"Digital transformation has become the mainstay for all businesses today and one of the drivers of this revolution is Artificial Intelligence (AI). There is no denying that AI is destroying seemingly insurmountable business barriers at an all astounding rate. Today, AI is instrumental in transforming the way all industries work – from dynamic manufacturing, healthcare industries or the rapidly evolving automotive and power sector," says Yeshraj Singh, Strategic Initiatives Leader – Digital Transformation, QuEST Global in an article published by Energetica India.

The 3rd Annual Internet of Manufacturing South is a very important conference for the construction and support of the industrial ecosystem. It's a great pleasure to come and compare new ideas. In the build up to Internet of Manufacturing South 2019 we caught up with Arnie Kravitz the CTO of Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) to discuss Digital Twin Technologies, AI, & Automation and its benefit for manufacturers. What are your views on Digital Twin technologies? How do you think they will affect manufacturers' operations in the future?

One of the biggest sources of anxiety about AI is not that it will turn against us, but that we simply cannot understand how it works. The solution to rogue systems that discriminate against women in credit applications or that make racist recommendations in criminal sentencing, or that reduce the number of black patients identified as needing extra medical care, might seem to be "explainable AI." But sometimes, what's just as important as knowing "why" an algorithm made a decision, is being able to ask "what" it was being optimized for in the first place? Machine-learning algorithms are often called a black box because they resemble a closed system that takes an input and produces an output, without any explanation as to why. Knowing "why" is important for many industries, particularly those with fiduciary obligations like consumer finance, or in healthcare and education, where vulnerable lives are involved, or in military or government applications, where you need to be able to justify your decisions to the electorate.

How will humanity manage the growth of artificial intelligence systems? To answer that, French and Canadian officials are drafting a blueprint for an expert council that they hope could be a prototype for global cooperation on AI policy. The Global Partnership for AI (GPAI), advanced over the past year by French president Emmanuel Macron and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, has started to take shape in a series of transatlantic negotiations in the past few months. While many details have yet to be resolved, negotiators hope for a general understanding by the end of this year, according to Malik Ghallab, director emeritus of a French state robotics lab in Toulouse, who is active in the planning process. The idea is to create a standing forum – involving government, industry and academia – to monitor and debate the policy implications of AI globally.

CAIRO - 21 November 2019: The Cabinet, during its meeting on Thursday under Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli, approved a draft resolution on establishing a national council for artificial intelligence. The national artificial intelligence council, which follows the Cabinet, will be chaired by the communications and information technology minister and group a number of ministers and heads of several bodies concerned. The new national body will be responsible for outlining the national strategy for artificial intelligence and overseeing its implementation in a way that copes up with the international developments in this field. The council will be authorized to cooperate with the related regional and international bodies as well as to select the best artificial intelligence applications that could help offer safe, sustainable and smart services. During the meeting, the Cabinet approved authorizing the ICT minister to contract and sign agreements with Microsoft, ESRI, VMware and Teradata on the behalf of the government to be self-funded by the ministry during the years 2019/2020, 2020/2021, 2021/2022 and 2022/2023.

Those with it are at an increased risk of developing a dementia, making early detection critical. Researchers at Apple and the University of Tübingen believe the key might lie in iOS app usage habits. To this end, they propose a machine learning approach to reveal differences in patterns between users with and without cognitive impairment. It achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristics of 0.79, they report, indicating that it's able to correctly spot symptomatic subjects about 80% of the time. "The ubiquity of smartphone usage in many people's lives make it a rich source of information about a person's mental and cognitive state," wrote the research team in a preprint paper.

With drone photography, "we can track all of the trash in a creek, river, or stream, examine how it's distributed, and then apply machine–learning …

Dear Makers, We are hosting our fifth meetup on 27th November. Talk 1: Scalable Automatic Machine Learning in H2O by Erin LeDell The focus of this presentation is scalable and automatic machine learning using the H2O machine learning platform. H2O is an open source, distributed machine learning platform designed for big data. The core machine learning algorithms of H2O are implemented in high-performance Java, however, fully-featured APIs are available in R, Python, Scala, REST/JSON, and also through a web interface. Since H2O's algorithm implementations are distributed, this allows the software to scale to very large datasets that may not fit into RAM on a single machine.

Environmental conflicts have emerged as major issues that deeply affect the socio-economic state of a region and/or an entire nation. These conflicts are related to natural resources, land, wildlife, supply chains etc. The crises are widespread around the globe and it is increasing rapidly. According to the Environmental Justice Atlas, India has the most number of environmental conflicts, followed by Colombia and Nigeria. For instance, approximately 66% of all civil cases in the Supreme court of India are related to the land disputes for more than 2.5 million hectares of land.

NIWA and Microsoft Corp. are teaming up to make artificial intelligence handwriting recognition more accurate and efficient in a project that will support climate research. The project aims to develop better training sets for handwriting recognition technology that will "read" old weather logs. The first step is to use weather information recorded during a week in July 1939 when it snowed all over New Zealand, including at Cape Reinga. NIWA climate scientist Dr. Andrew Lorrey says the project has the potential to revolutionise how historic data can be used. Microsoft has awarded NIWA an AI for Earth grant for the artificial intelligence project, which will support advances in automating handwriting recognition.