Artificial intelligence efforts lack long-term vision, and it may be a structural problem. Worse yet, the direction of AI -- and future of corporate decision-making -- is now concentrated in a relatively small handful of global companies. That's the word from author and futurist Amy Webb, who recently shared her concerns with Michael Krigsman, host of CxOTalk. Webb, a professor of strategic foresight at NYU and founder of the Future Today Institute, says AI is being shaped by nine companies, all in the US or China: Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Tencent. Webb documented the hold these organizations have on AI and other technologies in her recent book, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity.

On September 19, 2019, the European Parliament Research Service (EPRS) released a paper, European Union (EU) Guidelines on Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (AI): Context and Implementation (--Paper--), to shed light on the ethical rules that were established under the EU Guidelines on Ethics in AI (--Guidelines--). The Guidelines, which are nonbinding, were published in April 2019 after the European Parliament was directed to update and complement the existing Union legal framework with guiding ethical principles that are based on a --human-centric-- approach to AI. The Paper aims to provide guidance on the key ethical requirements that are recommended in the Guidelines when designing, developing, implementing or using AI products and services to promote trustworthy, ethical and robust AI systems. The Paper also identifies some implementation challenges and possible future EU action while also calling for certain actions including clarifying the Guidelines, fostering the adoption of ethical standards and adopting legally binding instruments to set common rules on transparency. Of note, the Guidelines highlight that all AI stakeholders must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) principles and advise the AI community to guarantee that privacy and personal data are protected, both when building and when running AI systems to afford citizens full control over their data. Thereupon, AI developers are directed to apply specific design techniques, such as data encryption and data anonymization.

THIS EVENT IS 100% FREE! Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing – these are the buzzwords that are floating around manufacturing facilities across the United States. What does this mean for you? How are you gaining knowledge about these new technologies? Are you keeping up with your competitors who are being innovative and implementing smart manufacturing in their facilities?

A new survey found that more than half of B.C's. artificial intelligence companies believe the federal government is not doing enough to boost the sector, and half have considered leaving the province. The non-profit industry association, Artificial Intelligence Network of B.C., says there are more than 150 AI-related firms in B.C. and more than 65 submitted responses to its survey, which was conducted by CityAge and released this week. More than 56 per cent of respondents said the federal government needs to do more to help the local AI sector grow, with 31 per cent saying its efforts were lacking and 24 per cent saying they needed major attention. Half of respondents said they have considered moving their companies out of B.C. They main reasons they gave were a desire to connect to bigger markets (35 per cent) and to operate in a better taxation and regulatory environment (11 per cent).

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 4 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com A glitch in the new "FIFA 20" video game has exposed the personal details of a number of players. Game developer EA Sports tweeted on Thursday that some players noticed the leak when they were on the registration portal page for the EA Sports FIFA 20 Global Series competition. Players in the Global Series can qualify to compete in an eWorld Cup tournament.

These are troubled times for artificial intelligence developers: never has there been such potential in the field of machine learning, which relies on users' personal information for training--however, data regulation and public perception of digital privacy have never been sterner, either. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal was a watershed moment: personal data from 87 million Facebook users were covertly used for political campaigning. This event, and the frequent news of security breaches in social networks, in operating systems and in cloud servers have eroded public trust. Earlier this year, Google admitted that its employees listen to recordings of conversations held between clients and the company's smart speaker. Technologists are on a quest for privacy-protecting artificial intelligence, which has led to the proposal of new techniques like federated learning.

Peggy and Joshua Peschel, assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering, Iowa State University, answer the question: Do people with more experience trust AI (artificial intelligence)? They identify how to make AI more trustworthy in every part of our lives, saying that it has to consistently work and there needs to be public awareness when it is being used.

Like many of you in Towards Data Science, I am self-taught in machine learning and can remember the day I first left my laptop in model training, fan whirring away, to return hours later and find it still buzzing along. "Hmm", I thought, "maybe I need a GPU". Fellow DIY thinkers: it is not a good idea to try and rip apart an old Xbox, but you could build your own. On days even further in the past, energy usage for my family sometimes created a choice between playing video games and air conditioning: rainy summer afternoons with the Xbox fan and the additional external Xbox fan both battling for sound preeminence with video games and other electronic weapons. Those were the days before discussions about energy efficiency triggered a climate change debates.

The University of Queensland (UQ) is leveraging the power of its new supercomputer to analyse human skull models, with the work conducted being dedicated towards delaying the onset of one of the world's most debilitating illnesses -- Alzheimer's Disease. Courtesy of Dell Technologies, UQ's new high performance computer (HPC) system is being used by the Research Computing Centre (RCC). The system, dubbed Weiner, is capable of processing massive amounts of computational tasks in parallel, including data visualisation and machine learning, which allows for the modelling of possible treatments for illnesses. See also: Photos: The world's 25 fastest supercomputers (TechRepublic) Speaking with media at the Dell Technologies Forum in Sydney on Tuesday, UQ RCC chief technology officer Jake Carroll said the centre boasts a wide range of employees, from physicists through to computer scientists, even those specialising in humanities. "People from all walks of research need to be able to participate and integrate with these things," Carroll said.

Let's be real: When you download a new app, you probably don't bother to read its privacy policy first. I write about privacy as a journalist and even I rarely bother to read those policies. They're written in eye-glazing legalese perfectly calibrated to make any normal human being want to stop reading as soon as possible. Who can blame us for rushing to check that little box that says we agree to the terms of service? Now, a new tool called Guard promises to read the privacy policies of various apps for us.