Reading this tweet by Maciej Ceglowski makes me want to set down a conjecture that I've been entertaining for the last couple of years (in part thanks to having read Maciej's and Kieran's previous work as well as talking lots to Marion Fourcade). The conjecture (and it is no more than a plausible conjecture) is simple, but it straightforwardly contradicts the collective wisdom that is emerging in Washington DC, and other places too. This collective wisdom is that China is becoming a kind of all-efficient Technocratic Leviathan thanks to the combination of machine learning and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism has always been plagued with problems of gathering and collating information and of being sufficiently responsive to its citizens' needs to remain stable. Now, the story goes, a combination of massive data gathering and machine learning will solve the basic authoritarian dilemma.

The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) is an international society of radiologists, medical physicists, and other medical professionals. The annual RSNA meeting with approximately 50,000 attendees in Chicago is a place for scientific exchange and clinical training. This year radiologists are invited to experience the hands-on cutting-edge technology of artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and virtual reality. The Fraunhofer MEVIS team will be pleased to welcome you at their booth, located at the "AI Showcase". Our experts are looking forward to providing you with a range of latest developments in deep learning and artificial intelligence, e.g., our free software MEVIS draw.

Scientists have made artificial nerve cells, paving the way for new ways to repair the human body. The tiny "brain chips" behave like the real thing and could one day be used to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's. A team from the University of Bath used a combination of maths, computation and chip design to come up with a way to replicate in circuit form what nerve cells (neurons) do naturally. Neurons carry signals to and from the brain and the rest of the body. Scientists are interested in replicating them, because of the potential that offers in treating diseases such as Alzheimer's, where neurons degenerate or die.

Huawei developed World's fastest AI training cluster. For Huawei, who previously listed 33 US companies as core suppliers for chips and processors, a ban on purchasing US goods was expected to take a hit on R&D at a crucial time. Several analysts predict the counter effect of this move is Huawei's redoubled effort to be technologically self-reliant, and a recent'AI breakthrough' might provide further backing for those comments. Huawei claimed to have developed the world's fastest artificial intelligence (AI) training cluster--Atlas 900. Atlas 900, dubbed the "fastest AI training model", combines "the power of 1, 024 Ascend 910 AI chips and has a computing capability as strong as the aggregation of 500, 000 personal computers," as reported in CCTV. At Huawei Connect 2019, the electronics maker said; "it takes Atlas 900 only 59.8 seconds to train ResNet-50, the gold standard for measuring AI training performance.

As is a global holiday sales event, apparently. Global Cyber Monday sales hit $30 billion, according to Salesforce. In the U.S., sales hit $8 billion, up 11% from last year. The deals started at an average of 23% off on November 25th, growing to almost one-third off by Cyber Monday. That, of course, is if retailers still have stock left after $4.4 billion in sales on U.S. Thanksgiving Day and a record $7.2 billion in sales on Black Friday in the the U.S. alone.

Consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica had offices in London, New York, Washington, as well as Brazil and Malaysia. The company boasted it can'find your voters and move them to action' through data-driven campaigns and a team that includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists. In 2013, Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan used his app, This Is Your Digital Life, to ask 270,000 Facebook users questions about their personalities. By answering them, the users granted Kogan access to not only their profiles but to those of their friends. He subsequently sold that information to Cambridge Analytica for $51million.

Today Microsoft announced an update to the Seeing AI app that will include new language output options, including Dutch, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. The iOS exclusive app was first released in 2017 as a free tool to help people with visual impairments navigate day-to-day life. It's built around a series of different channels, which users can select depending on their particular needs or circumstances. For the first time Microsoft's Seeing AI app will speak in languages other than English. Today's update enables audio output in Japanese, German, Spanish, Dutch, and French In one channel, the app will read out the text of any document the iPhone's or iPad's front facing camera is pointed at.

SAN FRANCISCO – The co-founders of Google are stepping down as executives of its parent company, Alphabet, ending a remarkable two decades during which Larry Page and Sergey Brin shaped a startup born in a Silicon Valley garage into one of the world's largest, most powerful -- and, increasingly, most feared -- firms in the world. Sundar Pichai, who has been leading Google as CEO for more than four years, will take on additional duties as Alphabet's CEO, the position held by Page. Brin and Page met as Stanford University graduate students in 1995 and started the company soon after. What started as a way to catalog the growing internet has now become one of the most powerful companies in the world. Google dominates online search and digital advertising and makes the world's most widely used operating system for smartphones, Android.

Some industry experts argue that machine learning (ML) will reverse an increasing trend toward passive investment funds. But although ML offers new tools that could help active investors outperform the indexes, it is unclear whether it will deliver a sustainable business model for active asset managers. Let's start with the positives A form of artificial intelligence, ML enables powerful algorithms to analyze large data sets in order make predictions against defined goals. Instead of precisely following instructions coded by humans, these algorithms self-adjust through a process of trial and error to produce increasingly more accurate prescriptions as more data comes in. ML is particularly adaptable to securities investing because the insights it garners can be acted on quickly and efficiently.