After a year of development, Huawei today announced the commercial availability of the Huawei Ascend 910 AI computing chip and the machine learning framework MindSpore. Huawei says the Ascend 910 is the world's fastest AI processor, packing twice the performance of rival Nvidia's Tesla v100. Billed as the single chip with the greatest computing density, Ascend 910 delivers performance of up to 256 teraFLOPS under FP16 and 512 teraOPS under IN8 with declared max power consumption of 310W. In comparison, the GPU Tesla V100 delivers up to 125 teraFLOPS with a max power consumption of 300W, while Google's TPU 2.0 with four ASICs can reach 180 teraFLOPS. Ascend 910 is designed for deep learning training, and targets users such data scientists, researchers and engineers.

Robotic process automation and artificial intelligence are changing the way digital business transformation vendors across the Americas are delivering services to their enterprise clients, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm. The ISG Provider Lens Digital Business Transformation Report for Pan America finds enterprise clients looking for digital business transformation providers to help them automate IT functions. Many vendors are providing a high degree of automation while also delivering specialized services, including efficiency prioritization, dynamic response and provisioning, and security, based on a customer's needs, the report said. Many digital business transformation providers are developing intellectual property, including tools and as-a-service offerings, using analytics, automation, AI and cognitive computing, the report adds. These new services are disrupting providers that previously relied on offering low prices for labor-intensive services to remain competitive.

First published a decade ago, CJKV Information Processing quickly became the unsurpassed source of information on processing text in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. It has now been thoroughly updated to provide web and application developers with the latest techniques and tools for disseminating information directly to audiences in East Asia. This second edition reflects the considerable impact that Unicode, XML, OpenType, and newer operating systems such as Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux have had on East Asian text processing in recent years.

Heavy rain and blizzards aren't the only forms of severe weather Waymo's self-driving vehicles encounter on the regular. In a blog post published this morning, the Alphabet subsidiary laid out the ways its cars in over 25 cities tackle fog, dust, smoke, and other dangerous conditions that trip up even human drivers. "Challenging [environmental] conditions, which affect human driver and vehicle performance, are one of the leading contributors to crashes on our roads … Poor perception creates significant risk for other road users including pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicle occupants," wrote Waymo chief safety officer Debbie Hersman. "Waymo is working hard to master a variety of weather scenarios as part of our mission to improve road safety." To this end, Waymo says its autonomous vehicles are designed to detect sudden extreme weather changes, such as a snowstorm, that could impact their ability to drive safely.

In short, the Internet of Things, big data and Artificial Intelligence is being used to interpret the language of bees to gain a true understanding of biodiversity and environmental health. "We're starting to understand the characteristics of communication in the beehive," says John Abel, vice president of cloud and technology at Oracle for the UK, Ireland and Israel. "Already, we understand certain actions of the bee. For example, flying in a figure 8 is not random. Certain tones bees use will indicate food or water. The way the bee shudders and rotates within the figure 8 will indicate to the rest of the colony what it found and where it is. If the heat or sound in the hive changes, it can mean the hive is preparing to swarm. "If the queen bee is too large to fly – because when it is in the hive, its job is to create the future bees of the hive – the queen's workers have to prepare the queen for flying, and that takes 20 odd days.

"DEWA supports the directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, who instructed Dubai Government to deliver services that are 10 years ahead of other cities, and to work under the leadership of HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF), and HH Sheikh Maktoum bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai. These directives have guided DEWA's strategy to shape the future and enhance its role in serving the community to become a globally leading sustainable innovative corporation. DEWA has achieved considerable progress in this and one of its most prominent achievements is the launch of Digital DEWA, the digital arm of DEWA, to redefine the concept of utilities and create a new digital future for Dubai, to become the premier digital organisation in the world; with autonomous systems for renewable energy and storage and the expansion of artificial intelligence and digital services," said Al Tayer. Al Tayer noted that Digital DEWA has a four-point strategy. The first is launching advanced solar power technologies in Dubai.

One of the main reasons for this is that AI systems can process information in a significantly smaller amount of time than humans. An article by Ohio University attributes this efficiency boost to the fact that cognitive computing allows users to work through large amounts of data that were previously considered unusable. The article states that, "80% of all available data are unstructured, a category that includes text files, videos, websites, and mobile data." Considering AI's capability to process a vast amount of unstructured data, it's no surprise that cognitive computing is affecting the way decisions are made. AI is already shaking up the way traditional business processes are carried out, from streamlining innovation to improving efficiency across a wide range of fields.

Microsoft Research India on Wednesday announced the launch of a center for Societal impact through Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI). Part of the Microsoft Research (MSR) Lab in Bengaluru, this center will focus on creating and nurturing projects that can have real-world and large-scale societal impact. Through SCAI, MSR India will collaborate with a number of partners, such as academia, startups and NGOs. "I am excited about the creation of the center for Societal Impact through Cloud and Artificial Intelligence and I am looking forward to the efforts and collaborations ahead. There are so many opportunities to leverage recent advances in cloud computing and AI technologies to address long-term societal challenges spanning multiple sectors and realms, including health and wellness, education, transportation, and agriculture," said Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and Director at Microsoft Research.

When HSBC thwarted a $500 million central-bank heist, sophisticated computer software didn't raise the alarm. The funds flowed undetected from Angola's reserves to a dormant company's account in London. It was a teller at a suburban bank branch who became suspicious, declined a request to transfer $2 million, and triggered a review that uncovered the scam, according to one account of the episode. That was two years ago, and the finance industry's battle to stop the illicit transfer of as much as $2 trillion a year around the globe hasn't become any easier. At least a half-dozen lenders in Europe have found themselves at the centre of fresh allegations of dirty money schemes in the past year.