As Facebook prepares to launch its new cryptocurrency Libra in 2020, it's putting the pieces in place to help it run. In one of the latest developments, it has acquired Servicefriend, a startup that built bots -- chat clients for messaging apps based on artificial intelligence -- to help customer service teams, TechCrunch has confirmed. The news was first reported in Israel, where Servicefriend is based, after one of its investors, Roberto Singler, alerted local publication The Marker about the deal. We reached out to Ido Arad, one of the co-founders of the company, who referred our questions to a team at Facebook. "We acquire smaller tech companies from time to time. We don't always discuss our plans," a Facebook spokesperson said.

How has the landscape changed for the leading deep learning frameworks in the past six months? To answer that question, I looked at the number of job listings on Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn, and SimplyHired. I also evaluated changes in Google search volume, GitHub activity, Medium articles, ArXiv articles, and Quora topic followers. Overall, these sources paint a comprehensive picture of growth in demand, usage, and interest. We've recently seen several important developments in the TensorFlow and PyTorch frameworks.

Long before symptoms like memory loss even emerge, the underlying pathology of Alzheimer's disease, such as an accumulation of amyloid protein plaques, is well underway in the brain. A longtime goal of the field has been to understand where it starts so that future interventions could begin there. A new study by MIT neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory could help those efforts by pinpointing the regions with the earliest emergence of amyloid in the brain of a prominent mouse model of the disease. Notably, the study also shows that the degree of amyloid accumulation in one of those same regions of the human brain correlates strongly with the progression of the disease. "Alzheimer's is a neurodegenerative disease, so in the end you can see a lot of neuron loss," says Wen-Chin "Brian" Huang, co-lead author of the study and a postdoc in the lab of co-senior author Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and director of the Picower Institute.

The new system, described in a study published in JAMA Network Open, helps interpret medical images used to diagnose breast cancer that can be difficult for the human eye to classify, and it does so nearly as accurately or better as experienced pathologists. "It is critical to get a correct diagnosis from the beginning so that we can guide patients to the most effective treatments," said Dr. Joann Elmore, the study's senior author and a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. A 2015 study led by Elmore found that pathologists often disagree on the interpretation of breast biopsies, which are performed on millions of women each year. That earlier research revealed that diagnostic errors occurred in about one out of every six women who had ductal carcinoma in situ (a noninvasive type of breast cancer), and that incorrect diagnoses were given in about half of the biopsy cases of breast atypia (abnormal cells that are associated with a higher risk for breast cancer). "Medical images of breast biopsies contain a great deal of complex data and interpreting them can be very subjective," said Elmore, who is also a researcher at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Professor Jackie Hunter looks at why the pharmaceutical industry has been so slow to adopt artificial intelligence-based technologies and makes a prediction for the industry's future, including a significantly increased amount of interplay between large technology and pharma companies. There is no doubt that the pharmaceutical industry is ripe for disruption. Costs over the past two decades have soared – it currently costs USD 2.6bn to develop a drug – but the industry has not delivered high levels of innovation in return. True, important new medicines have been delivered, especially in biological areas such as immune-oncology and multiple sclerosis, but other areas such as dementia and brain cancer have not seen therapeutic advances. The past two decades have also seen an explosion of biomedical data, making it impossible for even the most learned researchers to process and garner real insight from this wealth of information.

Today, AI Ireland received a record 50% increase in entries in its second year, showcasing innovation in Artificial Intelligence across healthcare, finance, customer service, communications, and academia. The second AI Awards 2019 will be presented at the Gibson Hotel on Wednesday 20th November. These Awards, which are part of the not-for-profit organisation AI Ireland, support the growth and development of Data Science, Machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence in Ireland. This year also saw the introduction of a new category for Intelligent Automation-Best Use of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to reflect the rapidly growing sector within AI in the Irish market. "The increase in nominations shows the Irish AI sector is innovating with potentially game changing outcomes for organisations and society," said Mark Kelly, Chief Customer Officer at Alldus & Founder of AI Ireland.

Today's marketing teams are filled with specialists in fields such as data analytics or the use of specific tools, and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening to increase the need for dedicated professionals. For marketing leaders this has created the requirement to develop capabilities in areas that might be far removed from why they got into marketing in the first place. But perhaps AI might also be the tool that finally lets marketers get back to doing marketing? This is the promise of recently born company, Acoustic, which brings together many of the cloud-based marketing products and technologies formerly housed within IBM. According to Acoustic's senior vice-president of product management, Jay Henderson, Acoustic is taking advantage of IBM's heritage as one of the early adopters of AI within marketing.

The uptake of artificial intelligence by industry will drastically change the UK job market in the coming years – with 133 million new jobs expected to be created globally. In the UK alone, up to a third of jobs will be automated or likely to change as a result of the emergence of AI – impacting 10.5 million workers. The findings come from a new report – Harnessing the Power of AI: The Demand for Future Skills – from global recruiter Robert Walters and market analysis experts Vacancy Soft. Ollie Sexton, Principal at Robert Walters, said: "As businesses become ever more reliant on AI, there is an increasing amount of pressure on the processes of data capture and integration. As a result, we have seen an unprecedented number of roles being created with data skill-set at their core. "Our job force cannot afford to not get to grips with data and digitalisation.

The General Services Administration is making artificial intelligence the sixth pillar of its Centers of Excellence program, and agency leaders are already teasing a few of their potential areas of focus. The new AI center will be rooted in GSA's work with the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, which last month became the fifth government organization to participate in the CoE initiative. After helping the JAIC accelerate its development of AI technologies and increase the Pentagon's adoption of those tools, GSA officials see the opportunity to reapply that work to help the rest of the government reap the benefits of the emerging tech. "We can learn from [the JAIC partnership] … and frankly, we can reuse all that foundation for our existing agencies and agencies outside the Department of Defense," Anil Cheriyan, head of GSA's Technology Transformation Service, said Tuesday during the agency's IT Modernization Showcase. "The need for artificial intelligence is growing and significant across federal government."

Across Asia, governments are increasingly seeking to leverage the potential of AI with a mix of coordinated top-down approaches, and by providing incentives and support to the private sector to lead development. We view that the potential for AI is greatest in markets where governments have a vested interest in developing'smart', digital infrastructure; this is especially the case for developed markets, where governments are forced to leverage new, innovative technologies for productivity growth, as capital deepening and expanding the labour force become less reliable growth drivers. At the same time, we view that countries with strong institutional and business environments will stand to benefit the most from AI (see'What Our Clients Want To Know: The Fourth Industrial Revolution', October 2 2019). China Sees Bustling Activity, Set To Be Asia's Leader Over the years, China's protectionist Internet market, and relative lax in rules governing data use has resulted in the rise of several well-established consumer Internet players in Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, and ByteDance, among others, which have become extremely adept at leveraging data on their customers as key pillars of their overall strategy. The government further adopts a very centrally-coordinated approach the overall development of the technological landscape; its'Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan', launched in mid-2017, highlights a structured timeline to boost its position as a world leader in the technology by 2030 by, among others, investing up to USD15bn into projects which it deems strategically important for AI development.