As Vietnam moves from low-tech manufacturing to a service-oriented economy, the country's information technology (IT) market is increasingly gaining traction, giving competition to IT firms in China and India. This has partly been encouraged by the growth of Vietnam as a regional market for domestic enterprises and global technology vendors. As Vietnam adopts Industry 4.0 across all industries, investors should consider the benefits of locating their IT business to the country. Most of the industry is foreign-invested, with multinationals funding projects to build electronic components in the country. At least 86 percent of total IT revenues in 2017 were derived from hardware.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate HireVue, an AI tool that helps companies figure out which workers to hire. HireVue is one of a growing number of artificial intelligence tools that companies use to assess job applicants. The algorithm analyzes video interviews, using everything from word choice to facial movements to figure out an "employability score" that is compared against that of other applicants. More than 100 companies have already used it on over a million applicants, according to the Washington Post. It's hard to predict which workers will be successful from things like facial expressions. Worse, critics worry that the algorithm is trained on limited data and so will be more likely to mark "traditional" applicants (white, male) as more employable.

E.g. if one interviewer does not like you someone else might. AI likely to lead to few win all situations on which case, if AI is biased, you are screwed.

Twice a year, NVIDIA, a Silicon Valley-based technology company that pioneered and popularized the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), runs a conference called the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) aimed to showcase advancements in the use of processing technology for emerging technology use cases. It should come as no surprise that recent GTC events have focused on AI, given how compute-intensive machine learning training and inference can be. Each year, it seems that the GTC events have become more and more about AI only, to the virtual exclusion of other areas where GPUs are being applied. That being said, there were a number of interesting announcements that came out of the NVIDIA GTC 2019 event that are of interest beyond those that follow the company's own products and solutions. One of the most interesting announcements was not about a new product or feature.

The UK government has approved £2 million ($2.57 million) worth of funding for 18 projects that will develop anti-drone and drone detection technologies. The funding comes part of a competition held by the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) program under the UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD). MOD officials approved funding earlier this year, in April, after a series of amateur drone incursions froze air travel at several airports across the UK. Infamous is a three-day incident at the Gatwick Airport in London just before Christmas last year, and another day of flight cancellations in January, at Heathrow, London, one of the world's largest airports. In April, MOD, through DASA, asked the private sector for solutions to detect and neutralize "small UAS (unmanned aerial system) threats."

Based on Nvidia's Xavier AGX, the A178 Thunder expands the general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) systems available from Aitech. According to Dan Mor, GPGPU product line manager of Aitech: "GPGPU uses a parallel structure, with multiple small cores that process multiple tasks simultaneously. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow and system size continues to shrink, computing systems will be expected to perform in increasingly remote, harsh environments." The A178 Thunder has twice as many CUDA cores as Jetson TX2-based systems as well as the addition of new Tensor cores. It is claimed to have some of the most powerful processing capabilities in a small form factor (SFF) system.

Credit the pursuits of biomedical engineers for developing a microscope called'SCAPE' (Swept Confocally Aligned Planar Excitation) that can not only view groups of neurons in a living brain; it can do so while the person is busy engaged in an activity. With this innovation, scientists hope to get a deeper understanding into what fuels the brain of a human. We can also hope that SCAPE will help scientist come closer to understanding human'thought' and decision-making. I find it fitting that this kind of scientific achievement is happening in tandem with the development of machine learning. That's why I was surprised by the latest scourge of'fake news' on the Internet, which is largely going undetected.

Numbers figure pretty high up on the list of what a computer can do well. While humans often struggle to split a restaurant bill, a modern computer can make millions of calculations in a mere second. Humans, however, have an innate and intuitive number sense that helped us, among other things, to build computers in the first place. Unlike a computer, a human knows when looking at four cats, four apples and the symbol 4 that they all have one thing in common – the abstract concept of "four" – without even having to count them. This illustrates the difference between the human mind and the machine, and helps explain why we are not even close to developing AIs with the broad intelligence that humans possess.

The travel industry is one of the biggest proponents and early adopters of AI technology and applications. AI and machine learning are a natural fit for travel, a somewhat volatile industry that ebbs and flows based on a large number of wildcard variables. Customer service has been the primary way AI is being steadily integrated into the travel experience, although there are a host of other potential applications for the technology. Hotels are a prime location for AI adoption and the Connie robot being deployed by Hilton Worldwide Hotels is one of the most well known examples. Connie is an AI-based concierge that uses AI and speech recognition to provide a variety of tourist-related information to guests who speak to it.