As a society, we are finally acquiring a healthy scepticism about the use and abuse of our personal information. New polling conducted by YouGov for the Institute for Public Policy Research shows that 80% of the public want to see tighter rules applied to how the likes of Facebook and Amazon use their data. Over the weekend, it was revealed that US pharmaceutical companies have already been sold data relating to millions of NHS patients and that Amazon, incredibly, has been given free access to NHS data Hidden away in the secret US-UK trade papers, leaked and revealed by Labour in November, is perhaps the biggest single threat to public data yet seen. Instead of the encroaching privatisation of publicly held data, we should be looking to create a "digital commons" The potential threat to the NHS from a post-Brexit US trade deal is clear, and has become a major election talking point. But alongside the well-known dangers of accelerating privatisation and drug price hikes, there are risks to one of the UK's most prized publicly owned resources.

When it comes to AI (Artificial Intelligence), VCs (venture capitalists) continue to be aggressive with their fundings. During the third quarter, 965 AI-related companies in the US raised a total of $13.5 billion. In fact, this year should see a record in total fundings (last year's total came to $16.8 billion). Some of the deals have been, well, staggering. Just look at the $1 billion that Microsoft shelled out for an equity stake in OpenAI (the company is one of the few that is pursuing Strong AI). So what has been the result of all this activity? What have been the breakthroughs for AI this year?

American localization specialist Lionbridge Technologies has been employing machine translation tools for many years. Eventually, its customers started asking for multilingual training data. Today, Lionbridge has a separate division entirely dedicated to AI, doing everything from collection of chatbot training data to image annotation, audio transcription and even multilingual content moderation services. To find out more about the work of the division, AI Business talked to Aristotelis Kostopoulos, vice president of product solutions, artificial intelligence at Lionbridge. Q: The AI division at Lionbridge grew out of the machine translation business, but today it does so much more.

Walmart and Nuro announced a collaboration today in which the two companies will pilot autonomous grocery delivery in Houston, TX via Nuro's self-driving pod-like vehicles. In the coming months, the autonomous delivery service will be available to Houston customers who have opted into the program. The service will use R2, Nuro's custom-built delivery vehicle that carries only products with no onboard driver or passengers, and autonomous Toyota Priuses, all powered by Nuro's proprietary self-driving software and hardware. Nuro's R2 pods are low-speed vehicles roughly half the size of regular cars. There are two compartments for cargo, and literally no room for a driver. The advantage of the R2 is that is is more nimble than a full-sized auto and can't drive as fast.

If you want to create convincing output for some purpose, something that isn't real but seems to be, how do you do it? Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are an approach which holds a lot of promise. They provide a form of unsupervised learning, where a system can improve its performance over time without human feedback. Imagine that you're an artist hoping to get rich by creating fake "previously undiscovered" Rembrandts. Your works have to be good enough to fool the experts.

The New York Stock Exchange floor is devoid of humans and runs primarily on technology conducting ... [ ] the electronic trading activities. We've been told that there is nothing to worry about artificial intelligence, robots and technology. New technologies will only replace mundane, repetitive jobs and free up workers to do more meaningful work, claims the media and top management consulting firms. Last week, the House Financial Services Committee's Task Force on Artificial Intelligence conducted a meeting with university academics and Wall Street financial services professionals to discuss the impact of AI on trading, robo-advisory, market surveillance and other activities within the financial services sector. To set the tone, the report by Wells Fargo predicting 200,000 banking jobs in the U.S. will be lost over the next decade--due to the introduction of new technologies--was cited by the chairman of the AI Task Force, Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill).

We are very excited to organize 4th Annual Global Artificial Intelligence Conference - Santa Clara- in January month! As we get closer to the conference, we want to invite you to participate in Global Big Data Conference Webinar - Online Warm-Up on December 13 (1.00PM - 2.00PM) PST. Free Online Webinar: Friday Dec 13th, 2019 1.00 PM PST - 2:00PM PST Welcome to webinar hosted by Global Big Data Conference! Please start registering by entering your name and email address to attend Webinar Schedule: 1:00PM-1:20PM: Image Augmentations for Semantic Segmentation and Object Detection (Vladimir Iglovikov, Sr. Machine Learning Engineer, Lyft) 1:20 PM- 1:50PM: Building Real World AI Solutions (Alexander Liss, Director, Ancestry) 1:50PM - 2:00PM: Q&A KRS Murthy (CEO, KRS Murthy) will moderate the webinar Profile Vladimir Iglovikov, Sr. Machine Learning Engineer, Lyft Topic - Image Augmentations for Semantic Segmentation and Object Detection Abstract In his talk, Vladimir will talk about image augmentations. How to use them to improve Deep Learning models?

Together with the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and Electron Device Society, IBM Research organized the 2nd AI Compute Symposium at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center THINKLab in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., on Oct 17. More than 200 distinguished academics, renowned thinkers, students, and innovators from across industry and academia assembled for the one-day symposium, which showcased leadership and advancement in research addressing AI compute from pervasive to general AI. The free event featured three keynotes, three invited talks, a student poster session, and a panel discussion. The keynoters were Dr. Luis Lastras, a researcher with IBM; Professor Wen-mei Hwu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); and Harvard University/Samsung Fellow Donhee Ham. Lastras provided an exciting overview of research projects from IBM related to natural language processing and its evolution.

Where have we been, where are we now, and where are we headed? I've written this in first person format so the reader can see it through my eyes from the trenches, including observations, conclusions and questions. In looking back over time, it helps me to revisit milestone articles I've written and read. Although my first published paper on our AI R&D was in 2002, I'll start by looking back at a futuristic scenario on the American healthcare system published in 2010. A decade is a nice round number and was also the same year my old friend and former business partner Russell Borland passed away unexpectedly. Russell was a close friend from the early 1980s on. He was involved with our journey at KYield since inception in the mid 1990s, so losing him was a shock. I emailed the healthcare scenario to Vint Cerf who asked me if he could share it -- the paper was on the web so of course I said yes. The next thing I know enormous numbers of downloads were occurring (don't underestimate Vint's network, or Google's). We stopped counting at several million views from healthcare institutions all over the world, and that's just on our site (others have published the paper on the web without permission).

Billionaire Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel called on American technology companies to step up innovation and resist pressures to reject military partnerships, arguing the U.S. is lagging behind China in the technology race. "The China dynamic has changed things tremendously in the last few years. China is going to force us to compete, to think much harder, [about] how we can deploy technologies much faster," Thiel said during a discussion at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Friday, which was livestreamed on Fox Nation. Thiel was commenting on a study by data and analytics company Govini, which showed that the U.S.'s share in global research and development spending declined from more than 60 percent in 1967, to less than 30 percent today. Meanwhile, China's share of the world R&D spending has increased significantly and today China has a larger share than the U.S. did at the height of the Cold War. "In the 90s and maybe still in the 2000s, we thought the Cold War was over.