Recent advancements in the field of computer vision (CV) have led to new applications that could benefit people globally, and especially those in developing countries. To bring the CV community closer to tasks, data sets, and applications that can have a global impact, Facebook AI launched the Computer Vision for Global Challenges (CV4GC) initiative earlier this year. Through a series of academic programs, mentorships, sponsorships, and events, CV4GC brings together field experts from around the world to discuss potential CV applications to address issues that affect developing regions. One such program is the CV4GC request for proposals, a research award opportunity that launched in February with the goal of supporting research that aligns with CV4GC's mission. We were particularly interested in proposals that extended CV technology to achieve global development priorities, especially those captured in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Actor Jim Meskimen partnered with deepfake artist Sham00k to make his celebrity impressions a little more realistic. Meskimen and Sham00k shared the results in a YouTube video, and honestly, they're pretty remarkable. While Meskimen did the voices, deepfake software applied the facial features of 20 celebrities, including George Clooney, Nicholas Cage, Colin Firth, Robert De Niro, Nick Offerman, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Robin Williams and George W. Bush. The video speaks to Meskimen's talent as an impressionist but also to the capability of deepfake software. It proves how well the tech is able to blur the line between what's real and what isn't.

When I was a small boy, there was a machine in the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, that played tic-tac-toe and never lost. No matter where you placed your X, it rebounded with the right O. It could always win or force a draw, even if you went first and took the center square. The machine looked smart to an eight-year-old, but my mother, a logician, linguist, and early Fortran speaker, explained to me on one of our frequent visits that smart was the last thing it was. It could do one thing--play one essentially dumb game--and it could do it only because it had been programmed to follow a mechanical network of on/off switches. It wasn't thinking; it was just tracking.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU's new souped-up digital and big tech regulator, has promised ethical and human-centred rules on artificial intelligence (AI) in the first 100 days of her mandate. The EU can't be a leader in AI "without ethical guidelines," she told MEPs in her confirmation hearing this week. "The artificial intelligence you want must serve humans. That's a different kind of artificial intelligence" from that seen in the US and China, she said. The new rules will build on the EU's reputation as the world's foremost technology watchdog and regulator of online privacy.

Of the world's 10 million people in the world diagnosed with both tuberculosis (TB) and drug-resistant tuberculosis in 2017, 2.7 million live in India, making us a country with the highest burden of the disease, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Using the contact-free sensor that's placed under your mattress, Dozee tracks and analyzes your heart health, respiration, sleep quality, stress levels and more. What's worse, many remain undiagnosed and those who are detected with TB are only diagnosed weeks after they get it. With this delay, these unsuspecting carriers spread the disease to others in their homes or workplaces. This is particularly a risk for young children.

Computing has developed at an amazing pace over the last few decades, but even today's computers are essentially glorified calculators, says Dr Dharmendra Modha. The founder of IBM's Cognitive Computing Group wants to change that. He wants our computers to think more like humans. Modha and his team are designing a cognitive computing chip and software ecosystem inspired by the human brain. It would consume far less power and space than today's computers and could power everything from search and rescue robots in hazardous environments to intelligent buoys which float on ocean waves, predicting tsunamis or warning of oil pollution.

Lionel Messi needs no introduction. Even folks who don't follow football have heard about the brilliance of one of the greatest players to have graced the sport. We have text, tons of hyperlinks, and even an audio clip. The possibilities of putting this into a use case are endless. However, there is a slight problem. This is not an ideal source of data to feed to our machines.

And it appears they are not alone: Based on the 2017 Kaggle survey The State of ML and Data Science the most popular answer to the question "What data science methods are used at work?" was logistic regression with 63.5%. On the second place we find the decision tree with 49.9%. Those two methods constitute a class of very interpretable methods. However, to win a Kaggle competition one usually needs to employ a more modern, black-box like algorithm like boosted trees. In the Kaggle survey boosted trees ranked only 8th place with 23.9%.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the buzzword these days, and for good reason. Businesses around the world are taking up AI technologies to try and reduce operational costs, increase efficiency, grow revenue and improve customer experience. Businesses are also looking at putting a full range of smart technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing and more, into their processes and products. However can businesses that are new to AI, reap major rewards? When it comes to artificial intelligence, most people are well aware of the tropes from popular entertainment: the malevolent computer, the android gone rogue.

Before Insurance Australia Group (IAG) can begin selling more than insurance products to consumers, the company realised it needed to shift what is currently a very analogue business into something that is more digitally orientated. "We really want to change the mindset, get some records and customer value, and build new businesses as well, including beyond insurance," IAG Digital Architecture director Ian Jamieson explained at New Relic Future Stack 2019 last week. "An insurance company not selling insurance is quite disruptive because a lot of the core systems is under insurance, so if we want to sell a solution that provides emergency assistance to your home that is not an insurance product, how would you bill someone for that so that it's not under insurance … there are a range of things we need to transform and add new capabilities to." Jamieson said some areas that IAG is looking to expand its business into include motor and home repair services, spinning up brand new businesses such as in mobility services, and through acquisitions of startups, such as its most recent purchase of Carbar, a subscription-based car ownership platform. To make sure these business plans become a reality, Jamieson said the company has moved away from taking traditional waterfall approaches to projects and using a cross-functional method.