From quite some time, it has been noticed that AI is making analytics more efficient and productive at workplaces. This change is making leaders revisit their business functions and processes. FREMONT, CA: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quite a trending topic in emerging technologies, with many organizations adopting its use in their day to day operations while others are still doubtful about its relevance in the workplace. AI can generate insights, offer remote and virtual assistance, and evaluate unstructured information generated by everyday devices. Let us have a closer look at how AI can revolutionize the workplace.

The UAE launched a new initiative to boost the country's status as a "global leader" in artificial intelligence. The project, titled the UAE AI Network,will bring together public and private sector organisations and academic institutions to help shape the nation's ambitious strategy to successfully integrate the technology. Artificial intelligence isn't coming to the UAE - it is already here World's first artificial intelligence university to open in Abu Dhabi "The UAE has made significant growth in its AI development and adoption road map globally, by connecting governments, private entities and international organisations to provide supportive platforms for this technology," said Omar Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, after launching the initiative. "The UAE AI Network is a concrete step towards achieving our leadership's vision in positioning the UAE as a global leader in artificial intelligence by 2031, as well as developing an integrated system that employs artificial intelligence in vital areas in the UAE." He said the project sought to bring together governments, private entities, international organisations, start-ups, research centres, academic institutions, business incubators and accelerators under one roof to discuss AI.

Cognitive computing can transform the practice of pharmacovigilance, from a tedious, resource-intensive process to a dynamic and efficient method focusing on risk management. FREMONT, CA: As pharmacovigilance deals with the activities relating to the detection, understanding, assessment, and prevention of adverse effects of pharmaceutical products, it has to navigate through a large volume of complex data. It cannot be avoided for its complex nature because pharmacovigilance audit accesses the compliance of pharma companies with worldwide laws, regulations, and FDA guidance. There arises a demand for handling enormous data by remaining compliant with the changing regulations globally while maintaining and improving the information contained in the individual case safety reports. The cost of handling pharmacovigilance is increasing with the exponential growth of cases received by pharmaceutical companies. The technical advancement like cloud-based solutions, mobile health devices, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and machine learning can improve the effectiveness of PV and the efficacy of drugs.

At the Common Good in the Digital Age tech conference recently held in Vatican City, Pope Francis urged Facebook executives, venture capitalists, and government regulators to be wary of the impact of AI and other technologies. "If mankind's so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest," he said. In a related but contextually different conversation, this summer Joy Buolamwini testified before Congress with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that multiple audits found facial recognition technology generally works best on white men and worst on women of color. What these two events have in common is their relationship to power dynamics in the AI ethics debate. Arguments about AI ethics can wage without mention of the word "power," but it's often there just under the surface. In fact, it's rarely the direct focus, but it needs to be. Power in AI is like gravity, an invisible force that influences every consideration of ethics in artificial intelligence. Power provides the means to influence which use cases are relevant; which problems are priorities; and who the tools, products, and services are made to serve. It underlies debates about how corporations and countries create policy governing use of the technology.

Life for millions of energy consumers in the United States came to a grinding halt several times in the last few years due to large-scale power blackouts caused by forest fires. Transmission and distribution lines and critical infrastructure belonging to utilities are spread over thousands of miles, often, through poorly accessible wilderness. Overgrown vegetation and dead trees can touch and fall on power lines causing break downs and short circuits. They can also cause forest fires, and when they go unchecked, flare up into major ones. The vegetation across thousands of miles requires constant monitoring, pruning, and maintenance to ensure the right-of-way is constantly maintained.

Nvidia, leading manufacturer of AI-enabled processor technology, and embedded specialist Syslogic are entering into a strategic partnership. The new addition is a Syslogic component by Nvidia's partner program Jetson Ecosystem. Nvidia lists companies that promote the development of products based on the Jetson platform and thus pave the way for AI applications. Thanks to the new partnership with Syslogic, Nvidia's processor technology will be increasingly used in the rough industrial environments. As an AI pioneer Nvidia currently offers three processor families with different performance capabilities with its Jetson platform - Jetson Nano, Jetson TX2 and Jetson AGX Xavier.

Google's announcement of a partnership with a major healthcare provider raises fresh privacy concerns as the tech company expands its footprint into the healthcare industry. Monday's announcement comes after the Wall Street Journal revealed Google had won access to health-related information of millions of Americans across 21 states through the partnership with Ascension – the second-largest healthcare system in the US. The Journal reported that the data involved in the project includes lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, including patient names and dates of birth. The collaboration, code-named "Project Nightingale", began in secret last year, according to the Journal. Google's parent company, Alphabet, on Monday officially signed Ascension, its biggest cloud computing customer in healthcare yet.

Scientists have built simulations to help explain behavior in the real world, including modeling for disease transmission and prevention, autonomous vehicles, climate science, and in the search for the fundamental secrets of the universe. But how to interpret vast volumes of experimental data in terms of these detailed simulations remains a key challenge. Probabilistic programming offers a solution--essentially reverse-engineering the simulation--but this technique has long been limited due to the need to rewrite the simulation in custom computer languages, plus the intense computing power required. To address this challenge, a multinational collaboration of researchers using computing resources at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has developed the first probabilistic programming framework capable of controlling existing simulators and running at large-scale on HPC platforms. The system, called Etalumis ("simulate" spelled backwards), was developed by a group of scientists from the University of Oxford, University of British Columbia (UBC), Intel, New York University, CERN, and NERSC as part of a Big Data Center project.

We are very excited to announce that Digamma.ai was selected to receive Microsoft AI for Earth Innovation Grant to apply Artificial Intelligence to help understand and protect the planet. AI for Earth awards grants to support projects that use AI to change the way people and organizations monitor, model, and manage Earth's natural systems. To date, they have awarded 435 grants to projects with impact in 71 countries. Our team will use the funds to continue and expand their work with U.S. Geological Survey to apply state-of-the-art Machine Learning algorithms towards the study of landslides and other natural hazards. The main objective of the partnership between Digamma.ai and USGS is not only to find the location of the landslides, but to gain a better understanding of the landscape responses to earthquakes and large storms.

Nvidia sales executive Kevin Connors says channel partners play an important role in the chipmaker's strategy for selling and supporting GPU-accelerated solutions for artificial intelligence -- a market that is still in its early stages and can provide the channel major growth opportunities as a result. "People are wanting higher performance computing at supercomputing levels, so that they can solve the world's problems, whether it's discovery of the next genome or better analysis and other such workloads," Connors, Nvidia's vice president of sales, global partners, said in an interview with CRN. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's GPUs have become increasingly important in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads, thanks to the parallel computing capabilities offered by their large number of cores and the substantial software ecosystem Nvidia has built around its CUDA platform, also known as Compute Unified Device Architecture, which debuted in 2007. "As a company, we've always been focused on solving tough problems, problems that no one else could solve, and we invested in that. And so when we came out with CUDA -- which allowed application developers to port their high-performance computing apps, their scientific apps, engineering apps to our GPU platform -- that really began the process of developing a very rich ecosystem for high-performance computing," said Connors, who has been with Nvidia since 2006.