Over the next three years, Houssam Abbas will carefully send 80 modified Traxxas RC rally cars--the Ford Fiesta model--to research facilities around the country. Some will go to Arizona State University, others to Clemson University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, UCLA, Vanderbilt University, or the University of Iowa. In each place, researchers will open their packages, take out the 21-inch, modified, 1/10th-scale car, and begin to run tests. Abbas, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Oregon State University, hopes the toys are the key to cracking the self-driving car. He and colleagues believe their miniature, cheap, open source, self-driving "platform" will give 33 scientists of all stripes chances to experiment with cutting-edge technology at a critical moment: before autonomous vehicles hit the streets en masse.

If you're worried about the malevolent potential of deepfake video, you're not alone – so is Facebook. The company has launched a project to sniff out deepfake videos, and it's pledging more than $10m to the cause. It has pulled in a range of partners including Microsoft for help. Deepfakes are videos that use AI to superimpose one person's face on another. They work using generative adversarial networks (GANs), which are battling neural networks.

New Delhi, October 4,2019:Tech Mahindra, a leading provider of digital transformation, consulting and business reengineering services and solutions, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding(MoU) with Startup Bangladesh to foster the growth of digital startup ecosystem in Bangladesh, by providing guidance and mentoring to the budding entrepreneurs.The MoU was signed in presence of H.E. Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Bangladesh and Shri Piyush Goyal - Minister of Railways and Commerce & Industry, Government of India. As part of the comprehensive growth framework outlined within the MoU, Tech Mahindra will be assisting new-age technology startups in the country, focusing on future technologies like Artificial Intelligence, 5G, Big Data, Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning, to leverage digital growth opportunities across its global network. Startup Bangladeshis a concrete initiative by the Government of Bangladesh to create new opportunities, develop technical skills and help realize the vision of Digital Bangladesh. As part of the MoU, Tech Mahindra will extend collaboration opportunities to the innovators of Startup Bangladesh to engage with its research and development arm Makers Lab, which has global footprint including India, US, Europe and Australia. This collaboration will take up initiatives like Ideathons and Hackathons across educational institutions in Bangladesh.

Gordon's wine bar is reached through a discreet side-door, a few paces from the slipstream of London theatregoers and suited professionals powering towards their evening train. A steep staircase plunges visitors into a dimly lit cavern, lined with dusty champagne bottles and faded newspaper clippings, which appears to have had only minor refurbishment since it opened in 1890. "If Miss Havisham was in the licensing trade," an Evening Standard review once suggested, "this could have been the result." The bar's Dickensian gloom is a selling point for people embarking on affairs, and actors or politicians wanting a quiet drink – but also for pickpockets. When Simon Gordon took over the family business in the early 2000s, he would spend hours scrutinising the faces of the people who haunted his CCTV footage. "There was one guy who I almost felt I knew," he says. "He used to come down here the whole time and steal." The man vanished for a six-month stretch, but then reappeared, chubbier, apparently after a stint in jail.

The world's first robot citizen'Sophia' on Friday attended the International Round Square Conference in Indore, where it talked about climate change, conservation of energy and sustainable development. The event was attended by over a thousand students and several dignitaries. Hosting the event, filmmaker Uttara Singh asked Sophia several questions ranging from'what kind of dance she likes' to'what an ideal world will be like.' Sophia said that its favourite dance is the'robot' dance and showcased some moves. The humanoid robot said that algorithms, artificial intelligence are wonderful in keeping politicians and business leaders accountable.

"It's a reflection of a failure to rewire the organization," write the authors, who are McKinsey partners. "AI initiatives face formidable cultural and organizational barriers…at most businesses that aren't born digital, traditional mindsets and ways of working run counter to those needed for AI." To support the widespread adoption of AI, they suggest that companies must make three fundamental shifts. As Yogi Berra might have said, this first shift feels like déjà vu all over again, as information technologywent through something similar over its first few decades. Companies first embraced IT in the 1960s and 1970s to automate back-end processes in applications including inventory management, financial transactions and airline reservations.

Humans are good at a lot of things, but when it comes to assessing risk in the modern world we have some serious limitations. It's not uncommon to be plagued with fear and anxiety while flying, for example, but the same people who quake at the thought of trusting their life to an airliner will often treat the far more dangerous task of driving with baffling nonchalance. It should be no surprise then, that people are also wildly off the mark when it comes to assessing the risks presented by public road testing of autonomous vehicles. This misperception of risk is dramatically illustrated in a recent story by Washington Post reporter Faiz Siddiqui, which uncovers a kind of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) backlash against AVs in the heart of Silicon Valley. Siddiqui spoke with a number of Valley residents, most of whom work in the tech sector and believe in the long term potential of self-driving cars, who object to being what one terms "the guinea pig" for this new technology.

Many in financial services are trialing artificial intelligence (AI) applications, with projects increasingly sophisticated in methodology and ambition. WatersTechnology, in partnership with SmartStream, recently convened a Chatham House-style discussion with industry technologists to discuss their hopes for AI as well as the practical and ethical challenges to greater adoption. While the world of AI grows ever wider, one constant has shown through as firms inch closer to implementation--gambits with a strong data orientation will thrive, and those without will not. Banks and asset managers experimenting with AI have come through the early stages with enthusiasm, but, as with the peloton in the Tour de France, they are beginning to feel some strain in their legs. For many, arduous new terrain still awaits before reaching the finish line. As one contributor to the WatersTechnology/SmartStream discussion described it: "The struggle at the moment remains being able to articulate a business case for AI; hence the reason people are doing more proof of concepts to trial it--to help define the business case, to then move forward with its applicability within the industry."

The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) recently selected UIB to be one of their partners in Dubai Future Foundation's Dubai Future Accelerators' (DFA) Cohort 6 -- UIB's third DFA cohort, our first was with du and our second was with the Dubai Police. Even though the DFA program is spread across nine weeks (starting June 16) with a four-week break in between, UIB completed the project in only three weeks, enabling DEWA to go live the week of July 8, making the project a big success for UIB, DEWA, and DFA. This has also enabled us to use the program's remaining weeks to focus on new use cases and plan for how to further scale our partnership. What did we do with DEWA? We used UIB's UnificationEngine Conversational AI platform to deploy DEWA's customer service virtual assistant, "Rammas," on WhatsApp.

Over the course of the next five days, we will be bringing you a wide range of content dedicated to the technology that has surely more potential than any other to transform government and public services. Today we will be making an introduction to artificial intelligence, looking at the journey the public sector has so far taken with the technology, and where it has led. Tomorrow we will profile some existing use cases, then later in the week we will move on to looking at the ethical, legal, and technical challenges, the respective roles of the various stakeholders and, finally, we will examine what the future may hold. AI Week – which is being run by PublicTechnology in association with UiPath – will bring our readers an array of features, interviews, analysis and case studies. From Wednesday, you will also be able to view an exclusive webinar discussion in which an expert panel of public- and private-sector representatives will debate all the major issues.