In April 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made a momentous decision. The agency's approval of IDx-DR, a diagnostic system developed by Iowa-based IDx Technologies for diabetic retinopathy, wasn't a revolutionary move on the face of it, but nevertheless marked an important inflection point in the delivery of modern healthcare. So why was the FDA's decision to award marketing clearance to IDx-DR so significant? As is increasingly the case in medical technology, the answer lies with artificial intelligence (AI). The IDx-DR software is driven by AI, and it's the first system approved to autonomously provide diagnostic assessments without the supervision of an expert clinician. The system involves capturing images of a patient's eye with a retinal camera – in this case the Topcon NW400 – that can be operated by any non-specialist staff member with a little training.

Intel Corporation this week announced that it has acquired Habana Labs for approximately $2 billion. Habana is an Israel-based company that develops programmable deep learning accelerators for the data centre. This acquisition is aimed at strengthening Intel's artificial intelligence portfolio and accelerate its efforts in the AI silicon market, which Intel expects to be greater than $25 billion by 2024. "This acquisition advances our AI strategy, which is to provide customers with solutions to fit every performance need – from the intelligent edge to the data centre," said Navin Shenoy, executive VP at Intel, in a press release. In July, Habana announced its Gaudi AI training processor, which the Tel Aviv startup promised was capable of beating GPU-based systems by 4x.

The development of artificial intelligence technologies has brought forth the era of autonomous cars, realistic robots, intelligent chatbots, and AI YouTubers. And now, researchers have created an artificial intelligence tool that utilizes language models to identify'fake news'. This tool has been developed to stop the spread of misinformation through stance detection. Based on deep-learning, the AI tool can verify the information provided in posts made on various platforms by comparing it to other posts available on the subject. With the tool, researchers want to eliminate the deceptive posts that have plagued the internet.

Finland is offering a techy Christmas gift to all European Union citizens -- a free-of-charge online course in artificial intelligence in their own language, officials said Tuesday. The tech-savvy Nordic nation, led by the 34-year-old Prime Minister Sanna Marin, is marking the end of its rotating presidency of the EU at the end of the year with a highly ambitious goal. Instead of handing out the usual ties and scarves to EU officials and journalists, the Finnish government has opted to give practical understanding of AI to 1% of EU citizens, or about 5 million people, through a basic online course by the end of 2021. It is teaming up with the University of Helsinki, Finland's largest and oldest academic institution, and the Finland-based tech consultancy Reaktor. Teemu Roos, a University of Helsinki associate professor in the department of computer science, described the nearly $2 million project as "a civics course in AI" to help EU citizens cope with society's ever-increasing digitalization and the possibilities AI offers in the jobs market.

With respect to climate change, poaching, and encroachment on natural habitats, some animal populations have fared far worse than others. It's estimated that the populations of more than 4,000 species shrunk by 60% between 1970 and 2014, and a recent United Nations global assessment found that as many as 1 million species are at risk of extinction within the next decade. That's why Google has partnered with Conservation International and other organizations -- the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Map of Life, World Wide Fund for Nature, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Zoological Society of London, with support from Google's Earth Outreach program and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Lyda Hill Philanthropies. The goal is to help process one of the world's largest and most diverse databases of photographs taken from motion-activated cameras. As of today, the fruits of their labor is available through Google Cloud as a part of Wildlife Insights, an AI-enabled platform that streamlines conservation monitoring by expediting trap-camera photo analysis.

Local executives of iconic American computer company IBM said last week that Thailand will serve as the firm's hub for expanding into Indochina as they believe the subregion offers the potential for high growth and increasing revenues over the next three years. "We are studying how to enter the Indochina market in various areas including as business partners, and under a business model with consideration to regulations and laws for investment," said Patama Chataruck, managing director IBM Thailand. "Meanwhile, Thailand still has high potential." Known as Big Blue because of the color of its logo, International Business Machines (IBM) was once the world's leading computer manufacturer, but sold its personal computer business to Lenovo of China in 2005. It still manufactures super-computers, other hardware and has devoted tremendous resources to becoming a leader in solutions and software.

AI has a "black box" problem. We cram data in one side of a machine learning system and we get results out the other, but we're often unsure what happens in the middle. Researchers and developers nearly had the issue licked, with "explainable algorithms" and "transparent AI" trending over the past few years. Black box AI isn't as complex as some experts make it out to be. Imagine you have 1,000,000 different spices and 1,000,000 different herbs and you only have a couple of hours to crack Kentucky Fried Chicken's secret recipe.

CIMON (The Crew Interactive Mobile Companion 2) has been busy working with astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The robotic assistant is now using a tone analyzer, detecting emotions during the current voyage. CIMON made its debut on the ISS in November of this year, with Space.com's "During the experiment, CIMON successfully found and recognized Gerst's face, took photos and video, positioned itself autonomously within the Columbus module using its ultrasonic sensors, and issued instructions for Gerst to perform a student-designed experiment with crystals. Weighing about 5 kilograms (11 lbs. on Earth), the 3D-printed robot designed jointly by the German space agency DLR, Airbus, and IBM works similarly to Apple's virtual assistant Siri or Amazon's Alexa. "If CIMON is asked a question or addressed, the Watson AI firstly converts this audio signal into text, which is understood, or interpreted, by the AI," explained IBM project lead Matthias Biniok in the statement. "IBM Watson not only understands content in context, [but] it can also understand the intention behind it." There is a great video here, of Gerst conversing with CIMON, and it shows the complexity of this fantastic technology. Especially regarding the amount of relevant information that it can store and relay to astronauts, making their jobs easier. The Watson team at IBM computing only added the tone analyzer to the standard set of Watson capabilities this week. However, CIMON 2 was added as a seventh crew member on SpaceX Dragon during a resupply mission last week. In addition to updated software, the robot also got a hardware upgrade, with enhanced sensitivity on its microphones, and a more advanced sense of orientation. The German Aerospace Center and Airbus are the other crew members for this CIMON project. "IBM is using its tone analyzer technology to analyze how CIMON converses with the astronauts.

Learning to Program An introduction to programming for those who have never programmed before, by Alan Gauld. It introduces several programming languages but has a strong emphasis on Python.