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.

"FRONTLINE investigates the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, from fears about work and privacy to rivalry between the U.S. and China. The documentary traces a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our lives, our jobs and our world, and allow the emergence of the surveillance society." As a business technologist, I am beyond excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning ("AI") and all of the application areas already impacted by the technology. The marriage of statistical analyses, adaptive pattern recognition, big data and computational efficiency to describe, explain, predict and actuate events, conditions and processes is thriving. It all came together at roughly the same time.

Albert Einstein's famous expression "spooky action at a distance" refers to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon seen on the most micro of scales. But machine learning seems to grow more mysterious and powerful every day, and scientists don't always understand how it works. The spookiest action yet is a new study of heart patients where a machine-learning algorithm decided who was most likely to die within a year based on echocardiogram (ECG) results, reported by New Scientist. The algorithm performed better than the traditional measures used by cardiologists. The study was done by researchers in Pennsylvania's Geisinger regional healthcare group, a low-cost and not-for-profit provider.

Madabhushi, along with 11 additional winners, will be recognized at the second annual cleveland.com/The HomeGrown Heroes celebrates the unsung heroes of our community who are working tirelessly on their start-ups, businesses, innovations and social organizations to fuel the economic development of our region. See Madabhushi's story in the video feature by John Pana at the top of this post. A Case Western Reserve University biomedical engineering researcher, Madabhushi is making award-winning gains in how artificial intelligence can contribute significantly not only to diagnosing cancer, but also giving physicians personalized guidance on the best treatment options for each patient. His work on how computers can more accurately predict which lung cancer patients would benefit from chemotherapy was named one of the Top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2018 by Prevention.

In some cases, AI-assisted cancer detection might be more than a convenience -- it could be the key to getting a diagnosis in the first place. Microsoft and SRL Diagnostics have developed an AI tool that helps detect cervical cancer, freeing doctors in India and other countries where the sheer volume of patients could prove overwhelming. The team trained an AI to spot signs of the cancer by feeding it "thousands" of annotated cervical smear images to help it spot abnormalities (including pre-cancerous examples) that warrant a closer look. Doctors would only have to look at those slides that justify real concern. A framework for using the AI is now ready for an "internal preview" at SRL.