At the vast Pernis refinery in Rotterdam, where Royal Dutch Shell processes 20m tonnes of crude oil a year, any glitches or unplanned downtime can be costly. The equipment and operating conditions at Europe's largest refinery are monitored using 50,000 sensors that generate 100,000 measurements a minute. Last year Shell started using machine learning to better analyse and process that data. The model was designed to predict failures in control valves, and it allowed workers to carry out maintenance or adjust operating conditions as needed. The work at Pernis is an example of how oil and gas companies use artificial intelligence and machine learning to notice problems before they occur, sometimes months in advance.

Microsoft's recent victory in landing a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract called JEDI could make life more complicated for one of the software giant's partners: the independent artificial-intelligence research lab OpenAI. OpenAI was created in 2015 by Silicon Valley luminaries including Elon Musk to look to the far horizon, and save the world. The newborn nonprofit said it had commitments totaling $1 billion and would work on AI "to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." But OpenAI restructured into a for-profit this year, saying it needed more money to fulfill its goals, and took $1 billion from Microsoft in a deal that involves helping the company's cloud division develop new AI technology. Now Microsoft's JEDI win raises the possibility that OpenAI's work for the benefit of humanity may also serve the US military.

Microsoft's recent victory in landing a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract called JEDI could make life more complicated for one of the software giant's partners: the independent artificial-intelligence research lab OpenAI. OpenAI was created in 2015 by Silicon Valley luminaries including Elon Musk to look to the far horizon, and save the world. The newborn nonprofit said it had commitments totaling $1 billion and would work on AI "to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." But OpenAI restructured into a for-profit this year, saying it needed more money to fulfill its goals, and took $1 billion from Microsoft in a deal that involves helping the company's cloud division develop new AI technology. Now Microsoft's JEDI win raises the possibility that OpenAI's work for the benefit of humanity may also serve the US military.

While ranking the programs, we kept in mind the ROI. So, the biggest factor for Ranking is based upon return on investment and the skills delivery to the students. DataTrained is one of the companies working in the Retail Analytics domain. It was founded in 2012. They also impart training in data science and management space.

There's booming demand for silicon custom-designed to accelerate AI workloads, as the gobs of cash raised by startups like Hailo Technologies, Graphcore, and Untether AI demonstrates. The fierce competition isn't deterring Blaize (formerly Thinci), which hopes to stand out from the crowd with a novel graph streaming architecture. The nine-year-old startup's claimed system-on-chip performance is impressive, to be fair, which is likely why it's raised nearly $100 million from investors including automotive component maker Denso. Blaize emerged from stealth today with $87 million raised over several venture rounds from strategic and venture backers Denso, Daimler, SPARX Group, Magna, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Temasek, GGV Capital, SGInnovate, and Magna; the second-to-last round closed in September 2018 and totaled $65 million. The company initially focused on what it called vision processors -- chips to speed up vision, radar, and sensor fusion tasks -- before expanding to encompass datacenters, edge infrastructure devices, and enterprise client devices.

New technological advancements are shortening the way of life span of prevailing tech. Hence, there's a continuous demand for workers to stay up to date. It has become essential to survival in the industry. New upcoming technologies are making tech systems faster, agile and superior. Which technologies are going to be the movers and shakers on the world of tech in 2020?

KUALA LUMPUR – Sony Corp.'s gaming arm will establish its first Southeast Asian video game studio in Malaysia in 2020. Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC and the Malaysian government jointly said the studio, named Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., will provide art and animation to develop global game titles for its PlayStation consoles. Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan said in a statement the firm decided to set up the studio in Malaysia because of the country's talented human resources, vibrant game ecosystem and the government's support. Malaysian International Trade and Industry Minister Datuk Darell Leiking said in the statement that the Sony studio "is a key win for Malaysia and a testament to the nation's efforts to attract strategic high-quality investments from international companies."

In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by directly monitoring our brain signals. Crops would exist that doubled their biomass in three hours. Humanity would be well on the way to ending its dependency on fossil fuels. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. In recent decades, the letter went on, a number of worrying social indicators – such as wealth inequality and public debt – had started to climb in western nations, indicating that these societies were approaching a period of upheaval. The letter-writer would go on to predict that the turmoil in the US in 2020 would be less severe than the American civil war, but worse than the violence of the late 1960s and early 70s, when the murder rate spiked, civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests intensified and domestic terrorists carried out thousands of bombings across the country. The author of this stark warning was not a historian, but a biologist.

Richard Bartle is one of the leading academics on video games and is a senior lecturer and honorary professor of computer game design at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. He might seem an unusual choice to talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence, but video game developers have grappled with the ethics of creating virtual worlds with AI beings in them for a long time. Not only do they have to consider the ethics of what they create in their own worlds, the game designers also have to consider how much control to grant players over the AI characters who inhabit the worlds. If game developers are the gods, then players can be the demi-gods. He recently spoke about this topic in a fascinating talk in August on the IEEE Conference on Games in London. I interviewed him about our own interests in the intersection of AI, games, and ethics. He is in the midst of writing a book about the ethics of AI in games.

In the House of Councillors election of July 2019 two new Diet members were elected who each have severe physical disabilities. One is an Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patient and the other has Cerebral Palsy. Both are barely able to move their bodies and require large electric wheelchairs to get about. The assistance of a carer is also necessary. In particular, the ALS patient is dependent on an artificial respirator and is even unable to speak.