It is becoming increasingly evident that China is not prepared to continue being second best in the world of technology. Their meteoric rise in many areas, including artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and smartphones, is making the world of technology sit up and take notice. Now the world sees how the ambitious plans of President Xi Jiping to overtake other technologically strong countries are nothing new. Indeed it has been a legacy handed down since the inception of the People's Republic of China. Even though the trade war between the first and second-largest economies of the world persists, China is continuing unabated in a race that they are determined to win. This is how China is becoming more dominant in AI and other technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has opened up a world of opportunities for business owners by collecting new types of data and deriving insights that can positively influence consumers on both an individual and group basis. Each of these new opportunities can either interact with consumers through front-end user interfaces or work to deliver information to consumers through back-end development. Examples include customer chat bots, product recommendations, content creation and curation, as well as predictive analysis in reporting. One of the most important ways AI can be used in digital marketing is to enhance the value of customer loyalty programs for both businesses and consumers. In order to gain retailer rewards such as discounts and coupons, customers are often willing to offer data – age and location demographics, buying habits and preferences – which AI technologies can use to predict how individual customers, as well as all consumers in a given geography, will respond to future marketing initiatives.

So, imagine you are driving along in your fancy high-tech car, minding your own business, with your yet-to-be-feature-complete full self-driving software activated, and suddenly the car slams the brakes to a full stop, like a donkey that had an epiphany that what it was doing just didn't serve any purpose and therefor just refused to move any further. Sure, it's great that something useful is becoming of outdated fossil fuel vehicles. Giants having fun with them riding down hills seem like a good solution, and I guess they don't burn gas in the process, but my car might get nervous around these guys. For the time being, my car didn't stop, but when the brain of the car gets more clever than that of a cricket, it might recognize the car, and panic! It does so already when it sees broken off tree branches laying on the side of the road.

We are pleased to launch PennAI – an accessible artificial intelligence system and open-source software developed by at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine by faculty, staff, and students from the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI). The components of PennAI include a human engine (i.e., the user); a user-friendly interface for interacting with the AI; a machine learning engine for data mining; a controller engine for launching jobs and keeping track of analytical results; a graph database for storing data and results (i.e., the memory); an AI engine for monitoring results and automatically launching or recommending new analyses; and a visualization engine to displaying results and analytical knowledge. This AI system provides a comprehensive set of integrated components for automated machine learning (AutoML), thus providing a data science assistant for generating useful results from large and complex data problems. More details can be found in our PennAI publications.

At Automation Anywhere, we are passionate in our belief that Software Bots can free people to create, think, discover, and ultimately build great companies. With our Digital Workforce platform, we are contributing to build a Digital Workforce, 3M strong, by 2020. Our platform includes Robotic Process Automation, Cognitive technologies and Analytics and is adopted by over 700 of the world's leading enterprises and many are calling it one of the most essential and disruptive technologies in the market today. We have dedicated the last decade to driving the adoption of Robotic Process Automation technology in leading Financial Services, BPO, Healthcare, Technology, and Insurance companies to name a few, across more than 90 countries. We are taking the lead to define the category and create the blueprint to make it successful.

The first artificial intelligence-based (--AI--) symptom-assessment application to be made available in Swahili has been launched today, unlocking access to health information and advice for more than 100 million people seeking healthcare in East Africa.-- The app, developed by Ada Health, combines a world-class medical knowledge database with intelligent reasoning technology to help users understand what might be causing their symptoms, as well as providing localized guidance about what they should do next. In doing so, the app aims to empower patients to make informed decisions about their own health, while also complementing and supporting existing healthcare services, doctors and clinics.-- Globally, four billion people - more than half the world--s population - lack access to basic health services, with the disadvantages of this global health challenge often disproportionately experienced by people in low- and middle-income countries. East Africa is a region that is acutely affected by this issue. By offering an AI-powered symptom-assessment medical application in Swahili, a language spoken by over 100 million people across the likes of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique and Somalia, Ada hopes to significantly improve access to quality health information and advice, particularly for young people and families.

Every part of our daily lives can play a role in causing it, from electricity, to transportation, the homes we live in, the food we eat, even the healthcare services we rely on. And all of those aspects of our lives are also affected by climate change. Much of what we know about the impacts of climate change comes from sophisticated computer models. Now, a group of computer scientists is calling on their colleagues to put advanced computing and artificial intelligence to work to solve the climate problem. "A.I. can help pinpoint where deforestation is happening using satellite imagery or aerial imagery," said David Rolnick, lead author of a new study outlining how artificial intelligence could help with climate change.

A new partnership between computing giant IBM and The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York is aiming to embed AI into the full spectrum of the fashion industry. The partnership will see a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools covering deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision applied to the fashion industry, across design and development, merchandising, supply chain and retail. It will see the FIT/Infor Design and Technology Lab (DTech Lab) build on a previous partnership with the technology heavyweight, which saw the DTech Lab work with IBM and leading fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger. The project, Reimagine Retail, focused on using AI to increase the brand's competitive position through optimisations in product design, supply chain and market insights. "Reimagine Retail was a powerful example of what happens when fashion partners with a global tech leader to advance challenging innovations," said Michael Ferraro, director of the FIT/Infor DTech Lab.

Although Computer Vision (CV) has only exploded recently (the breakthrough moment happened in 2012 when AlexNet won ImageNet), it certainly isn't a new scientific field. Computer scientists around the world have been trying to find ways to make machines extract meaning from visual data for about 60 years now, and the history of Computer Vision, which most people don't know much about, is deeply fascinating. In this article, I'll try to shed some light on how modern CV systems, powered primarily by convolutional neural networks, came to be. I'll start with a work that came out in the late 1950s and has nothing to do with software engineering or software testing. One of the most influential papers in Computer Vision was published by two neurophysiologists -- David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel -- in 1959.

The next time you get sick, your care may involve a form of the technology people use to navigate road trips or pick the right vacuum cleaner online. Artificial intelligence is spreading into health care, often as software or a computer program capable of learning from large amounts of data and making predictions to guide care or help patients. It already detects an eye disease tied to diabetes and does other behind-the-scenes work like helping doctors interpret MRI scans and other imaging tests for some forms of cancer. Now, parts of the health system are starting to use it directly with patients. During some clinic and telemedicine appointments, AI-powered software asks patients initial questions about their symptoms that physicians or nurses normally pose.