Five Dutch companies including Ahold Delhaize, ING, KLM, NS and Philips aim to further boost the AI ecosystem in the Netherlands by accelerating and promoting the development of AI technology and nurturing AI talent in the country. This effort will add educational capacity, foster the development of the AI community in the Netherlands and reiterate the position of the Netherlands as a competitive and relevant global AI hub. The goal of Kickstart AI, is to bridge the AI gap between the Netherlands and other countries, like the UK, the US and China, that have made notable progress in this area. In order to keep the country's position as a pioneer and inventor of technologies, the Dutch government, organizations and universities have ground to cover in terms of structural investments and availability of global AI talent. The five companies "kickstarting" AI are, for the first time, uniting forces in this kind of joint initiative and taking highly needed decisive action.

John McCarthy, the father of Artificial Intelligence, describes it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs". Artificial Intelligence is a way of making a computer and software related to computer which can think intelligently and autonomously, kind of similar to a human mind. In general understanding artificial intelligence is accomplished by studying how a human brain works while solving a problem and in what manner it learns and makes decisions, where outcomes of such kind of study are used as the basis of developing intelligent software and systems. Till now this field was dominated by quasi-artificial intelligent systems called "expert systems," which mainly used a rules-based decision-making process.1 In other words, we can interpret that these systems were not fully autonomous and, therefore, not truly intelligent, because they lacked the ability to learn and produce unpredictable results, and mostly they acted in a manner predetermined by their programming.2

BURLINGTON, Mass., Oct. 10, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cerence Inc. (NASDAQ:CRNC), AI for a world in motion, today announced it is now a resident partner of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, an academic institution dedicated to supporting researchers specializing in the field of deep learning. The partnership enables Cerence and Mila to further research and advance cutting-edge work in machine learning and enhance automotive AI applications. As part of the relationship, Cerence researchers will work with Mila interns on projects and contribute to research, publications, and presentations in an AI lab at Mila's Montreal headquarters, just a short distance from Cerence's Montreal office, one of its key global R&D sites with nearly 450 employees. "As we continue to advance our research agenda and begin our new journey as Cerence, we are thrilled to have Mila as a resource," said Udo Haiber, Senior Vice President, Research & Development at Cerence. "Our automotive-focused R&D team and their decades of experience have put us at the forefront of innovation in the car, together with the world's leading automakers. Our new alignment with Mila will enable us to work more closely with academic AI researchers worldwide to continue to revolutionize the in-car experience, especially as we approach the horizon of autonomous vehicles."

Hey buddy, pick a lane and stick with it! I was taken aback by a rude driver that had abruptly and without signaling opted to cut into my lane. I needed to quickly move into the lane next to me. Wait a second, unfortunately, none of the cars in that lane were willing to allow me into their jam packed lane. I'm sure that you likely have experienced the same kinds of frustrations in your daily commute as well. On the freeways here in Los Angeles, it seems like here aren't enough lanes for the number of cars. The lanes are often poorly marked and cars tend to radically veer toward each other. Plus, drivers illegally dart into and out of the HOV lane, and sometimes illegally use the emergency lane as a form of underhanded transit. We live in a world of lanes. On the open highways, there are usually a couple of lanes going in each direction.

Founded by world-renowned deep learning expert and recipient of the prestigious 2018 Turing Prize Yoshua Bengio, Mila is an epicenter of artificial intelligence and machine learning research, seeking to create a space for innovation in artificial intelligence and technology while fostering strong synergy and knowledge exchange between academic research and innovators in society. As the leading provider of AI-powered automotive assistant technologies to automakers worldwide, Cerence's global research and development organization is more than 700 strong, with a tenured and experienced team dedicated to building human-like, innovative in-car experiences with their foundations in AI-powered speech recognition; natural language understanding and generation; and multi-modal technologies like gaze, gesture and emotion recognition.

Yet, accessibility for all is still an issue. The'digital revolution' has not fully democratised access to online resources. One-tenth of the UK adult population is still affected by digital exclusion, according to a report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). A recent survey of UK council websites published by Better Connected also found that 40% of local authority gov.uk website pages are not accessible to people with disabilities. This needs to be addressed by September 2019, when an EU Directive on the accessibility of public sector websites and mobile applications comes into force. AI is a fantastic opportunity for the public sector to address accessibility challenges.

In 1899, French artist Jean-Marc Côté was among a team of illustrators commissioned to create a series of drawings to commemorate the 1900 world's fair in Paris. The series, originally printed as inserts for cigar boxes (and then later reprinted, but never sold, as postcards - science fiction author Isaac Asimov reportedly owned the only surviving set) took the artists' best guess at how technology would change our lives by the advent of the 21st century. The subject matter of En L'An 2000 is, for the most part, spectacularly off the mark. Firefighters battle flames while flying through the air on bat wings, deep sea divers ride giant seahorses through the ocean and students have the contents of history books transferred directly into their brains via psychic helmets. Endearingly hopeful and bizarre, Côté and his fellow artists' work does betray just how hard it is to predict where the next wave of technological developments will take us.

In China, platforms and services like Alibaba's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay have brought facial recognition payments to online and brick-and-mortar retail stores. But as biometrics and facial recognition technologies become mainstream, experts and regulators are concerned about the privacy and cybersecurity risks associated with these, according to a report by Abacus. Li Wei, director of the technology department of the People's Bank of China, said consumers should realize that when they are using these features, they are giving up privacy for convenience. Faces are very sensitive personal information, and it could have a critical impact on someone if it were leaked or stolen. While people can put their bank cards in their pockets, faces are out in the open all the time, Li said, adding that some companies have not considered these issues.

Myth #1: "Robots will take my job" While one noticeable benefit coming from automation is effort reduction, intelligent automation has actually created more jobs in industry over the years than it has replaced. Intelligent automation and robotics shouldn't be viewed as a threat. Its sole purpose is to improve productivity and operational effectiveness, enabling people to focus on quality, analytics, and enhancing client relationships. Intelligent automation also provides a great opportunity to implement an organizational change management program that enables your employees to upskill and acquire new skills for the future. We've already seen how robots play a significant role in the workforce, and there's increasing use of mobile applications and virtual agents that allow users to work hand-in-hand with robots to simplify daily tasks.

Not too long ago, in fact at the beginning of present decade, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) were still talking about setting up new Network Operation Centers (NOCs) to monitor customer experience! In the subsequent years, the network centric approach turned into service centric approach and NOCs were replaced by Service Operation Centers (SOC). These centers provide insights into services used by the customer, for example video quality, web access etc. Aided by big data processing, these terabytes of network data proved to be a goldmine for CSPs. Over recent years, they have provided great analytics insights into customer behavior and their experience in real time. Today, as 5G deployments gain traction and customers' appetite for ever increasing speeds grow, it has become both a challenge and opportunity for CSPs to measure and continuously improve the customer experience.