The Chancellor of the High Court has urged commercial lawyers to prepare for the disruptive impact of technology on the law, the legal system and legal profession before others "steal a march" on them. Sir Geoffrey Vos said the profession needed "to turn its incredible intellectual fire-power towards the development of the English common law, so that it can effectively tackle the problems thrown up by the use of big data, cryptoassets, on-chain smart contracts, and artificial intelligence". Expressing confidence that the English common law could adapt to these challenges, he added: "My plea is that you do not leave it too late, because there are many other brilliant lawyers in other jurisdictions who are motivated to steal a march on their common law colleagues in the UK." Giving the Commercial Bar Association's annual lecture this week, Sir Geoffrey warned commercial lawyers that it was too late to hope to retire before any of this became a reality. "It is already reality," he said. Rather, he encouraged lawyers "to think imaginatively about the world in which the commercial legal services of the future will be required".

It has been found that taking a look at standard ECG tests, AI can help identify patients who are more likely to die of any medical reason within a year. The researchers from Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania reached this conclusion after analyzing the results of 1.77 million ECGs and other records from almost 4,00,000 patients. The team of researchers used that data to compare ML-based models. The model can either directly analyze the raw ECG signals or depend on aggregated human-derived measures and commonly diagnose disease patterns. The neural network model was found to be more efficient which can directly analyze the ECG signals for predicting the one-year risk of death.

Freshworks, a company that provides customer service software and automation tools for businesses, has confirmed that it's raising $150 million in a series H round of funding co-led by Alphabet's CapitalG, Sequioa Capital, and Accel. This takes the company's total funding to nearly $400 million and follows its $100 million series G round last July that included the same three investors. This time around, however, Freshworks is valued at $3.5 billion, more than double its previous valuation. It's worth noting that Freshworks hasn't officially closed the fresh round of funding yet, having merely signed "definitive agreements" with the aforementioned investors -- it doesn't expect the financing to close until the end of the year. It appears the reason Freshworks preannounced the funding was due to a leak last week on an Indian news site via anonymous sources.

What is good for the country might not work for a city and what is good for a city might not work for a small community. Successful cities or communities are usually built via a bottom-up approach, called localism. The archaeological evidence at Harappa, Mohenjodaro and other such sites are a testimony to this. Be it the sanitation or the street connectivity, the planning looks way ahead of its time. However, today, the people of the modern cities struggle to commute, breathe and carry out their routine.

Day three of ADIPEC 2019 has just concluded here in Abu Dhabi, UAE and much was said about oil demand concerns. Morning discourse was coloured by the International Energy Agency's take that demand is set to plateau by 2030 due to a pick up in the use of electric vehicles around the world. In its latest market projections, the IEA said overall demand for energy is set to increase by 1% every year until 2040, however headline demand will plateau ten years earlier than it had previously forecast. Elsewhere in its World Energy Outlook report, the IEA said US shale output, which has made the country the world's biggest oil producer, is likely to stay higher for longer than previously projected, with the country accounting for 85% of the increase in global oil production by 2030, and for 30% of the increase in natural gas. Meanwhile, switching tack to the coming 12 months, OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo said an uptick in demand for 2020 may be on the cards should the US-China trade stand-off end.

I recently participated in a podcast interview that outlined the practice of cognitive experience design, also known as CognitiveXD. In hearing the questions, I realized we needed a crisp definition that outlines what CognitiveXD is, and how we can use CognitiveXD to solve big systemic problems. Q: What is cognitive experience design? A: Cognitive experience design or #CognitiveXD is the practice of using artificial intelligence (ai) technologies to reduce the human mental effort and time required to complete a task. Q: Why do we need cognitive experience design?

NEW YORK--China is eroding America's military superiority and conventional deterrence through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems …

At its AI Summit today in San Francisco, Intel touted a raft of AI training and inference hardware for deployments ranging from cloud to edge and designed to support organizations at various points of their AI journeys. The company revealed its Movidius Myriad Vision Processing Unit (VPU), codenamed "Keem Bay," for edge media, computer vision and inference applications. The company said the VPU, available the first half of 2020, incorporates "highly efficient architectural advances" and will deliver more than 10 times the inference performance of current Movidius VPUs and up to six times the power efficiency of competitor processors. Intel claimed that "early performance testing indicates that Keem Bay will offer more than 4x the inference throughput of Nvidia's similar-range TX2 SOC at one third less power, and nearly equivalent throughput of Nvidia's next higher class SOC, Nvidia Xavier, at one fifth the power. Keem Bay will also be supported by Intel's OpenVINO Toolkit for development of computer vision applications – "addresses a key pain point for developers -- allowing them to try, prototype and test AI solutions on a broad range of Intel processors before they buy hardware," according to Intel. It also will be incorporated into Intel's newly announced Dev Cloud for the Edge, launched today, designed to allow developers to test algorithms on any Intel hardware. Intel also offered the first live demonstrations and additional architectural details of its Nervana Neural Network Processors for training (NNP-T1000) and inference (NNP-I1000) ASICS for cloud and data center environments, first announced last August at the Hot Chips conference. In discussing the company's AI products roadmap (see above), Naveen Rao, corporate VP/GM of Intel's AI Products Group, said the combination of "the new Intel hardware will enable the industry to embrace much larger and more complex AI algorithms, expanding what can be achieved with AI in the cloud and data center, an edge server, or an IoT device." "With this next phase of AI, we're reaching a breaking point in terms of computational hardware and memory," said Rao. "Purpose-built hardware like Intel Nervana NNPs and Movidius Myriad VPUs are necessary to continue the incredible progress in AI.

Internet censorship by authoritarian governments prohibits free and open access to information for millions of people around the world. Attempts to evade such censorship have turned into a continually escalating race to keep up with ever-changing, increasingly sophisticated internet censorship. Censoring regimes have had the advantage in that race, because researchers must manually search for ways to circumvent censorship, a process that takes considerable time. New work led by University of Maryland computer scientists could shift the balance of the censorship race. The researchers developed a tool called Geneva (short for Genetic Evasion), which automatically learns how to circumvent censorship.