To stay ahead of the game and meet customer's needs, banks cannot afford to pay for costly and largely underused branches. Instead, the focus needs to shift to improving their online offerings. This past Friday was arguably the biggest day of the year for retailers, particularly online retailers. Throughout last week, you probably received emails about massive Black Friday discounts. Some of you might have put together wish lists to check out at the stroke of midnight while others used your phones, to scout whether a 30% discount was worth the still hefty price tags.

I am sure if you are into artificial intelligence and machine learning, at some point you may have thought about what dangers can AI bring into our lives. Ever asked the question of what can possibly be the real threat of artificial intelligence. Now, whether we like it or not, Artificial Intelligence is one of the biggest technological revolutions. A revolution that will lead humanity to the future. Tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google are spending millions, if not billions of dollars in AI researches.

China has issued new rules banning online video and audio providers from using artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality technologies to produce "fake news." The regulation published Friday by China's cyberspace authority said that both providers and users of online video news and audio services are "not allowed" to use new technologies such as deep learning and virtual reality to create, distribute and broadcast "fake news." "Fake news" has been generalised to mean anything from a mistake to a parody or a deliberate misinterpretation of facts. The rules come into effect on January 1, 2020. Failure to follow them could be considered a criminal offence, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said, without offering details on punishments.

Independent watchdog key to monitor artificial intelligence Geoff Maslen 01 June 2019 Nations that increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) devices to assist in decision-making should act immediately and adopt'an independent watchdog' to monitor them for possible risks to the public, according to two senior academics in New Zealand. John Zerilli and Colin Gavaghan have called on their government to establish an independent regulator to monitor "and address the risks associated with these digital technologies". "To protect us from the risks of advanced artificial intelligence, we need to act now," say the two Otago University academics. "The public should know what AI systems their government uses as well as how well they perform. Systems should be regularly evaluated and summary results made available to the public in a systematic format."

The principal tasks of artificial intelligence (AI) are training and inferencing. The former is a data-intensive process to prepare AI models for production applications. Training an AI model ensures that it can perform its designated inferencing task--such as recognizing faces or understanding human speech--accurately and in an automated fashion. Inferencing is big business and is set to become the biggest driver of growth in AI. McKinsey has predicted that the opportunity for AI inferencing hardware in the data center will be twice that of AI training hardware by 2025 ($9 billion to 10 billion vs. $4 billion to $5 billion today).

The use of facial recognition technology is continuing to expand, despite concerns about its accuracy and fairness and about how it could be used by governments to spy on people. These concerns have been heightened following a report by the Financial Times which shows that Chinese groups have a significant influence in shaping international standards regarding the technology. The report details how Chinese companies including ZTE, Dahua and China Telecom are proposing standards for facial recognition to the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the body responsible for global technical standards in the telecommunication industry. Usually, the standards set by the ITU are technical in nature, but human rights campaigners say the proposals under discussion in this case are more like policy recommendations. The standards proposed include recommendations for use cases, suggesting that facial recognition can be used by police, by employers to monitor employees, and for spotting specific targets in crowds.

Captivating images capture by custom-built drones have revealed the damage to the Greenland Ice Sheet that is being caused by rising global temperatures. The images, which have been taken as part of an EU-funded project to track changes in the world's second-largest ice sheet, are the first drone-based observations of how fractures form and expand under meltwater lakes. The expanding fractures cause catastrophic lake drainages, during which huge quantities of water are transferred to below the surface of the ice. Changes in ice flow occur on a much shorter timescales than were previously considered possible, said the research team, which was led by the University of Cambridge. 'It's possible we've under-estimated the effects of these glaciers on the overall instability of the Greenland Ice Sheet,' said drone pilot Tom Chudley, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute.

The use of robots in the workplace has more than double in just a 12 year period, displacing 50 percent of many human workers across the US, studies have found. A new interactive map provides more detail into this'robot exposure' by highlighting the top 10 metropolitan areas threatened by this machine takeover – California being listed as number one. In addition to areas most at risk, experts found that automation is displacing younger, less-educated and minority workers at the highest rates. The study and map were developed by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank headquartered in New York City, which looked across more than 250 metropolitan areas to understand this'robot intensity'. Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Ana, California were ranked number one, followed by Chicago, Naperville and Joliet in Illinois.

Experts believe that artificial intelligence (AI) is the future as it has the potential to transform everything right from healthcare to space exploration. Enterprises have already started looking at ways to utilize AI to process and protect data. Some of you might have heard the term'big data'. Big data is based mainly on AI and machine learning (ML), and is not only useful in collecting data, but in data protection too. Endpoint security has come a long way over the years right from using an anti-virus solution to using AI for data protection from cybercriminals.

According to a recent press release, "Today, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced $15 million in funding for 23 projects to accelerate the incorporation of machine learning and artificial intelligence into the energy technology and product design processes as part of the Design Intelligence Fostering Formidable Energy Reduction (and) Enabling Novel Totally Impactful Advanced Technology Enhancements (DIFFERENTIATE) program. Launched in April of this year, the DIFFERENTIATE program aims to develop streamlined solutions to next-generation energy challenges. The program identified three general mathematical optimization problems that are common to many design processes. The selected projects then conceptualized machine learning and artificial intelligence-based solutions to help engineers execute and solve these problems in a manner that dramatically accelerates the pace of energy innovation." The release goes on, "Following the initial round of Phase I funding for the DIFFERENTIATE program, additional funding will be available to qualifying awardees at a future date… DIFFERENTIATE projects include: Iowa State University – Ames, Iowa. Iowa State University will develop machine learning tools to accelerate the inverse design of new microstructures in photovoltaics. The team will create a new deep generative model to combat challenges in real-world inverse design problems. The proposed inverse design tools, if successful, will produce novel, manufacturable material microstructures with improved electromagnetic properties relative to existing technology."