The European Robotics League, funded by the European Commission to advance research, development and innovation in robotics and artificial intelligence, is the umbrella for three robotics competitions: ERL Consumer, ERL Emergency and ERL Professional service robots. All three leagues meet every two years in the ERL Smart Cities Robotics Challenge, showcasing how real robots can make our lives better in urban environments. The Challenge The SciRoc challenge will be held in the smart shopping mall of the Centre:MK. The challenge focuses on smart shopping and is divided into a series of episodes, each consisting of a task to be performed addressing specific research challenges. In order to accomplish their tasks, robots will have to cooperate with the simulated digital infrastructure of a smart shopping mall.

Do you have expertise in Machine Learning? Could you use this experience to help us create game-changing solutions for healthcare problems? The George Institute for Global Health, part of the Nuffield Department of Women's & Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford, is looking for a Machine Learning Scientist to join the team and contribute to the development and implementation of the algorithmic core of a series of exciting new projects in Oxford Martin School's prestigious programme on Deep Medicine. The programme is focused on tackling major healthcare problems – in both policy and practice - with the application of modern machine learning algorithms (including, but not limited to deep learning) to large multi-modal medical data (e.g., medical records, genetics, medical imaging, and wearable). Your responsibilities will include: employing existing (and develop new) Machine Learning algorithms that can learn personalised and population-level patterns in multi-modal data; mapping the results of the Machine Learning works to innovative solutions for the delivery of care (e.g.

For good reason, plenty of people are worried about the quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2) that are being pumped into the atmosphere. Since the early 1800s, scientists have known that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap heat, causing the effect we now know as global warming. CO2 is a particularly big contributor to this problem. Created as a result of the burning of fuels like oil and natural gas, CO2 makes up the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gas emissions. It represents around 72% of the total, compared to 18% methane and 9% nitrous oxide.

The British-born computer scientist, Andrew Ng, is a leading thinker on artificial intelligence (AI) and has been a pioneer in its application for many years. He founded the Google Brain project, served as Chief Scientist at Baidu, and co-founded the online learning platform, Coursera. Today, in addition to his academic work at Stanford University (USA), Mr. Ng is heading up two startups: Landing AI, which works with enterprises to adopt AI, and deeplearning.ai, Mr. Ng recently spoke with WIPO Magazine about the transformative power of AI, and the measures required to ensure that AI benefits everyone. AI is the new electricity.

The boom in popularity for podcasting has given a new voice to the world of spoken word content that had been largely left for dead with the decline of broadcast radio. Now riding the wave of that growth, a startup called Descript that's building tools to make the art of creating podcasts -- or any other content that involves working with audio -- a little easier with audio transcription and editing tools, has a trio of news announcements: funding, an acquisition, and the launch of a new tool that brings some of the magic of natural language processing and AI to the medium by letting people create audio of their own voices based on text that they type. Descript, the latest startup from Groupon founder Andrew Mason, created as a spinoff of his audio-guide business Detour (which got acquired by Bose last year), is today announcing $15 million in funding, a Series A for expanding the business (including hiring more people) that's coming from Andreessen Horowitz (it also funded the startup's seed round in 2017) and Redpoint. Along with that, the company has acquired a small Canadian startup, Lyrebird -- which had, like Descript, also built audio editing tools. Together, the two are rolling out a new feature for Descript called Overdub: people will now be able to create "templates" of their voices that they can in turn use to create audio based on words that they type, part of a bigger production suite that will also let users edit multiple voices on multiple tracks.

Pitting two artificial intelligences against each other in games such as DeepMind's Go has led to some of the biggest breakthroughs in AI in recent years, as the machines learn skills through trial and error that eventually lead to them beating humans. But can the same technique produce a more useful AI capable of operating in the real word? OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI research group, published research on Tuesday showing what it claimed was a method for training increasingly powerful smart systems that could prepare them for tackling more ordinary human problems. Set in increasingly realistic environments, the technique points to a way for the AI to "evolve" in a simulated world until it is ready to be used, it said. The researchers used several intelligent "agents" in a game of hide-and-seek played in a simulated physical environment.

Oracle on Tuesday used its 2019 Openworld conference in San Francisco to introduce ways for B2B firms to bring sales and marketing data together, as well as tools to personalize and customer experiences based on a variety of contextual data. Among the updates announced as part of its customer event this week, the business software giant said it was going to offer an integration between its marketing automation applications and Oracle DataFox. Acquired last year, Datafox brought Oracle an artificial intelligence (AI) data engine designed to continuously extract company-level data and signals to help companies see where they can grow. The Oracle Datafox integration will mean B2B firms can have a richer view of accounts, which will help them rank and prioritize opportunities, said Rob Tarkoff, Oracle's executive vice-president and general manager, CX Cloud. "CX applications will no longer be trapped by data that sits in different silos," Tarkoff said during a keynote session, which was livestreamed from Oracle Openworld.

Paxata, the pioneer in self-service data preparation, today announced that it was named an innovator in Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) "Innovation in the Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for Data Integration and Preparation" Top 3 report. According to the findings, more than half of all participants (52 percent) said that the use of AI or ML to automate the data preparation or integration process is important to their organization. Because of the prominent role of data integration and preparation in any analytics project, the report stated that AI-enablement should be a priority for analytics leaders at all levels as it provides organizations with the ability to overcome the constraints of legacy or less-automated data processing. The complimentary report can be downloaded here. "The next major shift in the analytics, business intelligence, and data management markets is coming from the use of AI and ML across the entire information supply chain. Along with using machine learning to find the next-best offer, companies can now point algorithms at modern data platforms to find links between data sets, automate data preparation, or breaches in data governance," said John Santaferraro, Research Director at EMA and lead author of the report.

British police officers are among those concerned that the use of artificial intelligence in fighting crime is raising the risk of profiling bias, according to a report commissioned by government officials. The paper warned that algorithms might judge people from disadvantaged backgrounds as "a greater risk" since they were more likely to have contact with public services, thus generating more data that in turn could be used to train the AI. "Police officers themselves are concerned about the lack of safeguards and oversight regarding the use of algorithms in fighting crime," researchers from the defence think-tank the Royal United Services Institute said. The report acknowledged that emerging technology including facial recognition had "many potential benefits". But it warned that assessment of long-term risks was "often missing".

Imagine being able to know if you have Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, liver failure, Crohn's diseases, pulmonary hypertension, chronic kidney disease, or any number of cancers based on a simple, non-invasive test of your breath. Breath analyzers to detect alcohol have been around for well over half a century--why not apply the same concept to detect diseases? A global team of scientists from universities in Israel, France, Latvia, China and the United States have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system to detect 17 diseases from exhaled breath with 86 percent accuracy. The research team led by Professor Hassam Haick of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology collected breath samples from 1404 subjects with either no disease (healthy control) or one of 17 different diseases. The disease conditions include lung cancer, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer, ovarian cancer, bladder cancer, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, gastric cancer, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, idiopathic Parkinson's, atypical Parkinson ISM, multiple sclerosis, pulmonary hypertension, pre-eclampsia toxemia, and chronic kidney disease.