London, China is a leading force in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and blocking AI research with the country will do more harm than good for humanity, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. In an interview with the BBC, Nadella said that despite national security concerns, backing out of China would "hurt more" than it solved. "A lot of AI research happens in the open and the world benefits from knowledge being open," he said. Quoting Microsoft President Brad Smith, Nadella said: "We know any technology can be a tool or a weapon. The question is, how do you ensure that these weapons don't get created? I think there are multiple mechanisms."

Researchers are looking to employ onboard artificial intelligence systems to improve the control and sophistication of prosthetic hands, by using deep learning approaches that read and react to nerve signals transmitted through the arm. The practice of tracking the natural electric impulses sent by the brain to control individual muscles, known as electromyography, has been used to operate prosthetic limbs and hands before, as well as wheelchairs and other devices. But performance gaps remain when it comes to the fine motor control of fingers and hands. By running a neural network in real-time on a dedicated processing unit within the prosthetic, researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) hope to speed up responses for faster hand movements. In addition, the proposed system could be retrained based on the actions of the user to increase its accuracy.

Sometimes HR managers and recruiters have a tough time finding the right candidate for a job. Can conversational AI save the day? Recruiting the right talent is one of the most challenging tasks for recruiters. On top of these responsibilities, recruiters have to develop a recruitment strategy that meets business goals, takes into consideration competitor analysis and employee satisfaction rates. In reality, managing this workload effectively is a hard task to do, that's why many companies turned to Artificial Intelligence for extra help. In one of their recent reports, Deloitte covered a use case of a multinational bank struggling to optimize the workload of hundreds of service desk agents, who support HR management processes.

At this week's Xilinx Developers Forum (XDF) in San Jose, California, Xilinx announced "Vitis" – a new framework for developing applications that use Xilinx programmable logic devices such as FPGAs, ACAPs, MPSoCs, RFSoCs, and all the other acronyms they can come up with that refer to what we'd call "FPGAs." With an abundance of grandiosity, the company proclaimed that Vitis was "five years and a total of 1,000 man-years in the making." We don't frequently encounter person-millenia metrics for new product announcements. Even if we assume that they started this in 1984 when Xilinx was founded, they would still have needed at least 28 engineers writing code full time for Vitis over that 35 year span. Spoiler: engineering-eons aside, Vitis IS impressive, and more importantly, is likely to mature to be even more impressive over the coming years.

Deal making landscape in the artificial intelligence (AI) tech space during 2014–2018 was dominated by global tech giants, according to GlobalData. Of the top five acquirers, four were based out of the US, with Ireland-based Accenture being the only exception in the list. The four US-based companies–Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Splunk–collectively accounted for 30 acquisitions in the AI tech space during 2014–2018, whereas Accenture acquired six companies in this area during the period. Aurojyoti Bose, Financial Deals Analyst at GlobalData, said, "Technology companies have been the dominant deal makers in the AI space. However, with AI making inroads into diverse sectors, the buyer universe in expanding and the space is also attracting investments from non-technology companies."

On fields across the world, phones, tablets, drones, and other technologies are changing how food is grown. Through these devices, artificial intelligence (AI)--technology able to perform tasks that require human intelligence--may help farmers use the techniques they already know and trust on a bigger scale. And Big Data--data sets that reveal telling patterns about growth, yield, weather, and more--may help farmers make better decisions before crises strike. According to the report Refresh: Food Tech, From Soil to Supper released in 2018, AI and Big Data may help produce more food, use less water, limit resource consumption, redirect food waste, and lower food prices--all while improving the lives and incomes of farmers and food producers. "Recent advances have the potential for big breakthroughs in the ways we grow, store, transport, distribute, and consume food," says the Refresh Report.

With the unemployment rate at a low 3.7% and the skills shortage severe, corporations need to get creative about finding talented job candidates. IBM is among the technology giants testing new methods involving artificial intelligence to overcome the labor market challenges. AI has been applied to the job application process directly as a method to prevent human bias in hiring decisions. Now more companies are using AI assessment tools to reverse-engineer job roles and find candidates often overlooked by recruiters. IBM introduced its SkillsBuild platform in France in May 2019 with the goal of identifying job skills and employment opportunities for members of disadvantaged communities.

By the end of this decade, a milestone is reached in artificial intelligence, with computers now routinely passing the Turing Test.** This test is conducted by a human judge who is made to engage in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. Participants are placed in isolated locations. For several decades, information technology had seen exponential growth – leading to vast improvements in computer processing power, memory, bandwidth, voice recognition, image recognition, deep learning and other software algorithms. By the end of the 2020s, it has reached the stage where an independent judge is literally unable to tell which is the real human and which is not.* Answers to certain "obscure" questions posed by the judge may appear childlike from the AI – but they are humanlike nonetheless.*

There is a roughly one-in-five chance an individual will experience some form of mental illness in their lifetime. Moreover mental illness can strike anyone -- even popular celebrities such as Ariana Grande, Michael Phelps, and Lady Gaga have spoken of their struggles. Figures from nonprofit organization Mental Health America show the severe depression rate for US youth increased from 5.9 to 8.2 percent over the last five years. For reasons ranging from non-diagnosis to social stigmas, more than half of the 43 million Americans who suffer from some form of depression have received no treatment for their condition. The numbers provide a sobering glimpse of the shortcomings in mental health care, and some researchers are suggesting AI might be able to address the problem.

On the other hand, Tropical race 4 (TR4), the virulent strain of fungus Fusarium oxysporum cubense that is threatening banana crop globally with the fusarium wilt disease has killed off millions of bananas in Africa and Asia (from the 1980s onwards). It had surfaced in the Cavendish group of bananas in parts of Bihar and is now spreading to Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and even Gujarat, which could spell havoc for the country's banana industry. Even though India is the largest banana producing country in the world and third-largest orange-producing country, our exports for these crops are mainly to the Middle East and some neighbouring countries. Very little, if not any, is exported to the US or EU. In spite of such high production, India's banana exports generate a meager$49.8