Artificial intelligence-based property management platform Askporter has won a further £1.5 million in funding from half a dozen venture capitalists. One of the backers, Woking-based Henley Investments, has used the announcement to claim that the property management sector is'inefficient and ripe for disruption'. Askporter, which still calls itself a start-up despite being three years old, is a proptech company that uses a digital platform including a'virtual assistant' app to help property management teams run buildings more efficiently. It claims to help "cut costs and reduce the time spent on tedious tasks, all the while providing first-class support to occupants". "Our success raising £1.5 million investment reflects wider changes sweeping the property industry," says AskPorter CEO Tom Shrive (pictured, left).

A hundred and thirty three years--that's how long Virginia-based Newport News Shipbuilding has been in the business of manufacturing ships. As the sole developer of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, the company has constructed more than 30 warships, including the world's first and largest nuclear-powered carrier, which weighs 100,000 tons and comprises 300 million parts. Traditionally, building a ship like this might require 30 million to 40 million man-hours. Digital transformation has upended the ship building business, said Bharat Amin, VP and chief information officer at Newport News Shipbuilding, on stage at Siemens' Spotlight on Innovation, an annual technology conference held recently in Orlando. "You hear about smart cities, we want to be a smart shipyard," Amin told the audience.

IBM has released three artificial intelligence (AI) projects tailored to take on the challenge of curing cancer to the open-source community. At the 18th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) and the 27th Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), which will be held in Switzerland later this month, the tech giant will dive into how each of the projects can advance our understanding of cancers and their treatment. Cancer alone is estimated to have caused 9.6 million deaths in 2018, with an estimated 18 million new cases reported in the same year. Predisposition through genetics, environmental factors including pollution, smoking, and diet are all considered factors in how likely someone is to develop such a disease, and while we can treat many forms, we still have much to learn. Researchers from IBM's Computational Systems Biology group in Zurich are working on AI and machine learning (ML) approaches to "help to accelerate our understanding of the leading drivers and molecular mechanisms of these complex diseases," as well as methods to improve our knowledge of tumor composition.

Five years after Google acquired DeepMind, the health and artificial intelligence group is unveiling its biggest breakthrough yet in health care. Its technology is able to predict if a patient has potentially fatal kidney injuries 48 hours before many symptoms can be recognized by doctors. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, DeepMind researchers said their algorithms correctly predicted 90 percent of acute kidney injuries that would end up requiring dialysis. The work was the result of a project with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to help doctors get a head start on treatment. "We've been really excited for the potential of using AI to support clinicians moving care from reactive to proactive and preventative," said Dominic King, DeepMind's co-founder and clinical lead, in an interview.

An artificial intelligence system should be recognised as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says. The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore. Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans - to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognised. The academics say this is "outdated". And it could see patent offices refusing to assign any intellectual property rights for AI-generated creations.

When she calls me, she can immediately tell if something is wrong, simply from the way I say "Hello" or "I'm fine". Like many relationships with those we hold close, my mom and I have built a level of trust to the point that she knows how I'm feeling from a simple word or phrase. But unfortunately, I, like many others in the world today, spend as much (if not more) time interacting with technology as I do with the people close to me. Yet unlike talking to my mom or a friend, the way we interact with devices is completely transactional. My cell phone can't read between the lines and understand what's really going on with me.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) held its 57th annual meeting July 28 to August 2 in Florence, Italy. Today, the ACL 2019 organizing committee announced its eight paper awards: Best Long Paper, Best Short Paper, Best Demo Paper, and five Outstanding Paper awards. The paper addresses the issue by sampling context words both from the ground truth sequence and the predicted sequence by a model during training. Researchers tested the approach on Chinese to English and WMT'14 English to German translation tasks, and achieved significant improvements on various datasets. Click here to read the full paper.

As the Joint Chiefs of Staff gathered in Key West, Florida for a private meeting in March 1948, the first U.S. secretary of defense, James Forrestal, posed a simple question: "Who will do what with what?" The Air Force and Navy tussled over strategic nuclear bombers, while the Army and Marine Corps bickered over limitations to their respective end strengths. The resulting Key West agreement defined the primary functions of the services for the Cold War, but it didn't end the debate -- far from it. Interservice rivalries flared over atomic weapons and the "missile gap." Turf battles wasted critical time and money and introduced new dangers in command and control.

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) an advantage to your business? While most say yes, tech experts concur that AI brings in a whole new set of challenges to organizations, especially around data security, transparency and data protection. Irrespective of the challenges, analysts have predicted that the artificial intelligence market will register a CAGR of over 33% by 2023. But, it's time that organizations start addressing a few key aspects around data. Ajoy Menon, Managing Director and Lead – Financial Services, Accenture Advanced Technology Centers in India, informs, "We are seeing great traction among BFSI companies to incorporate AI along the whole spectrum of its value chain and to reimagine their processes, products, employees and customer experience."

One of the core tasks of weather services is to warn of dangerous weather conditions. These include thunderstorms in particular, as these are often accompanied by gusts of wind, hail and heavy rainfall. The Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) uses the "NowcastMIX" system for this purpose. Every five minutes it polls several remote sensing systems and observation networks to warn of thunderstorms, heavy rain and snowfall in the next two hours. "However, NowcastMIX can only detect the thunderstorm cells when heavy precipitation has already occurred. This is why satellite data are used to detect the formation of thunderstorm cells earlier and thus to warn of them earlier," explains Professor Jens Dittrich, who teaches computer science at Saarland University and heads the "Big Data Analytics" group.