Last December, a conference of biologists gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to review a shocking finding. DeepMind, Alphabet's artificial intelligence lab and sister company to Google, had beat a roomful of biologists in a contest to predict the shape of a protein based on its genetic code. That might not sound monumental, but understanding the way proteins fold into three-dimensional shapes is crucial to helping create drugs, which often fight disease by latching onto proteins and altering the way they work in the body. DeepMind was able to predict these proteins' shapes with significantly more accuracy than the many esteemed academics and professionals at the conference. "It dawned on me that this is a field that people have been working in for decades," Mohammed AlQuraishi, a biologist and researcher at Harvard who participated in the contest, told Vox. "The fact that a new group could come in and do so well, so quickly--I felt bad because it demonstrated the structural inefficiency of academia."

Was George Orwell right, is Big Brother watching us? Undoubtedly many are alarmed by the ever-increasing level of computer-driven surveillance, particularly involving facial recognition technologies. In the past few months, San Francisco and Oakland, California, and the US state of Massachusetts have all banned police from using facial recognition tech. Meanwhile, in Europe, The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduces restrictive rules about privacy preservation in data processing. A team of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recently proposed a new architecture that can anonymize faces in images automatically while the original data distribution remains uninterrupted.

GRANT: Trade finance is very paper-oriented business and has been for a very long time. I would describe the pace of technology driven change around trade finance as rather modest, certainly over the past couple of decades. "Machine learning is really just a term for something that's been around for years - coding a computer to take certain actions in certain scenarios." However the emergence of blockchain and machine-learning technology has already revolutionised the way we look at trade finance globally, providing us with a unique opportunity to shift gears. Certainly, at ANZ we have meaningful programs of work that leverage those two technology capabilities which impact a material component of our trade-finance business.

Asked what is the biggest misconception about AI, Yoshua Bengio answered without hesitation "AI is not magic." Winner of the 2018 Turing Award (with the other "fathers of the deep learning revolution," Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun), Bengio spoke at the EmTech MIT event about the "amazing progress in AI" while stressing the importance of understanding its current limitations and recognizing that "we are still very far from human-level AI in many ways." Deep learning has moved us a step closer to human-level AI by allowing machines to acquire intuitive knowledge, according to Bengio. Classical AI was missing this "learning component," and deep learning develops intuitive knowledge "by acquiring that knowledge from data, from interacting with the environment, from learning. That's why current AI is working so much better than the old AI."

PathAI, a startup that employs machine learning techniques to improve diagnostic accuracy, today announced that it's raised $60 million in series B funding led by growth equity firm General Atlantic, with General Catalyst participating. It brings its total venture capital raised to about $75 million, following an $11 million series A financing round, which CEO and cofounder Dr. Andy Beck said will be used to enhance PathAI's existing offerings, drive improvement of its platform, and fuel research and development into new tools and devices. "Our goal has been clear since day one – a relentless drive to ensure patients get the right diagnosis and the most effective treatment. We're looking forward to working with our partners to scale this effective approach across disease areas and around the world," Beck said. "The global network and deep expertise in technology and life sciences brought by General Atlantic, alongside the continued support of existing investors like General Catalyst, can only enhance our ability to effect change toward this major, impactful objective."

Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter "Ping An" or the "Group", HKEX: 2318; SSE: 601318) is pleased to announce Ping An Global Voyager Fund is leading an investment of US$15 Million in Riverain Technologies, a leading provider of clinical artificial intelligence software used to efficiently detect lung disease at its earliest stages. Riverain Technologies markets advanced artificial intelligence imaging software used by leading hospitals around the world. The software significantly improves a clinician's ability to accurately and efficiently detect cancer and other cell anomalies in thoracic CT and X-ray images. The company's suite of patented ClearReadTM software tools are FDA-cleared, deployable in the clinic or in the cloud, and powered by the most advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning methods available to the medical imaging market. Its products are relied upon by leading healthcare institutions, including Duke University, Mayo Clinic, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, and Veterans Affairs hospitals.

The deal reminds us of Amazon's 2012 purchase of Kiva Systems, which kick-started an arms race to automate supply chains, warehouses, and fulfillment centers. In fact, since the inception of the ROBO Global Robotics & Automation Index, logistics and warehouse automation has been its best performing subsector, returning over 220%, including more than 30% so far in 2019. With 4 deals in the past 12 months, Shopify has been on a bona fide acquisition spree. That said, the 6 River acquisition is its first warehouse fulfillment-related deal, and may well be the most important acquisition to date in the company's quest to transition into a global retail operating system that spans global fulfillment and brick-and-mortar operations from a single e-commerce platform solution provider. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Massachusetts, 6 River Systems provides collaborative mobile robots to enhance warehouse fulfillment solutions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the educational landscape around the world. The technology is helping to simplify administrative tasks so that teachers can focus on communicating with students instead of spending valuable time on manually grading exams and homework. This new, tech-oriented approach may also help educators to create customized learning materials based on traditional syllabuses, and foster a personalized approach to learning. While India is serious about investing in AI, it's still way behind China, which plans to create a $150 billion AI-based tech sector by 2030. However, the education industry on the Indian subcontinent is experiencing dynamic growth and is currently revolutionizing the approach to learning.

Founded in 2008 by business school friends Robert Gentz and David Schneider, German-headquartered "etailer" Zalando is as much of a tech company as it is a retailer. One reason the company can provide a personalized user experience to its 27 million customers is because of the way it uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning just like the other 28 percent of retailers who used artificial intelligence in 2018. Here are only a few of the ways Zalando uses machine learning and artificial intelligence today. One of the ways Zalando uses technology to improve the user experience is through its Algorithmic Fashion Companion (AFC), a digital outfit recommendation tool that can generate outfit recommendations in real-time. The algorithm's recommendations are based on products that the customer has put in their "wish list," expressed interest in or purchased before.

Oracle's digital assistant is now available in Microsoft Teams, the cloud hosting and services provider announced today. Oracle's AI assistant got several other updates today, including the ability to interact via voice commands, enterprise-grade security for voice recordings, and the ability to respond to more complex voice commands. The news was announced today at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. As part of the Microsoft Teams integration, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 users will be able to access Oracle enterprise bots from the Microsoft Teams App Store. "For enterprise customers, what we're enabling [them] to do now is they can easily try to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with their employees and colleagues and so forth with Microsoft Teams," Oracle VP of AI and digital assistant Suhas Uliyar told VentureBeat in a phone interview.