During an evening reception hosted by Computer Weekly, Oracle, Equinix and Cintra, C-level business leaders from four application providers/independent software vendors (ISVs) will discuss their strategies on machine learning, automation and cloud transformation. Facilitated by Bryan Glick, Editor-in-Chief of Computer Weekly, the session will explore how these businesses drive innovation, new market opportunities and revenue growth.

BENGALURU: The decrease in demand for manpower owing to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and allied technology resulting in job cuts, has been an area of concern. In India alone, jobs loss in the IT sector is reported to have touched 1,000 over the past year, particularly due to incorporating of advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning. According to sources, various global firms who have their major centres in Bengaluru (such as Cognizant, Accenture and IBM) have either cut or redeployed their employees. As per a survey by the All India Management Association and consulting firm, Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC), 36% of decision-makers said that overall advancements in automation and technology had not displaced jobs. However, 46% of them indicated that they would have a severe impact on employment in India. Further, nearly half of the participants surveyed felt that job automation was reasonably probable; however, it was likely to be partial, with humans retained for specific expertise.

Every year, municipalities across South Africa lose millions of Rands from electricity theft. My work as an electrical engineer at Aurecon has led me to think deeply about coming up with ways to not only help solve this problem but consider possible preventative measures that could be put into place. Municipalities generate an enormous amount of data related to electricity distribution and consumption. When combined with real-time data analysis and machine learning algorithms, this information can be used to pick up on electricity theft at any node in the grid. As part of my Research interests, I started to create an algorithm that uses machine learning and artificial neural intelligence to detect electricity theft as well as cable theft, together with one of the Junior Electrical Engineers Tendai Matiza.

"Relying on common solutions in places where there's no point in reinventing the wheel has been one of the mainstays of the Estonian digital state," Government Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Deputy Secretary-General for IT and Telecom Siim Sikkut said in a Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications press release. "This is how X-Road and the digital identity were born, for instance, which made developing e-services several times faster and easier for everyone," Sikkut continued. "Now we want to bring the same platform-based approach and acceleration into the field of AI, and I'm glad that the first step in that direction has been taken." The first base component for AI-based solutions added to the source code repository is a text analysis tool created by Texta OÜ, which has been used by many institutions to date for increasing the effectiveness of their work processes and the automation of routine activities. The Ministry of Education and Research, for example, uses the tool for the audit of document management aimed at identifying documents which have gone public without permission.

Kanaan is generally very bullish about AI, partly because he knows firsthand how useful it stands to be for troops. Six years ago, as an Air Force intelligence officer in Afghanistan, he was responsible for deploying a new kind of intelligence-gathering tool: a hyperspectral imager. The instrument can spot objects that are normally hidden from view, like tanks draped in camouflage or emissions from an improvised bomb-making factory. Kanaan says the system helped US troops remove many thousands of pounds of explosives from the battlefield. Even so, it was often impractical for analysts to process the vast amounts of data collected by the imager.

Abu Dhabi: Taking another bold step in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), Abu Dhabi on Wednesday announced the opening of the world's first dedicated AI university – Mohammad Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Located in Masdar City with the latest state-of-the-art facilities and equipment, the university will offer both masters (two years) and PhD programmes (four years) for local and international graduate students across three main specialised fields – machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing – as the UAE looks to equip the next generation of students with the latest expertise in the field of AI. Official applications for the university are open from this month, with registrations taking place in August of next year. The first batch of classes will start in September 2020. How are we going to produce the right number of people with the right mindset [and] the right knowledge ... That is what this university is about -- providing that person power over 5 to 10 to 20 years.

Algorithms are grading student essays across the country. So can artificial intelligence really teach us to write better? Todd Feathers, who wrote about AI essay grading for Motherboard, called up every state in the country and found that at least 21 states use some form of automated scoring. "The algorithms are prone to a couple of flaws. One is that they can be fooled by any kind of nonsense gibberish sophisticated words. It looks good from afar but it doesn't actually mean anything. And the other problem is that some of the algorithms have been proven by the testing vendors themselves to be biased against people from certain language backgrounds."

Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and other forms of smart automation have revolutionised the present and future of work. These technologies have the potential to bring great economic benefits, contributing up to $15 trillion to global GDP by 2030, according to a PwC report on the impact of automation. The UAE has been at the forefront of using AI to streamline processes through its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031. The country appointed the world's first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in 2017. Last week, UAE capital Abu Dhabi announced the establishment of the Mohammad Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the first graduate level, research-based artificial intelligence university in the world.

Simon Eccles is on a mission to streamline the NHS with technology. His goal is for people's health information and their pathway through care to be seamless. But he isn't pretending this is going to be easy. The chief clinical information officer for the NHS, and deputy chief executive of NHSX, says: "The more work I do internationally, the more I am aware that everybody is finding this a challenge." Five years from now, Eccles thinks NHS tech may not have changed radically.

An international campaign takes its battle to outlaw "killer robots" to the UN this week with a new ally – a "peace robot". Created by an inventor from the BBC programme Robot Wars, the droid, known as David Wreckham, has been recruited to deliver a message to world leaders in New York on Monday. The robot will drop a letter to UN diplomats demanding that robots not guided by human remote control which could accidentally start wars or cause mass atrocities should be outlawed by the same type of international treaty that bans chemical weapons. Unlike drones, which are controlled by military teams often thousands of miles away from where they are deployed, critics say that autonomous killer robots have the potential to do disastrous things they were not originally programmed for. Wreckham will also visit the Manhattan headquarters of hi-tech corporations, calling on them to desist from developing technologies for autonomous weapons.