On 6-7 May 2019, the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its partners UNICEF and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) hosted a workshop in San Francisco on the joint "Generation AI" initiative. This workshop identified deliverables in two key areas: 1) public policy guidelines that direct countries on creating new laws focused on children and 2) a corporate governance charter that guides companies leveraging AI to design their products and services with children in mind.

Merriam Webster: Definition of artificial intelligence a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior Techopedia explains Artificial Intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines. It has become an essential part of the technology industry. Research associated with artificial intelligence is highly technical and specialized. Artificial intelligence or AI refers to software technologies that make a robot or computer act and think like a human. Some software engineers say that it is only artificial intelligence if it performs as well or better than a human.

The government has launched the National AI strategy today, with Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and Parliamentary Secretary for the Digital Economy Silvio Schembri both delivering speeches during the Delta Summit. The document, called'Malta the Ultimate AI Launchpad: A Strategy and Vision for Artificial Intelligence in Malta 2030', aims to ensure that benefits brought about by this next wave of innovation delivers benefits across all segments of Maltese society. Speaking at the Summit, Muscat highlighted that this year's summit doubled in size, from 4,500 people registering last year, to 10,000 this year. "This summit is one of the best opportunities for Malta to showcase our progress, our achievements and our dedication in areas of emerging technology to the world," Muscat said. "We made great strides compared to other countries as we were ambitious in our initiatives."

Redwood City, California-based Skydio and member of NVIDIA's startup accelerator, Inception, has just released the latest version of their AI capable GPU-accelerated drone, Skydio 2. Comprised of six 4K cameras, with an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 as the processor for the autonomous system, Skydio 2 is capable of flying for up to 23 minutes at a time and can be piloted by either an experienced pilot or by the AI-based system. The Jetson TX2 has 256 GPU cores and is capable of 1.3 trillion operations a second. According to the team, the drone uses nine custom deep neural networks that help the drone track up to 10 objects while traveling at speeds of 36 miles per hour. "Skydio 2 enables you to capture everything from a backyard pickup game to a downhill adventure with a single tap, the company wrote in blog post. "It builds on Skydio R1's foundation and takes it to the next level."

BlackBerry Limited BB has created Advanced Technology Development Labs (BlackBerry Labs). This is going to be a new business unit operating at the forefront of R&D in the cybersecurity landscape. With this strategic move, the company aims to ensure that its customers are protected across all endpoints and verticals in the IoT. Headed by chief technology officer, BlackBerry Labs will include a team of more than 120 software developers, architects, researchers, product leads and security experts. They will work toward the common goal of identifying, exploring and creating new technologies to ensure that the company is on the cutting edge of security innovation.

A Danish R&D project is developing an automatic sea ice product service, which can meet the increased demands for better and more timely sea ice information, using the extensive amount of free and available data from the Copernicus Sentinel satellites, along with novel machine learning techniques for satellite data fusion and sea-ice information retrieval. Manual ice-charting from multi-sensor satellite data has been used for decades, but it is a time-consuming process and delays the delivery of satellite based information to end users. There is a need for automated ice observations from satellite data delivered directly to users or assimilated into ice forecast models, in order to meet the increased demands for better and more timely sea ice information, to improve efficiency and safety of marine operations in polar regions. The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), the Technical University of Denmark and Harnvig Arctic & Maritime have initiated the project Automated Sea Ice Products (ASIP) – funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark. The ASIP vision for designing an automatic and robust sea ice classification scheme is to merge imagery from the Sentinel-1 satellites of the European Union's Copernicus programme with other satellite sensor data that have complementary capabilities, such as passive microwave data from AMSR2 (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2) and in the future the Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR), to better resolve the ambiguities that can occur in SAR imagery of sea ice.

Researchers from The University of Western Australia and the University of California have developed a new machine-learning tool that will improve the management, restoration and irrigation of rangeland areas used for grazing. Associate professor Sally Thompson from the UWA School of Engineering and UWA Institute of Agriculture says the tool was suited to environments where the amount of rainfall exceeded the absorption capacity of the soil, resulting in the excess water flowing over the land. The new machine learning tool models surface water flows in dry environments with patchy vegetation cover. The findings have significant implications for agricultural and natural systems in Australia and worldwide. "The research could help environmental designers limit soil erosion in rangeland environments and agricultural systems, minimising degradation risks in drylands," says Sally. "It also has applications in urban settings, where waterproof surfaces, like pavement, generate runoff and flood risks."

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the large accounting and management consulting firm, released a startling report indicating that workers will be highly impacted by the fast-growing rise of artificial intelligence, robots and related technologies. Banking and financial services employees, factory workers and office staff will seemingly face the loss of their jobs--or need to find a way to reinvent themselves in this brave new world. The term "artificial intelligence" is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. AI includes well-known applications, such as Siri, GPS, Spotify, self-driving vehicles and the larger-than-life robots made by Boston Robotics that perform incredible feats. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, speaks about Siri during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 4, 2018, in San Jose, Calif.

Maker of the popular PyTorch-Transformers model library, Hugging Face today said it's bringing its NLP library to the TensorFlow machine learning framework. The PyTorch version of the library has seen more than 500,000 Pip installs since the beginning of the year, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told VentureBeat. The Transformers library for TensorFlow brings together the most advanced Transformers-based AI models, like Google's BERT and XLNet, Facebook's RoBERTa, and OpenAI's GPT and GPT-2. It also includes Hugging Face's DistilBERT. Each of the models exceeds human performance and ranks atop the GLUE benchmark leaderboard.

Work to bring driverless cars to Britain's streets has reached a milestone with the first demonstration of an autonomous fleet driving in a "complex urban environment" in London. Ford Mondeos fitted with autonomous technology from the UK tech firm Oxbotica operated on public roads around the former Olympic Park in Stratford this week. Driven programme, a partially government-funded consortium, said it had "exceeded their initial plan" and was a significant step in confirming autonomous vehicles could operate in real-life situations in a large European city. Oxbotica said first passenger trials of a separate venture, an autonomous ride-sharing taxi service planned with the cab firm Addison Lee in the capital, could now start in June 2020. The Driven team – a combination of local authority planners, insurers, cyber-security and data experts, as well as Oxbotica – have been conducting trials in Oxford to examine what they called the "ecosystem" around autonomous vehicles, such as potential problems with hackers, communications technology and the legal framework. For now, the cars are operated with a safety driver in the front seat ready to take control, and prompted by the technology to decide whether to intervene in difficult situations.