The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has set in motion the crafting of the country's Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector roadmap as it vowed to position the Philippines as an AI powerhouse in the ASEAN region. Trade Undersecretary Rafaelita M. Aldaba of the Competitiveness and Innovation Group led the formal signing of an agreement with distinguished data scientists, Dr. Christopher P. Monterola and Dr. Erika Fille T. Legara, for the formulation of an AI Roadmap. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) where technology becomes more enmeshed with everyday life, AI advancement is seen as one of the key factors to help keep our country competitive. AI's importance is underscored as it is emerging to be a potential bright spot for our country, with wide opportunities for growth for our competent workforce. "The formulation of the AI Roadmap is very important and timely. This effort provides the impetus that will move the country forward to keep up with the rapidly changing times," said Aldaba.

Today's IT teams are dealing with a growing mountain of data. What's more, they're finding themselves having to use a multitude of tools in order to monitor and manage that data. In situations of technical outages, this can make it incredibly difficult and time-intensive to identify and resolve underlying issues. Anyone in business knows that even just a tiny amount of down-time can have a serious and costly impact on the bottom line. And it's the IT team that bears the brunt of the burden.

Despite being AI powerhouse, Israel's academic institutions find themselves outpaced by thriving industry as many students turn to online classes Israeli universities are struggling to keep up with the demand for academic programs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, amid a severe shortage of skilled workers in the booming sector. There are presently dozens of AI courses and tracks offered at the undergraduate and master's level in academic institutions across the country. However, there is not enough space to accommodate the number of students wishing to enroll. The lack of sufficient academic staff and programs is exacerbating the already-existing tech talent crunch, estimated at roughly 15,000 workers. Katrina Ligett, an associate professor of computer science and head of the new program on Internet and Society at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says that programs for cutting-edge technologies like AI are still very young and will need time to catch up.

The 2019 China New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Report was officially released on 24 May 2019 during the Pujiang Innovation Forum. According to analysts, the biggest challenge that China's AI development is facing relates to very weak links between universities and universities/research institutes. For instance, although China ranks first in the world for number of papers published, these mainly originate from universities and research institutes. There still are no strong and effective mechanisms to the supply and demand of AI results, which largely remain not market-oriented. The number of industry actors participating in government-funded AI research is still very low.

When it comes to hyped technologies that could aid in the corporate fight against climate change, the blockchain and artificial intelligence are probably neck-in-neck. For those who view both with skepticism, I would suggest there's one big difference in the adoption cycle of the two. I can cite numerous pilot projects involving blockchain, but I think it's reasonable to doubt how it will scale. AI, on the other hand, is already driving some very real-world corporate progress toward stated sustainability goals, particularly energy efficiency. Exhibit A is the warehouse operation I wrote about in October, Lineage Logistics, which is using machine learning combined with sensors and data about weather and other parameters to reduce the amount of electricity it uses to keep food frozen. So far, it has cut annual power consumption by 33 million kilowatt-hours, saving $4 million along the way.

A think tank has released two deepfake videos which appear to show election rivals Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn advocating each other for Britain's top role. The clips are produced by Future Advocacy and intend to show that people can no longer necessarily trust what they see in videos, not just to question what they read and hear. Boris Johnson has a message for you.#GE2019 Jeremy Corbyn has a message for you.#GE2019 In the era of fake news, people are becoming increasingly aware not to believe everything they read.

Over the weekend, a viral twitter thread exposed several issues in the credit lending decisioning process for Apple's new payment card, underwritten by Goldman Sachs. For some context, Apple and Goldman Sachs were involved in alleged gender discrimination in credit card limits caused by biased algorithms powering Apple Card's credit lending decisioning process. There was widespread social media instances confirming this discrimination, including Apple's very own co-founder, Steve Wozniak and his spouse. The primary issue here is with the Black Box algorithm that generated Apple's credit lending decisions. As laid out in the Twitter thread, Apple Card's customer service reps were rendered powerless to the algorithm's decision.

Cisco recently announced how its three most recent acquisitions will add value to its Cisco Contact Center help desk solution that's currently used by more than three million agents in over 30,000 enterprises. The announcement was made at the 10th annual Cisco Contact Center Summit on September 19, 2019, in Hollywood, Florida, which was attended by 1,100 Cisco salespersons, partners, and customers. Cisco's Contact Center is an integrated communications application suite that delivers intelligent call routing, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multi-channel contact management to contact center agents over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Cisco has been enhancing the capabilities of its contact center offerings by acquiring various products over the past year or so, and integrating those offerings' features and functionalities to its feature stack. Beginning in May 2018, Cisco finished its acquisition of business intelligence (BI) specialist Accompany.

REUTERS: Alphabet Inc's Google signed its biggest cloud computing customer in healthcare yet, according to an announcement on Monday (Nov 11), gaining with the deal datasets that could help it tune potentially lucrative artificial intelligence tools. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Google teaming up with Ascension to collect personal health-related information of millions of Americans across 21 states. The partnership will also explore artificial intelligence and machine learning applications to help improve clinical effectiveness as well as patient safety, Ascension said in a statement. Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian has made it a priority in his first year on the job to aggressively chase business from leaders in six industries, including healthcare. The company previously had touted smaller healthcare clients, such as the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine.

"China is betting on AI and investing in AI and deploying AI on a scale no other country is doing," says Abishur Prakash, a futurist and author of books about the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on geopolitics. As developments in AI accelerate, some in the US fear that the ability of China's powerful central government to marshal data and pour resources into the field will push it ahead. The country has announced billions in funding for start-ups, launched programmes to woo researchers from overseas and streamlined its data policies. It has announced news-reading robots and AI-powered strategy for foreign relations. Perhaps most alarming to the US are its efforts to incorporate it into its military. In the last few years, Washington has toughened oversight of Chinese investments, banned US firms from doing business with certain Chinese companies and increased criminal prosecution of alleged technology theft.