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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more common in clinical practice. Increased computing power, greater volumes of data generated, and progress in machine learning promise new possibilities in clinical research and patient care. However these developments also raise certain ethical and legal questions. How will the role of doctors and patients change if AI is used in diagnostic procedures? Who is responsible for the consequences of AI-assisted processes in clinical contexts?

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Heng Swee Keat, announced today that Singapore will embark on a plan to develop and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform Singapore's economy and improve the lives of citizens. This plan is outlined in the National AI Strategy document that was unveiled at the SFF X SWITCH (Singapore FinTech Festival and Singapore Week of Innovation and TeCHnology) Conference. The National AI Strategy is key to the next stage of our Smart Nation journey. The key approach is to adopt a human-centric approach, and focus on delivering tangible benefits to citizens and businesses through AI. In line with this, we have identified five National AI Projects for a start, to use AI technologies to address key national challenges and deliver impactful social and/or economic benefits to Singaporeans.

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.

SoftBank Group Corp. is considering a plan to consolidate its Yahoo Japan internet business with the messaging service Line Corp. Z Holdings Corp., a unit of SoftBank's telecom arm formerly known as Yahoo Japan, confirmed Thursday that it's in talks with Tokyo-based Line about a possible merger, but said no final decision on a deal had been made. Line separately said it is considering such a merger along with other opportunities to increase value. Z Holdings shares surged in Tokyo, while Line's stock was poised to climb. SoftBank Corp., the domestic telecom arm of Masayoshi Son's business empire, holds a 44 percent stake in Z Holdings, while Line is controlled by South Korea's Naver Corp. SoftBank is considering setting up a new company with Naver, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. They may reach an agreement as early as this month, one of the people said.

Yoshua Bengio is recognized as one of the world's leading experts in artificial intelligence and a pioneer in deep learning. Yoshua Bengio's profound influence on the evolution of our society is undeniable. In 2017, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2018, he was is the computer scientist who collected the largest number of new citations in the world. In 2019, he received, jointly with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, the ACM A.M. Turing Award -- "the Nobel Prize of Computing" -- for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs.

Artificial Intelligence is still a nascent technology; much of the groundbreaking work moving the industry forward is done inside research labs. It's often from those labs that open source projects are started. That's why ODSC focuses on research at its conferences and invites the experts pushing the boundaries of AI to speak. Between the two upcoming conferences, researchers from more than 20 of the top research institutes in the country will deliver talks and lead trainings at ODSC West 2019. Institutes like Open AI, NASA's JPL, Google, MIT CSAIL, BAIR, The Turing Institute, and Max Planck - to name just a handful - are presenting at ODSC in 2019, helping us bring our community to the leading edge of AI.

For a long time, financial institutions had a buttoned-down reputation when it came to innovative thinking. Nowadays, even the most conventional and risk-averse parts of the economy are looking at Artificial Intelligence, not long ago considered an experimental, bleeding edge technology. Wall Street is the financial district of New York City. It is the home of the New York Stock Exchange, the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies. Nowhere is the change more dramatic than in Financial Services.