Sifted, an online publication covering technology and entrepreneurship that is backed by the Financial Times, has included Romanian Maria Luciana Axente on a list of "30 Artificial Intelligence people in Europe to follow on Twitter." "Home to some of the world's top artificial intelligence (AI) labs, Europe is brimming with AI experts and many of them are using Twitter to talk about their work. They're sharing academic papers, job opportunities, AI news and other bits of information that can be hard to come by through a standard Google search. But finding these people on Twitter isn't always easy, so Sifted has curated a handy list of AI gurus for you to follow and thrive off," a description of the list reads. Maria Axente is the artificial intelligence program driver and AI for Good Lead at PwC in London. In her role, Axente advises PwC's partners across industry, academia, governments and more on how to harness the power of AI in an ethical and responsible manner.

"Will these developments enable people to attain higher living standards, better working conditions, greater economic security, and improved health and longevity? The answers to these questions are not predetermined. They depend upon the institutions, investments, and policies that we deploy to harness the opportunities and confront the challenges posed by this new era," the report said. The warning signals keep flashing. In the past week alone, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issued a report saying that automation has "contributed substantially" to reducing the portion of national income that goes to US workers over the past two decades, Bloomberg News reported. Technological efficiencies will result in an estimated 200,000 job cuts in the US banking industry in the next decade, according to a Wells Fargo & Co. report, Bloomberg also reported.

In a bid to tackle the spread of fake news and misleading videos created using artificial intelligence (AI) and bots, China has released new rules that ban online video and audio providers from using deep learning to produce fake news without a proper disclosure. Failing to provide a disclosure that the post in question was created with AI or VR technology is now a criminal offence, according to the Chinese government. The rules go into effect on January 1st, 2020, and will be enforced by the Cyberspace Administration of China, The Verge reported. The regulation comes about one-and-a-half months after California introduced legislation to make political deepfakes illegal, outlawing the creation or distribution of videos, images, or audio of politicians doctored to resemble real footage within 60 days of an election. The new regulation published 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, according to South China Morning Post.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will have a positive impact on international trade. Already, specific applications in areas such as data analysis and translation services are helping to boost companies' exports. Here are 6 practical examples of the use of artificial intelligence to help companies to export more abroad. To the extent that AI stimulates productivity growth, it will promote greater economic growth and provide new opportunities for international trade. But it will take time for economies to incorporate and effectively use new AI technologies that require significant investment, access to skilled people and a transformation of business practices.

China has just taken a giant step forward in its ambitions to control everything that is done on the Internet, with the launch of a new "rights in cyberspace" law. It can sometimes seem that the Internet is a "lawless place", where anyone can do whatever they want; in reality, our actions on the Internet have more and more consequences, and the best example of this is China. The communist government has not hidden its interest in implementing more controls on the Internet, with the aim of "guaranteeing the rights and interests" of its citizens; however, along the way it is taking decisions that may violate others, such as privacy. The latest law, which came into force on December 1, is perhaps the most controversial. It implies the obligation to implement facial recognition to hire phone lines or mobile Internet, for all new registrations.

It's that time of the year when banking industry pundits turn their thoughts to the top trends of the upcoming year. I'd like to take a different tact and posit the top debates the industry will wrestle with in the coming decade. The branch debate is certainly not new. But it's far from resolved, and will accelerate in the next few years. Over the next few years, this debate will focus less on consumer behaviors and preferences and more on the potentially disparate economic impact of branch closings.

Brexit supporters are more likely to live in areas most threatened by the economic impact of automation, according to a study of the impact of robots and artificial intelligence in the workplace. A map of the parts of the UK likely to be hit by automation fits more closely with the map of leave voters than any other factor, said the Institute for the Future of Work (IFW). Up to 15 million workers are expected to have their employment prospects endangered by automation over the next decade, according to a series of reports that have tried to gauge the impact of new technology in the workplace. In 2015, the Bank of England estimated as many as 15m jobs would need to change or be lost through automation. A report by the consultancy firm PwC found that 10m, or 30%, of jobs in Britain were potentially under threat from breakthroughs in artificial intelligence In some sectors half the jobs could go, it warned.

A Slate staff writer who regularly reports on Christianity responds to Andrew D. Hudson's "A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Robot Walk Into a Bar." The Michigan-based company Covenant Eyes markets itself to Christians who want to stop viewing pornography. Its software takes screenshots of a user's screen activity, uses A.I. to scan it for pornographic imagery, and then sends regular reports to the user and a designated "ally" who has agreed to hold him accountable. The company's name comes from a Bible verse that reads, "I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman." Everyone wants technology to reflect their own worldview, and religious conservatives are no exception.

With new neural network architectures popping up every now and then, it's hard to keep track of them all. Knowing all the abbreviations being thrown around (DCIGN, BiLSTM, DCGAN, anyone?) can be a bit overwhelming at first. So I decided to compose a cheat sheet containing many of those architectures. Most of these are neural networks, some are completely different beasts. Though all of these architectures are presented as novel and unique, when I drew the node structures… their underlying relations started to make more sense. The Neural Network Zoo (download or get the poster). One problem with drawing them as node maps: it doesn't really show how they're used. For example, variational autoencoders (VAE) may look just like autoencoders (AE), but the training process is actually quite different. The use-cases for trained networks differ even more, because VAEs are generators, where you insert noise to get a new sample. AEs, simply map whatever they get as input to the closest training sample they "remember".

AI and broadband are eating retail for breakfast. In the first half of 2019, we've seen 19 retailer bankruptcies. And the retail apocalypse is only accelerating. What's coming next is astounding. Why drive when you can speak?