In the technology industry, it's not unusual for vendors to want to latch on to the latest trend and claim to have a product or service that fits the category. Artificial intelligence is no exception, which means customers need to be vigilant about querying vendors to ensure their technology can really be classified as AI at all, if not intelligent process automation (IPA) specifically. The London-based venture capital firm MMC found that of 2,830 startups in Europe that were classified as AI companies, only 1,580 – about 56% – actually offered AI technology. "We looked at every company, their materials, their product, the website and product documents," David Kelnar, head of research for MMC, told Forbes. "In 40% of cases we could find no mention of evidence of AI."

DeepMind says this latest iteration of AlphaStar -- AlphaStar Final -- can play a full StarCraft 2 match under "professionally approved" conditions, importantly with limits on the frequency of its actions and by viewing the world through a game camera. It plays on the official StarCraft 2 Battle.net "StarCraft has been a grand challenge for AI researchers for over 15 years, so it's hugely exciting to see this work recognized in Nature," said DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis. "These impressive results mark an important step forward in our mission to create intelligent systems that will accelerate scientific discovery." DeepMind's forays into competitive StarCraft play can be traced back to 2017, when the company worked with Blizzard to release an open source tool set containing anonymized match replays.

It's a well-established fact that object- and face-detecting algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial attack, as evidenced by a 2014 study conducted by researchers at Google and New York University. That's to say the models can be deceived by specially crafted patches attached to real-world targets. Most research in adversarial attacks involves rigid objects like glass frames, stop signs, or cardboard. But scientists at Northeastern University and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab propose what they are calling an "adversarial" T-shirt, one with a printed image that evades person-detectors even when it's deformed by a wearer's changing pose. In a preprint paper, they claim it manages to achieve up to 79% and 63% success rates in digital and physical worlds, respectively, against the popular YOLOv2 model.

In the late '90s, wildlife conservationists Zoe Jewell and Sky Alibhai were grappling with a troubling realization. The pair had been studying black rhino populations in Zimbabwe, and they spent a good deal of their time shooting the animals with tranquilizer darts and affixing radio collars around their necks. But after years of work, the researchers realized there was a major problem: Their technique, commonly used by all manner of wildlife scientists, seemed to be causing female rhinos to have fewer offspring. The researchers published their findings in 2001, igniting a controversy in the conservation world. The problem, says Duke University professor of conservation ecology Stuart Pimm, is that being "collared" is extremely stressful for animals.

Death Stranding is a video game about America, death, and high speed package delivery. Towards the end of the game, I was running medical supplies from one city to another. I had a truck, which made things easier, but the terrain was rocky. I tried to drive the truck down a cliff and over a river, but I miscalculated and got stuck on some rocks. I hauled myself out of the driver's seat, sighed, and unloaded the cargo, strapping it to my back. It was storming, not just a light rain, but a maelstrom that reduced visibility to just a few feet ahead of me.

This release was all about improving and enhancing toolkits' abilities to provide insights into your data, including a brand new outlier detection assistant, an update to our Machine Learning examples showcase page, an upgrade from Python 2.x to Python 3.x and a new System Identification algorithm. Outlier detection is by far the most popular use case in the industry. We constantly seek ways to offer a simple, yet rich and accurate way of helping you find outliers in your data, evaluate it and deploy it in your Splunk environment. It is not only smart by not having prejudice against your data's statistical characteristics, but also charming with a new set of custom visualizations available. With Python 2.7 coming to its end of life, Splunk 8.0 is migrating to Python 3.7 and so is the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit.

As part of Microsoft's Project Hanover, biomedical researchers from the Jackson Laboratory are refining an artificial intelligence tool that "reads" medical documents to inform the development of precision cancer treatments, per an Oct. 27 Microsoft blog post. The Bar Harbor, Maine-based Jackson Laboratory developed a searchable database of complex genomic information that can be sorted and interpreted to improve outcomes and share information about clinical trials and treatments. To speed this process, the lab's researchers are applying Microsoft's machine reading AI, which automatically extracts from thousands of medical and research documents only the most relevant information about cancer mutations, drugs and patient responses. The partnership is mutually beneficial: Microsoft's AI tool is increasing the lab team's efficiency in curating their Clinical Knowledgebase, while their usage is simultaneously validating the AI's accuracy and effectiveness in "reading" documents. "Our goal is to make the human curators superpowered," said Hoifung Poon, Project Hanover's lead researcher and director of precision health natural language processing with Microsoft's research organization.

Improving employee engagement is at the top of many human resource leaders' to-do lists. But combing through an ever-growing amount of engagement survey data to extract actionable insights can be overwhelming. So industry vendors have created artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to automatically analyze survey data to pinpoint themes and characterize the meaning of words or phrases. Tools like natural language processing (NLP) can save HR time and generate more-useful data along the way. SHRM Online spoke with Armen Berjikly, senior director of growth strategy for Ultimate Software in Weston, Fla., during the HR Technology Conference & Exposition for his thoughts on the state of NLP technology today, the pros and cons of using AI to analyze engagement survey data, and the importance of developing a code of ethics for using AI in HR. Prior to working at Ultimate, Berjikly was the founder and CEO of Kanjoya Inc., a workforce intelligence company that pioneered advancements in NLP technology dedicated to understanding human emotion.

The Indian state of Tamil Nadu is reportedly working on a state-level policy for blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI). On Oct. 31, local news outlet The Times of India reported that Tamil Nadu, the 10th-largest state in India, is working on separate policies for blockchain and AI which could be released as soon as the next 10 days. Tamil Nadu's blockchain and AI policies are expected to establish ground rules on how the state government can apply the emerging technologies for service delivery and solving governance issues. Santosh Misra, CEO of the state's e-Governance Agency commented: "We are working on separate policies on blockchain and AI. The AI policy is going to be perhaps the world's first policy addressing safe and ethical use of AI [...] No state or country has announced a standalone policy to address the safety and ethics associated with AI, and we have no precedence for it."

According to the Times of India, Tamil Nadu is in the works of releasing blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that are about to disrupt public policy and governance. "We are working on separate policies on blockchain and AI. The AI policy is going to be perhaps the world's first policy addressing safe and ethical use of AI" said Santosh Misra, CEO, TN e-Governance Agency (TNeGA). "No state or country has announced a standalone policy to address the safety and ethics associated with AI, and we have no precedence for it", he added. Blockchain is comprised of a list of records known as blocks, which cannot be modified.