The UAE is rolling out its biggest effort yet to develop a workforce versed in artificial intelligence, as the rapidly-advancing technology transforms economies worldwide. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), a new graduate-level AI research university in Abu Dhabi, is accepting applications for its first masters and PhD-level programmes this month, with its first class beginning in September 2020. The institution, the first university to have a singular focus on AI, aims to attract students from around the world to advance the technology and propel the UAE's economic diversification efforts. To compete with more than a hundred graduate-level degree programmes in AI -- mainly in North America, China and the UK -- MBZUAI is offering full scholarships, monthly stipends, health insurance and accommodation to all students. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence is an open invitation from Abu Dhabi to the world to unleash AI's full potential.

Diveplane, the company keeping the humanity in artificial intelligence (AI), today announced the availability of GEMINAI, the industry's first verifiable synthetic'twin' dataset. GEMINAI empowers businesses and government organizations to easily and safely sell, share and analyze sensitive datasets without the fear of mishandling, loss or theft. The'twin' dataset looks, acts, and feels realistic for the purposes of data modeling and analysis, but does not contain any personally identifiable information, which is critical for businesses that need to adhere to national and international privacy laws and compliance requirements, like GDPR, PHI and HIPAA. "We love seeing AI increasingly adopted by many industries, but we're finding that not all AI is created and trained equally," said Dr. Michael Capps, CEO of Diveplane. "Many businesses are forced to use inaccurate or incomplete data to train their AI due to privacy requirements, which can lead to the AI making poor or misleading decisions. With GEMINAI, we're eliminating that risk by creating a verifiable synthetic'twin' of the dataset, so that businesses don't need to sacrifice the quality of their AI for the sake of privacy. GEMINAI offers the best of both worlds and we're excited to introduce this first-of-its-kind technology to the market."

A rare disease drugs firm co-founded by the discoverer of Viagra has raised $56m (£44m) to use artificial intelligence for finding new medicines. Healx uses AI to examine potential beneficial side effects of existing treatments which could also treat rare ailments. The firm was co-founded in 2014 by David Brown, who discovered Viagra in the 1990s as a side effect of medicine for high blood pressure. It started as a project at the University of Cambridge. Dr Brown said: "We're taking safe drugs that are already optimised, provided the potency is good enough, we can go straight to the clinic."

PARIS – Designers of machine translation tools still mostly rely on dictionaries to make a foreign language understandable. But now there is a new way: numbers. Facebook researchers say rendering words into figures and exploiting mathematical similarities between languages is a promising avenue -- even if a universal communicator as seen in "Star Trek" remains a distant dream. Powerful automatic translation is a big priority for internet giants. Allowing as many people as possible worldwide to communicate is not just an altruistic goal, but also good business.

Nations around the world are "stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia" in which artificial intelligence and other technologies are used to target, surveil and punish the poorest people, the United Nation's monitor on poverty has warned. Philip Alston, UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, has produced a devastating account of how new digital technologies are revolutionizing the interaction between governments and the most vulnerable in society. In what he calls the rise of the "digital welfare state", billions of dollars of public money is now being invested in automated systems that are radically changing the nature of social protection. Alston's report on the human rights implications of the shift will be presented to the UN general assembly on Friday. It says that AI has the potential to improve dramatically the lives of disadvantaged communities, but warns that such hope is being lost amid the constant drive for cost cutting and "efficiency".

Every expressway across South Korea will be modified for self-driving vehicles over the next few years, the government said Tuesday, in an ambitious project intended to remove a major barrier facing the technology. South Korea initially plans to upgrade the country's 5,500 km of highways, then expand the infrastructure on local streets in major cities as well by 2024. The Asian country, which has taken the lead in rolling out fifth-generation wireless communications, is staking out a position at the front of the pack in driverless car infrastructure as well. For example, signaling devices installed at traffic lights will inform the autonomous vehicle directly when the light changes color, rather than the car having to rely on a camera to determine whether the light is red or green. Other signals will relay the width of lanes so that the vehicles can adjust accordingly.

Every expressway across South Korea will be modified for self-driving vehicles over the next few years, the government said Tuesday, in an ambitious project intended to remove a major barrier facing the technology. South Korea initially plans to upgrade the country's 5,500 km of highways, then expand the infrastructure on local streets in major cities as well by 2024. The Asian country, which has taken the lead in rolling out fifth-generation wireless communications, is staking out a position at the front of the pack in driverless car infrastructure as well. For example, signaling devices installed at traffic lights will inform the autonomous vehicle directly when the light changes color, rather than the car having to rely on a camera to determine whether the light is red or green. Other signals will relay the width of lanes so that the vehicles can adjust accordingly.

From Gary Kasparov to Elon Musk, the list of those who say AI needs to be applied such that it augments us, not compete with us, is long. Yet the supply of reports warning that AI threatens jobs doesn't seem to have an end. On the other hand, a new report looking at a technology called Swarm AI may provide a much more benign fix. Speaking at a recent conference, chess legend, Gary Kasparov, said that the public perception of AI has been overly influenced by Hollywood: the reality is far more positive -- Kasparov's take on AI is a reason for optimism Swarms can be intelligent-- there is no great insight here. Those who study Emergence understand this, from ant colonies to cities, great things can be achieved from simpler entities working together.

X-ray vision has long seemed like a far-fetched sci-fi fantasy, but over the last decade a team led by Professor Dina Katabi from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has continually gotten us closer to seeing through walls. Their latest project, "RF-Pose," uses artificial intelligence (AI) to teach wireless devices to sense people's postures and movement, even from the other side of a wall. The researchers use a neural network to analyze radio signals that bounce off people's bodies, and can then create a dynamic stick figure that walks, stops, sits, and moves its limbs as the person performs those actions. The team says that RF-Pose could be used to monitor diseases like Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis (MS), and muscular dystrophy, providing a better understanding of disease progression and allowing doctors to adjust medications accordingly. It could also help elderly people live more independently, while providing the added security of monitoring for falls, injuries and changes in activity patterns.

AI is poised to have an increasing influence on the way companies create new content, paving the way for new forms of human-machine collaboration. AI is maturing at varying rates around the world, with some organizations using these technologies--including machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision--to support external and internal organizational capabilities. For media and entertainment companies and other content producers in particular, AI may also offer a startling range of possibilities for the creative process, enabling individuals and businesses to generate new content with minimized human input. In a global analysis based on Deloitte's most recent State of AI in the Enterprise survey, early adopters were asked to identify the primary benefits of implementing AI in their organizations.¹ Respondents say using AI to enhance existing products and services is their most sought-after externally focused benefit, with 43% ranking it in their top three, while 31% prioritize using it to optimize external processes. The top internally focused benefit, meanwhile, is optimizing business operations, with 41% placing it among their top three choices, followed by using AI to make better decisions, cited by 34% of respondents.