NEEDHAM, Mass., Oct. 8, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) today announced that its Smart Factory Machine …

ANN ARBOR, MI -- Business officials will gather in Ann Arbor this month to discuss how they've used artificial intelligence and machine learning to …

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of this document in a more accessible format, please email webmaster@digital.fco.gov.uk. Please tell us what format you need. It will help us if you say what assistive technology you use. The UK's Department for International Trade (DIT) is pleased to announce 12 high-growth Canadian FinTech companies from across 5 major Canadian cities chosen to participate in a trade mission to the UK – 21- 25 October 2019. These leading companies have collectively raised over half a billion in venture capital and are well positioned for global expansion.

In 2012 or so, if you'd asked most people in tech about'neural networks', if they had any answer at all they might well have said that it was an obscure idea from the 1980s that had never really worked - rather like VR. Then, in 2013, Imagenet gave us an explosive realisation that this could work now - again, rather like VR in 2013. Since then, the tech industry has been remaking itself around machine learning. There's a naive view that'Google will have all the data' or China will have all the AI' or'Data is the new oil', but it's more interesting to look at how many different kinds of deployment are now happening. The first phase was the creation of companies building platforms (or'primitives' or'substrates') for specific low-level ML applications - image recognition, voice recognition, sentiment analysis etc.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes is launching today to fund $200 million in grants over the coming years, which shall go towards benefiting society. "Sustained R&D investments are needed to advance trust in AI systems to ensure they meet society's needs" Building trustworthy AI is at the top of the funding priorities for the new program led by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and supported by a whole bunch of government agencies and their many acronyms. Together, these six areas shall prove to have a profound impact on our lives in the future -- from the management of our food supply to curing and preventing diseases and making giant leaps in our understanding of our place in the cosmos. "Sustained R&D investments are needed to advance trust in AI systems to ensure they meet society's needs and adequately address requirements for robustness, fairness, explainability, and security," according to the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan: 2019 Update. NSF Director France Cordova stated, "Advances in AI are progressing rapidly and demonstrating the potential to transform our lives.

When being empathetic is your full-time job, burning out is only human. Few people are more aware of this than customer service representatives, who are tasked with approaching each conversation with energy and compassion -- whether it's their first call of the day or their 60th. It's their job to make even the most difficult customer feel understood and respected while still providing them accurate information. But over the last few years, an unlikely aide has come forward: artificial intelligence tools designed to help people tap into and maintain "human" characteristics like empathy and compassion. One of these tools is a platform called Cogito, named for the famous Descartes philosophy Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").

I cover AI and future trends for a living. One overreaching theme I've noticed is how AI is being used not to augment people, but to weaponize their data against them. Businesses across almost every industry deploy artificial intelligence to make jobs simpler for staff and tasks easier for consumers. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Indeed unbridled adoption of AI won't just result in job losses, but data purgatory, and an internet that feels more like slavery than education and freedom.

In the center of Seattle-based food-tech company Picnic's 8,000-square-foot lab, an automated assembly line consists of a conveyor belt propped upon a metal base. To demonstrate the production, a Picnic worker places a pre-made 16-inch circle of pizza dough into the first module. A form of artificial intelligence (AI) called deep learning uses numerous layers of mathematical formulas to process and assess the size, dimensions and placement of the pizza on the belt, and to adjust the the module lighting so a computer-vision camera can properly see it. The pizza chugs along to a series of modules where a small hose evenly squirts tomato sauce over the dough, then a tray dispenses cheese, followed by a spray of pepperoni and ham. The pizza completes its journey through the automated assembly line in a little over a minute. The finished product glistens golden brown when it emerges from the oven.