Artificial intelligence (AI) technology can help us fight climate change--but it also comes at a cost to the planet. To truly benefit from the technology's climate solutions, we also need a better understanding of AI's growing carbon footprint, say researchers. AI is changing the way we work, live and solve challenges. It can improve healthcare, protect elephants from poachers, and work out how broadband should be distributed. But it could be most valuable as a range of applications helping humanity fight our biggest threat--climate change.

Nikhil advises clients on anti-money-laundering issues, financial-crime compliance, and oth-er regulatory matters. He has extensive experience in program design and review, with a fo-cus on applying machine learning and analytics to risk assessments, models for rating client risks, transaction-monitoring system optimization, suspicious-activity reporting, metrics and reporting, and model validation. His client engagements focus primarily on improving the effi-ciency and effectiveness of transaction-monitoring systems by deploying machine-learning models, undertaking rule design and threshold tuning/calibration, and deploying case/alert risk-scoring models. Nikhil joined Promontory from Standard Chartered, where he headed the analytics function for financial-crime compliance. His roles included leading a global team of data analysts and data scientists to set and maintain the operating parameters of the bank's monitoring, screen-ing, and filtering systems.

Climate action is the latest buzzword among industry circles since the many International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and the recent UN Climate Summit in New York City. Greta Thunberg grabbed the headlines, but industrialists are all wondering: How can we move swiftly and effectively to reduce carbon emissions? How can we use AI and other exponential technologies to do the job better, faster and cheaper? As a business strategist and urban planner, I advise companies to focus on cities since they consume 80% of energy and emit 70% of carbon, so we'll win or lose the carbon battle in the cities. Fortunately, cities can move faster than national governments and, as energy buyers, they can directly negotiate energy types and pricing, giving them enormous economic clout.

Okapi, a commercial real estate-focused artificial intelligence (AI) platform, has raised $5.5 million in Series-A financing. The funding round was led by Marius Nacht, the co-founder and chairman of Check Point Software Technologies and a hi-tech entrepreneur, and brings the total amount of capital Okapi has raised to $8.4 million. Founded by Iris Tsidon and Maya Gal, Okapi is a machine learning-powered software platform that analyzes disparate streams of property-related data to provide building professionals with predictive, targeted insights that improve tenant comfort and increase landlords' income opportunities. "After beginning North American operations in 2017, we quickly gained traction with Canada's largest landlords, helping to improve operations for their portfolios while increasing NOIs by 1-3 percent," said Tsidon, Okapi's CEO. "Just a few months after launching in the U.S., this funding round enables us to expand our team and increase our market penetration. We have found that there is incredible demand for artificial intelligence tools to analyze the vast troves of data that owners and operators are neglecting, and now we have the resources to add industry veterans to our staff and advisory board to help facilitate our expansion."

In an effort to boost research and development in the context of deepfake detection, Google has shared a database containing 3,000 deepfake videos with the new FaceForensics benchmark, a research project by researchers at the Technical University of Munich and the University Federico II of Naples. Deepfakes are audio or visual content doctored by artificial intelligence (AI). They are considered a major threat because they allow threat actors to spread disinformation and influence public opinion by making it seem like influential individuals including government, corporate and military leaders, candidates in democratic elections, scientists and celebrities, said or did things they didn't actually say or do. The videos released by Google were produced with the help of paid actors. After recording hundreds of videos, Google researchers used publicly available tools to create thousands of deepfake videos.

This year, self-driving cars started getting pretty good. Deep fakes video started getting pretty convincing. Our virtual assistants got to the point where they could understand us well enough to do some simple things, like tell us the weather or get driving directions home. When it comes to artificial intelligence, we have reached an inflection point. The technology is good enough to use. Next year promises to be a breakout year for AI, as it starts to permeate all aspects of our lives. Here are predictions for 2020 from some of the world's top AI experts. Jen Snell is VP of product marketing at Verint, where she leads a product strategy team focused on intelligent self-service, conversational AI, automation, and analytics. She is a frequent speaker and a leading contributor on topics shaping the development and design of interactive technologies. Follow her on Twitter @JenniferLSnell and on LinkedIn.

Implementing machine learning is a minefield and a slog. Even after IT managers put in place an accelerated computing infrastructure required for AI, after data scientists and business managers agree on analytics projects the organization needs, after the data science team selects algorithms, builds models, prepares data, runs prototypes and makes everything operational – after all that –there's still the real possibility business unit managers will reject ML recommendations for fear of bias in the model or simply because they don't understand how the system arrives at its decisions. It's the AI Trust Gap, and it's a particularly difficult hurdle for companies without FAANG-class compute and data science resources. We've written about new attempts to close the trust gap, including management strategy recommendations ("How to Overcome the AI Trust Gap: A Strategy for Business Leaders") and a product launch last month by IBM ("Explaining AI Decisions to Your Customers: IBM Toolkit for Algorithm Accountability"). Now CognitiveScale has added Certifai to its Cortex line of enterprise AI software that generates, according to the company, a "FICO-like" composite risk score based on the "AI Trust Index" that CognitiveScale developed with AI Global.

As lawmakers consider the impact artificial intelligence will have on America's workforce, experts across the government, industry and academia this week urged Congress to confront and prioritize issues around ethics, bias and the increasing interactions between humans and robots. "Thanks to AI some weird and wonderful things are beginning to happen: Cars are learning to drive themselves, machines can now recognize your friends' faces and when you see people walking down the street talking on their phones, you don't know if they're talking to another human, or to a machine and expecting the machine to answer," Erik Brynjolfsson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy said at a House Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing in Washington. "Just last week, [the smart assistant] Siri tried to join into a conversation I was having about interest rates." Brynjolfsson researches the impacts that emerging information technologies have on business strategies and productivity. When prompted by a question from committee Chairwoman Haley Stevens, D-Mich., he described how considerations around ethics and bias are becoming more and more urgent as AI rapidly advances.

France is poised to become the first European country to use facial recognition technology to give citizens a secure digital identity -- whether they want it or not. Saying it wants to make the state more efficient, President Emmanuel Macron's government is pushing through plans to roll out an ID program, dubbed Alicem, in November, earlier than an initial Christmas target. The country's data regulator says the program breaches the European rule of consent and a privacy group is challenging it in France's highest administrative court. It took a hacker just over an hour to break into a "secure" government messaging app this year, raising concerns about the state's security standards. None of that is deterring the French interior ministry.

Imagine the following: You're a veterinarian and Max, a 7-year-old, neutered tabby cat has been brought to you because his owners have noticed he seems to be losing weight and his coat is looking scruffy. He seems to be using the litter box a lot more though it's hard to tell if he's actually urinating, and he has begun throwing up his food a few times a week. You have a suspicion and the lab results prove it. For Max and many other older cats, these clinical signs aren't just indications of old age but a disease that has become one of the leading causes of death for older cats – chronic kidney disease, or CKD. CKD is a common ailment, affecting 30-40 percent of cats over the age of 10.