The "Agricultural Techniques Hackathon" will be held from September 26-28, 2019 in the Al- Qassim region and is open for participation by programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, web developers, owners of innovative Ideas and specialists from GCC and Middle East markets. The Hackathon will consist of three tracks comprising marketing and growth, management and follow-up of agricultural projects, and use of Artificial Intelligence and data in pest and agricultural control. A jury will review the most prominent ideas and solutions provided for solving the challenges facing the agricultural sector. The outstanding projects within the three tracks of the Hackathon will be included into Badir's dedicated plan with its accelerators program, who will be provided with a range of advisory services and intensive programs such as training, workshops, guidance to develop entrepreneurial innovations and transform them into real projects within 90 working days, and up to the incubation of the projects to ensure their success. Nawaf Al-Sahaf, the CEO of Badir Program, commented: "Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 program aims to adopt a more sustainable, productive, and efficient food system. Our joint'Agricultural Techniques Hackathon' with Mujtami will help generate fresh innovative ideas and solutions to transform the existing food system in the Kingdom, which will lead to reduction of natural resources waste, increase in the efficiency and quality of production, and higher economic return."

When the discussion turns to the computing platforms expected to power the coming wave of automated vehicles (AVs), there are basically two companies that seem to get all of the attention, Nvidia and Intel with its Mobileye subsidiary. Most of the companies developing AVs that have acknowledged their choice of chip providers are using hardware from one of those two companies. But if you open up the electronic control units in today's cars and trucks, there's a good chance that you will find chips from Eindhoven, Netherlands based NXP and they are fighting to keep a place in future vehicles through a new partnership with Kalray. French chip design firm Kalray has been around for about a decade and they specialize in processors that can run many calculations in parallel simultaneously. Kalray's Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA) chips are particularly adept at handling the type of machine learning and neural network algorithms that are at the heart of most automated driving perception systems.

A new, huge cargo drone, the APT 70, had the video of its first flight recorded and uploaded by pioneering aerospace manufacturer Bell. Built for delivery and disaster relief, the APT 70 can travel up to 18 miles on a single charge. The video shows off the impressive capabilities of cargo drones and how they could be used as an efficient future delivery system. The Autonomous Pod Transport 70 - or APT 70 for short - is 180 centimeters tall. The Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft comes with a range of 18 miles on a single charge.

In Grenoble, France, one company is aiming to make an impact in the field which is so visibly dominated by multi-billion dollar corporations. We caught up with the company's Business Unit Director responsible for introducing their products to the Automotive market, Stéphane Cordova, to find out more, ahead of their attendance at AutoSens Detroit in May. The company's approach to "Supercomputing on a chip" has evolved from a the business origins providing components and software services to data centres, where high speed and reliability as well as low power consumption and significantly reduced heat generation were all key factors in processor component design. What helped you decide to commit to exhibiting at AutoSens again? Kalray's technology will be at the heart of autonomous driving.

Faced with spending cuts by clients, stiffer competition from upstart legal services providers, and the rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), law firms' traditional model of the billable hour may have had its time in the sun. "Law firms are looking for different ways to charge for their services, especially in the corporate market where clients are just not accepting the old way of billing," says Dani McCormick, director of solutions at Lexis Nexis. The billable hour has long been the bedrock of how the legal profession works out how much to charge clients for their services. Fee earners log the time they spend on client work each day, usually in six-minute increments, and this helps them to provide clients with accurate bills and keep track of annual billing targets. While this model was effective in the past, critics say its rigid structure is incompatible with the current market, where clients are more price conscious, and see more value in project-based pay and success fees.

Artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry is predicted to save $150 billion annually for the US. As such, AI is being rapidly deployed in many areas of the healthcare landscape. This event will primarily focus on the Providers, attracting CIOs, CDOs, CTOs, VPs of IT and Informatics along with senior Physicians and Clinicians from leading US hospitals who will assess the business value outcomes of AI and share experiences of implementation in clinical care and hospital operations. Demand for basic and advanced analytics is growing exponentially in healthcare. Building a robust data ecosystem to support the spectrum of analytics, from descriptive analytics to support efficient operations to advanced ML / AI analytics to drive differentiated outcomes is a critical enabler for provider systems.

On Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma took the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai to debate artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity. As expected, Ma took a far more optimistic stance than Musk. Ma encouraged people to have faith in humanity, our creativity, and the future. "I don't think artificial intelligence is a threat," he said, to which Musk replied, "I don't know, man, that's like, famous last words." An edited transcript of the discussion follows.

Artificial intelligence is now being increasingly used to protect and preserve the country's ancient cultural heritages, which are human treasures but face risks brought by time and nature, Wu Jian, director of the Cultural Heritage Digitization Institute at the Dunhuang Academy, has said. Speaking at the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference's Shanghai West Bund Forum, Wu noted that the historic Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, northwest China's Gansu Province, are described as a Buddhism art "trinity" of structure, mural and sculpture. The themes of the elegant murals there include traditional stories and myth, and the well-known dances of feitian, or flying goddess. However, these murals, dating back more than 1,600 years, could never last forever in their original state. They are fragile in front of nature's power like sandstorm, heavy rains and floods, as well as human activities -- their bright colors having faded and the patterns blurred, some even disappeared.

In this July 30, 2019, photo, Paul Hildreth, emergency operations coordinator for the Fulton County School District, works in the emergency operations center at the Fulton County School District Administration Center in Atlanta. Artificial Intelligence is transforming surveillance cameras from passive sentries into active observers that can immediately spot a gunman, alert retailers when someone is shoplifting and help police quickly find suspects. Schools, such as the Fulton County School District, are among the most enthusiastic adopters of the technology. Paul Hildreth peered at a display of dozens of images from security cameras surveying his Atlanta school district and settled on one showing a woman in a bright yellow shirt walking a hallway. A mouse click instructed the artificial intelligence-equipped system to find other images of the woman, and it immediately stitched them into a video narrative of where she was currently, where she had been and where she was going. There was no threat, but Hildreth's demonstration showed what's possible with AI-powered cameras.

Damien Patton likes to fly under the radar. Paradoxically, the founder and CEO of Banjo, a Park City-based artificial intelligence firm, takes leaps in his personal life as an offroading and skiing enthusiast. Unlike the visibility Skullcandy's hilltop perch near S.R. 224 affords the consumer headphone brand, it's not readily apparent to the vacationers, athletes and commuters passing through that Kimball Junction is the nerve center of a global data operation that just raised more than $100 million in its most recent round of funding. "You're always excited to see the fact that you're being successful with it, but actually, I don't dwell on it," Patton said in an interview, indicating he prefers instead to think about solving the problems of today and the future -- like homelessness, gun violence and the opioid crisis -- with big data. Petabytes of data pass through the unassuming Basin office park that houses Banjo's global headquarters and around 100 of its employees.