United Imaging, a global leader in advanced medical imaging and radiotherapy equipment, followed a strong appearance at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) with a win in a competition jointly organized by Facebook AI Research and NYU Langone Health. The company's United Imaging Intelligence America subsidiary led out of Boston won top prize in the multi-coil 4x acceleration category, a clinically relevant challenge designed to accelerate MRI scans using artificial intelligence (AI). "Using AI to create highly accurate images from significantly smaller amounts of raw data could result in much faster scans," commented Dr. Terrence Chen, CEO of United Imaging Intelligence America. "This could improve the patient experience and make scans more accessible." Fast and accurate MRI image reconstruction from under-sampled data is critically important in clinical practice.

Qualcomm Ventures said Thursday that it has invested $8 million in a New York-based Internet of Things startup that helps companies predict when their machines will fail. Augury, founded in 2011, collects data from equipment via advanced sensors and then applies artificial intelligence algorithms to anticipate when they will break down. It saves customers money by flagging the need for maintenance ahead of a problem. Qualcomm Ventures believes the investment will help jumpstart the emergence of wireless connected factories, shipyards and other industrial operations -- all of which are expected to accelerate with the rollout of new 5G networks. In industrial settings, every machine generates data.

Artificial intelligence is here, it's just the beginning, and it's time to start thinking about how to regulate it. Those were the takeaways from the Technology Alliance's AI Policy Matters Summit, a Seattle event that convened experts and government officials for a conversation about artificial intelligence. Many of those experts agreed that the government should start establishing guardrails to defend against malicious or negligent uses of artificial intelligence. But determining what shape those regulations should take is no easy feat. "It's not even clear what the difference is between AI and software," said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, on stage at the event. "Where does something cease to be a software program and become an AI program?

BEIJING – Wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a red T-shirt, an 8-year-old Chinese boy is logged in for an online coding lesson -- as the teacher. Vita has set up a coding tutorial channel on the Chinese video streaming site Bilibili since August and has so far garnered nearly 60,000 followers and over 1 million views. He is among a growing number of children in China who are learning coding even before they enter primary school. The trend has been fueled by parents' belief that coding skills will be essential for Chinese teenagers given the government's technological drive. "Coding's not that easy but also not that difficult -- at least not as difficult as you have imagined," said Vita, who lives in Shanghai.

Dan Ammann, former president of the largest Detroit automaker and now the CEO of Cruise, wrote in a blog post that to "make order-of-magnitude -- rather than incremental -- improvements in transportation, we need to build alternatives that are superior to the status quo in every way." The post was headlined "We Need to Move Beyond the Car." Cruise's mission, he said, is to "reduce congestion through making shared rides more compelling by providing an awesome experience at a radically lower cost." Only then, "will we truly move beyond the car to the transportation system that we deserve." Ammann did not elaborate on Cruise's plans in his post.

This is a rare opportunity to work for a breakthrough company that is disrupting a $50B market. MongoDB is the fastest-growing database on the planet, and the MongoDB community is transforming industries with incredibly innovative applications. To help fuel and manage this growth, we are looking for someone to join our leading-edge talent acquisition team that moves quickly and stay focused but relish the opportunity to help build a company with immense potential. This is a critical and highly visible role in one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in the world where recruiting is a top priority of the company. You'll report to the Manager, Systems & Analytics and will be located in Gurgaon.

Apple has acquired a startup in the UK that develops technology designed to improve smartphone photography. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Spectral Edge for an undisclosed sum. Spectral Edge uses machine learning to "make smartphone pictures crisper, with more accurate colors." This works primarily by taking an infrared image and blending it with a standard photo. "Spectral Edge combines patented Image Fusion tech with Deep Learning to reveal more of the color, detail and clarity in any image," the company explained in its pitch.

At the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco this week, France-based research institute CEA-Leti presented papers highlighting its achievements in bio-inspired neural networks, a readout technique for high-fidelity measurements in large quantum dot arrays and inorganic thin film batteries with optimum energy and power density performance for medical and implantable devices. This article presents highlights of each of these three papers. Bio-inspired neural networks have been in development for a while, and at IEDM, Leti announced it had fabricated a fully integrated bio-inspired neural network, combining resistive-RAM-based synapses and analog spiking neurons. The functionality of this proof-of-concept circuit was demonstrated thanks to handwritten digits classification. "The entire network is integrated on-chip," said Alexandre Valentian, lead author of the paper, Fully Integrated Spiking Neural Network with Analog Neurons and RRAM Synapses.

One of the biggest threats to privacy and national security is the ability of the immensely powerful quantum computers to break prevailing methods of encryption almost instantaneously. Once quantum computers become a reality, something that could conceivably happen in the next decade or two, all of the data protected by encrypted systems on the internet will become decrypted and unprotected, accessible to all individuals, organizations or nation-states. Dr. Jill Pipher, President of the American Mathematical Society, VP for Research, and Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University led a briefing last week for lawmakers on Capitol Hill called "No Longer Secure: Cryptography in the Quantum Era" about the threats that quantum computing poses to existing cryptographic systems that support national and economic security. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) began the briefing by saying "we're acutely aware of the potential advantages and disadvantages that quantum presents. And we're also very concerned that some of our adversaries and competitors are investing a great deal in quantum computing."

For decades retail companies have been exploiting analytics within the different segments of their businesses, including marketing and operations. Such analytics are dusty, however, and have now come to an end. Traditional analytical methods are outdated; they require a lot of manual steps and the insights extracted cannot be easily generalized. Using analytics ultimately provides a low return if you include the amount of manpower needed allocating to run them. Machine learning (ML) can be viewed as an extension of analytics.