CHINA often goes all in when it comes to technology that it believes in. The country has invested significantly in autonomous vehicles, 5G, and artificial intelligence in recent times. The internet of things (IoT), however, didn't get all the attention it deserved -- but that's changing quickly. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has just announced that it will be launching a constellation of 72 satellites to help the nation bolster its interests and ambitions in IoT over the next 3 years. According to Xinhua, China's national news agency, the program will be implemented by Beijing-based private satellite company "Commsat," which was funded by the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics under the CAS. The bureau revealed that a total of eight communication satellites of the program were sent into space last year for in-orbit tests.

London, and particularly the Science Museum, has a long, solid history of mounting exhibitions on information technology topics, from its 1991 reconstruction of Babbage's Difference Engine to the industrial robots it featured in the late 1990s (which health and safety insisted should be behind glass), their humanoid fellows in 2017, and the 2014 exploration of the information age. This summer, the city has three such exhibitions running simultaneously, two of them at the Science Museum. You could summarize them as: 1) What have you done for us lately?; 2) What are you going to do for us?; and 3) Why is it taking so long? The first is GCHQ's romp through the history of keeping secrets, Top Secret: From ciphers to cyber security. This moves from the earliest times through Mary Queen of Scots' coded letters to World War II (GCHQ's formation, Bletchley Park and Alan Turing) and the Cold War.

Slowly but surely, work on self-driving cars is progressing. Crashes still happen, tragic accidents come to pass every once in a while, and autonomous vehicles still make stupid mistakes that that the most novice human drivers would avoid. But eventually, scientists and researchers will teach our cars to see the world and drive the streets on a level that equates or exceeds the skills of most human drivers. Distracted driving and DUI will become a thing of the past. Roads will become safer when humans are removed from behind the steering wheel.

Alexander Winkler-Schwartz, a neurosurgery resident and PhD candidate, poses in the lab with a NeuroVR neurosurgical simulator at McGill University, on July 31, 2019. Alexander Winkler-Schwartz focuses on the computer-generated brain on the screen while, below, his hands gently remove the virtual brain tumour inside the mannequin's head. An artificial intelligence algorithm tracks the neurosurgery resident's every movement – ready to classify his performance as part of a research project at McGill University, where intelligent machines are learning to rank people based on how deftly they take away the tumour. It's part of a wider effort to harness the power of technology to improve medicine. Artificial intelligence is already helping monitor the vital signs of babies in intensive-care, and robots are a fixture in operating rooms. The algorithm in Montreal is correct in determining whether the virtual surgeon is an expert, a beginner, or somewhere in between 90 per cent of the time, based on a study of 250 simulated operations by 50 different people, according to a study published in the open-source Journal of the American Medical Association on Friday that Dr. Winkler-Schwartz was a lead author on.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump invited Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to the White House last month at the height of tensions between the two countries, The New Yorker magazine reported. The invitation, extended by Sen. Rand Paul with permission from the president, was turned down for now, The New Yorker reported Friday. Zarif said it was up to Tehran to decide on accepting it. Neither the White House nor the State Department responded to requests for comment on the report, which quoted U.S. and Iranian sources and what the magazine called a well-placed diplomat. Zarif told the magazine he would not want a White House meeting that yielded just a photo op and a two page statement afterwards, The New Yorker said.

A "Manhattan Project" for artificial intelligence is how Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, described his company in 2010, when I was one of its first investors. I took it as figurative grandiosity. I should have taken it as a literal warning sign, because that is how it was taken in foreign capitals that were paying close attention. Now almost a decade later, DeepMind is the crown jewel of Google's A.I. effort. It has been the object of intense fascination in East Asia especially since March 2016 when its AlphaGo software project beat Lee Sedol, a champion of the ancient strategic board game of Go.

A German privacy watchdog has ordered Google to cease manual reviews of audio snippets generated by its voice AI. This follows a leak last month of scores of audio snippets from the Google Assistant service. A contractor working as a Dutch language reviewer handed more than 1,000 recordings to the Belgian news site VRT which was then able to identify some of the people in the clips. It reported being able to hear people's addresses, discussion of medical conditions, and recordings of a woman in distress. The Hamburg data protection authority told Google of its intention to use Article 66 powers of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to begin an "urgency procedure" under Article 66 of GDPR last month.

I participated in an amazing AI challenge through Omdena's community where we built a classification model for trees to prevent fires and save lives using satellite imagery. Omdena brings together AI enthusiasts from around the world to address real-world challenges through AI models. My primary responsibility was to manage the labeling task team. Afterward, I had the chance to take on another responsibility and build an AI model that delivered results beyond expectations. I am Leo from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and I m a mechanical aeronautics engineer who currently works as a data scientist and management consultant in Brazil helping several companies to achieve better business results.

TAIWAN-BASED technology firm CyCraft, which provides artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to enhance cybersecurity of businesses, on Friday announced a US$5.65 million fundraise in a Series B round. In total, CyCraft's total funding now amounts to US$8.15 million. Backers of this investment include Singapore-based investment company Pavilion Capital, and CID Group, an investment company based in Taiwan. Funds raised will propel the startup's research efforts in enhancing its AI technology and support market expansion in Asia. The firm has also formally launched SecOps Platform, an AI-driven platform which offers three variations of automated cybersecurity solutions.

In the last year, the scent industry has undergone a quiet but significant transformation thanks to artificial intelligence: In August 2018, fragrance house Firmenich announced a partnership with Swiss university Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne to create a digital lab in order to study AI for fragrance product development. In October 2018, another major fragrance house, Symrise, worked with IBM to develop an AI and machine learning perfumer machine called Phylra. This past April, fragrance company Givaudan launched AI platform Carto to assist perfumers in scent creation. And finally, in July, fragrance subscription startup Scentbird launched a sub-brand called Confessions of a Rebel that used AI and customer data and reviews in the creation of its four debut fragrances. Historically, perfume creation has toed the line between art and science.