According to the ONS (Office for National Statistics) around 1.5 million jobs in England alone could be at risk from automation. Deloitte finds that over the next two decades, up to 35% of all jobs could be at high risk of being replaced by automated systems. If the rise of automation has the potential to impact millions of jobs, will workers want to adapt and learn new skills if their jobs are at risk? A two-year Commission on Workers and Technology is currently assessing the impact automation and artificial intelligence (AI) could have on the UK's workforce. Yvette Cooper MP, who is chair of the Commission, wrote in The Guardian: "Trades unions and communities can't just stand by and hope for the best. If we want technological change to benefit everyone rather than widening inequality, then we need to start preparing now."

By now execs should be aware of the threat of email fraudsters impersonating them to instruct subordinates to wire funds to a scammer's account. But now they also need to watch out for phone hustlers, aided by artificial intelligence that spoofs the voice of CEOs. Deepfake videos depicting politicians like Barack Obama saying things he never did have sparked concerns over their potential for messing with elections and causing social chaos. But one use of the same technology is simple fraud. And in recent years the most lucrative fraud targeting businesses is carried out by spoofing the email account of a CEO (or some other trusted or authoritative person) who instructs a subordinate, such as a financial controller, to wire funds to a fraudster's account.

Recent years have seen a rising interest in developing AI algorithms for real world big data domains ranging from autonomous cars to personalized assistants. At the core of these algorithms are architectures that combine deep neural networks, for approximating the underlying multidimensional state-spaces, with reinforcement learning, for controlling agents that learn to operate in said state-spaces towards achieving a given objective. The talk will first outline notable past and future efforts in deep reinforcement learning as well as identify fundamental problems that this technology has been struggling to overcome. Towards mitigating these problems (and open up an alternative path to general artificial intelligence), I will then summarize a brain computing model of intelligence, rooted in the latest findings in neuroscience. The talk will conclude with an overview of the recent research efforts in the field of multi-agent systems, to provide the future teams of humans and agents with the necessary tools that allow them to safely co-exist.

To learn, however, a deep neural net needed to do more than just send messages up through the layers in this fashion. It also needed a way to see if it was getting the right results at the top layer and, if not, send messages back down so that all the lower neuron-like units could retune their activations to improve the results. That's where the learning would occur. In the early 1980s, Hinton was working on this problem. So was a French researcher named Yann LeCun, who was just starting his graduate work in Paris.

The authors cautioned that while the number of respondents was high, it was still not nearly enough data for an accurate statistical model, and that the model was not capable of identifying causality. Of the respondents, 74.1% were male. The average age was 32.7, with gender making no difference. When considering the public versus the private sector, the youngest respondents were those in mandatory military service, and the oldest were government employees, where the median age was 36. For those working in startups and corporations, the median age was 32.

Created by Microsoft in partnership with the Inria laboratory, the AI Factory is a co-innovation laboratory that links startups, the research world and the various players in the sector. Through these synergies, the AI Factory for Health projects will serve the patients and the medical profession to offer a renewed and individualized medicine. Startups selected to join the AI Factory for Health will benefit from AstraZeneca's know-how and expertise in pathologies, knowledge of patient needs and healthcare professionals, as well as legal expertise, access to institutions, and health data for the different European countries in which AstraZeneca operates.

Researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have found that bots or fake accounts enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) on social media have evolved and are now able to copy human behaviour to avoid detection. For the study published in the journal First Monday, the research team from the University of Southern California examines bot behaviour during the 2018 US presidential elections compared to bot behaviour during the 2016 US elections. "Our study further corroborates this idea that there is an arms race between bots and detection algorithms. As social media companies put more efforts to mitigate abuse and stifle automated accounts, bots evolve to mimic human strategies. Advancements in AI enable bots producing more human-like content," said study lead author Emilio Ferrara.

One of the few researchers who has led the development of artificial intelligence in both the U.S. and China dismisses the notion of an "AI race" between the trade war foes and thinks they could even learn from each other. Andrew Ng, the former leader of the AI teams at Baidu and Google Brain, told an event in San Francisco on Thursday that the two countries have their own advantages in developing AI. The U.S. still has the edge in fundamental research, he said, but Chinese companies have easier access to the consumer market thanks to Beijing's national AI strategy, which promotes the spread of the technology. At the same time, he said, the gap in awareness of data privacy between the two is narrowing. Ng had high praise for China's strategy and suggested other nations should follow suit and devise their own game plans.

How to identify and respond to "Deepfake" videos -- realistic AI-synthesized video generated for the purpose of spreading misinformation -- is a challenge that has been highlighted by recent social media stumbles on the question, particularly from Facebook. Several months ago Facebook was criticized for failing to remove a viral video manipulated to make US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sound drunk. In collaboration with Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from top universities, Facebook today announced the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) with the aim of finding innovative deepfake detection solutions to help the media industry spot videos that have been morphed by AI models. The challenge includes a dataset of video pairs (originals filmed by paid actors and tampered versions generated by various AI techniques). Facebook says no actual Facebook user data will be used, and has pledged US$10 million to encourage global participation in the challenge.

The Union health ministry is exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its fight against tuberculosis. India is among the countries with the highest number of TB patients, and is chasing the target of eliminating the disease by 2025--five years ahead of the global target. The Central TB Division of the health ministry has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Mumbai-based Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence to explore the application of AI in dealing with the disease. According to a statement on the collaboration, the institute would be supporting the Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP) to become'AI-ready', which would include "developing, piloting, and deploying AI-based solutions". "It would support the programme in vulnerability and hot-spot mapping, modelling novel methods of screening and diagnostics, and enabling decision support for care-givers, apart from supporting the RNTCP in adoption of other AI technologies," the statement said.