery this month. The 25-kilogram drone has eight rotating blades to get it in the air. Its machine gun carries 200 rounds of ammunition and can fire single shots or 15-round bursts. Many countries and groups already use small military drones that can drop grenades or fly into a target to detonate an explosive.

While artificial intelligence (AI) has been historically confined to the Sci-Fi section of the movie genre, it has recently started picking up steam in the real world. In 2018, VCs pumped $9.3 billion into AI startups, which marked a 72% increase in funding compared to the previous year. SenseTime, the world's most valuable startup, turned profitable three years after establishment with an average annual revenue growth of 400% in those three years. With this explosive growth, though, keeping up with the innovations happening in artificial intelligence can seem intimidating. After spending the summer reading through several pieces of literature, I've come up with a list of the top three AI books that can provide you a well-rounded perspective on the industry, where it's headed, and what impacts it will make.

In the financial world, neural networks are helping investigators find and stop fraud by uncovering trends across millions of transactions. ERGO, a German insurance company, is using predictive analytics from SAS to find unjustified claims. Customers also use neural networks in their buildings to optimize power usage and predict mechanical failures. Through the use of decision trees, we've helped rapidly growing Wake County, North Carolina, make property tax assessments fairer and more accurate. We are working with many tax authorities to uncover tax fraud and find citizens that have underdeclared their income.

Rx.Health is adding a suite of tools to prevent physician burnout. How do you keep physicians from being overwhelmed by a mountain of paperwork? Give them a voice assistant, similar to Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri. That's the thinking behind Suki, a Redwood City-based startup that recently struck a partnership with Mount Sinai Health System spinoff Rx.Health. Rx.Health curates digital tools for doctors, allowing them to prescribe digital therapeutics and care plans from electronic health record systems.

In its 4 year existence the Israeli start-up Taranis has seen huge growth. Taranis started as a tool to provide farmers with the information to detect and prevent crop disease, weeds and insect damage based on weather forecasts gathered from aerial surveillance. The technology was then further developed by adding visual layers from satellites, planes and drones and leveraged with AI capabilities. Taranis also created a one-of-a-kind, patented hardware that can capture accurate images at a high resolution from a plane flying at 160 km/h, such as a specific insect on a leaf from 200 feet above ground. Taranis CEO Ofir Schlam says the future of the precision farming industry is looking bright, with thousands of start-ups emerging within the last 10 years. According to him, smart farming is projected to create a massive impact on the agricultural economy in the near future and will be dependent on precision technologies, such as the adoption of automated practices and indoor urbanised farming.

Bank of America hits a milestone with Erica. It's not only fintechs that can lure millions of customers their way. Bank of America's voice-activated virtual assistant Erica now has more than ten million users. It's also on track to complete 100 million client requests in the coming weeks and that's all since its launch in June of 2018. "Erica is ushering in a new era of personalized banking and providing our clients never-before-possible convenience," said David Tyrie, head of advanced solutions and digital banking at Bank of America in prepared remarks.

Ability to quickly learn how to use software applications.

Me: "Alexa, tell me what will happen in 2020." Amazon AI: "Here's what I found on Wikipedia: The 2020 UEFA European Football Championship…[continues to read from Wikipedia]" Me: "Alexa, give me a prediction for 2020." Amazon AI: "The universe has not revealed the answer to me." Well, some slight improvement over last year's responses, when Alexa's answer to the first question was "Do you want to open'this day in history'?" As for the universe, it is an open book for the 120 senior executives featured here, all involved with AI, delivering 2020 predictions for a wide range of topics: Autonomous vehicles, deepfakes, small data, voice and natural language processing, human and augmented intelligence, bias and explainability, edge and IoT processing, and many promising applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies and tools. And there will be even more 2020 AI predictions, in a second installment to be posted here later this month. "Vehicle AI is going to be ...