Recent surveys, studies, forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the health and progress of AI highlighted the concerns of US companies doing business in China, the confidence of psychiatrists in their jobs' resistance to AI displacement, and the bursting of the drone and autonomous vehicles bubbles. An attendant stands next to a CloudMinds Technology Inc. XR-1 commercial humanoid service robot at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China, on Thursday, Aug. 29, 2019. Most of the projections about AI are wrong … people like us, street-smart, we are not scared by it… and we want to challenge ourselves to embrace it"--Jack Ma "Humans may become too slow. A millisecond is an eternity to a computer today. Computers are already smarter than human beings in many aspects…AI will be vastly smarter"--Elon Musk AI is "mimicking the brain" (or not) quote of the week: "Can software-based neural networks usefully approximate the (fuzzier, more complex) machinery of the organic brain?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) spans every major industry and is likely to dramatically transform industries. With better algorithms and large amounts of data, AI has the potential to perhaps outperform human decision-making. Performance differentials between firms on account of their proficiency with AI will also likely intensify over the coming years and will shake up most industries. "AI is a gamechanger to drive new business models and transform today's businesses and workplaces," remarks Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India. Taking a cue, the Indian School of Business (ISB) and Microsoft India have inked a new partnership to take forward their shared vision for an AI-empowered India.

With so many questions surrounding artificial intelligence's effect on the workplace and workforce, one wonders whether future Labor Day celebrations will take on new meaning. Employers in Illinois may face these questions sooner than others following passage of a new Illinois law that regulates the use of artificial intelligence ("AI") to analyze and evaluate job applicants' video interviews. The Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act imposes duties of transparency, consent and data destruction on organizations using AI to evaluate interviewees for jobs that are "based in" Illinois. The measure, passed unanimously in the Illinois legislature and approved by the Governor in early August, becomes effective January 1, 2020. Applying AI-based analytics to job interviews is an increasingly common practice.

This current year has already ushered in a tidal wave of tech innovations, from the rise of social robots and personal assistants to Amazon Prime's one-day delivery gamble and the proliferation of voice search. The latter alone became a $1.8B retail segment in the US in 2017, and is predicted to rise to around $40B by 2022. Amazon Prime's ability to prioritize Prime subscribers in their supply chain and get them their packages within 24 hours has rocked the world of online retail. Chatbots have been heavily deployed this year too, and are generally well-received by customers who would otherwise have to call or submit forms. But we're more than halfway through 2019, so it's time to ask: What big tech changes are going to affect the way we live and work in 2020?

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to help us realize our shared dream of a better future for all of humanity, but it will bring with it challenges and opportunities we can't yet foresee. At Stanford HAI, our vision for the future is led by our commitment to studying, guiding and developing human-centered AI technologies and applications. We believe AI should be collaborative, augmentative, and enhancing to human productivity and quality of life. These complement Stanford's tradition of leadership in AI, computer science, engineering and robotics. Our goal is for Stanford HAI to become an interdisciplinary, global hub for AI thinkers, learners, researchers, developers, builders and users from academia, government and industry, as well as leaders and policymakers who want to understand and leverage AI's impact and potential.

IIT Kharagpur has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop a resource portal to promote learning and development in the artificial intelligence (AI). Powered by Amazon SageMaker, a cloud machine learning platform, the National Artificial Intelligence Resource Portal (NAIRP) is aimed at making the search for AI learning resources simpler and more accessible to learners, practitioners and researchers in India, an IIT KGP statement said here on Saturday. The initiative has got funding from the Ministry of Human Resources Development, as part of the National Digital Library of India (NDLI) project which is being spearheaded by the premier institute. With the launch of NAIRP, machine learning practitioners will be able to search quickly and get access to myriads of learning resources, it said. "The contributions from AWS will enable us to provide cloud computing to all learners and reduce the high barrier to make training in AI more available," former IIT Kharagpur Director and Professor Partha Pratim Chakrabarti said.

In the first known case of successful financial scamming via audio deep fakes, cybercrooks were able to create a near-perfect impersonation of a chief executive's voice – and then used the audio to fool his company into transferring $243,000 to their bank account. A deep fake is a plausible video or audio impersonation of someone, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Security experts say that the incident, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, sets a dangerous precedent. "In the identity-verification industry, we're seeing more and more artificial intelligence-based identity fraud than ever before," David Thomas, CEO of identity verification company Evident, told Threatpost. "As a business, it's no longer enough to just trust that someone is who they say they are. Individuals and businesses are just now beginning to understand how important identity verification is. Especially in the new era of deep fakes, it's no longer just enough to trust a phone call or a video file."

Together with ERP, blockchain can help CFOs streamline processes, enhance transparency, and create new ways of working with partners and customers. Can you imagine a future in which your finance organization and external business partners have a common system to transact, store, and access records for payments, orders, and reporting--a future in which processes that were once manual and laborious are carried out automatically? Not only would you be able to cut out dozens of costly and time-consuming steps, you'd also be able to create a more trusted environment for everyone involved: vendors, business users, and customers. Blockchain can pave the way for this future. The technology promises other benefits, as well: Internet-connected devices seamlessly uploading data, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems tapping into historical records and proactively suggesting actions that finance professionals can use to bring their company to the next level in their digital transformation.

SURVEILLANCE is a fact of life. Your boss is monitoring your performance at work, supermarkets are collecting data on your grocery shopping, face-recognition cameras are tracking where you walk. Now there is a new frontier: the automobile. In a few months, European Union law-makers are due to rubber stamp proposals that will make a raft of monitoring devices mandatory in cars within three years. All new models of car will come with black boxes, intelligent speed assistants, drowsiness-monitoring cameras and more besides (see "Eyes on the …

App-only fintech startup Monzo is scaling up its machine learning capabilities and plugging employees into the rich stream of data generated by 1.7m global users as it forges ahead of the high-street banks in the digital space. Neal Lathia, data scientist and machine learning lead at the UK-based bank, told The Drum how his team is delivering "incremental gains" in the app, in customer and the product using smarter automation since he took the role on one year ago. Lathia, previously lead data science at SkyScanner, commands a team of more than 20 people. When he joined there were only two. Now he is looking to harness the wealth of data at the company's disposal to get Monzo "working faster". It contrasts with the role a data scientist at a high street bank may have, weighed down by legacy systems, corporate baggage and sheer scale.