In this special guest feature, Solomon Thimothy, CEO of DMA Digital Marketing Agency, believes that digital marketing advancements in 2018 have set a high bar for customer expectations. Customers now expect, deserve and demand that personalized, seamless transactions will only increase in 2019. By focusing on data-based AI solutions, organizations can ensure the customer journey will be more personalized and more profitable in the year to come. Solomon focuses his expertise and passion in helping businesses invest in long-term digital marketing for financial growth. His education from Northeastern Illinois University and North Park University provide him with the tools needed to lives up to its digital marketing commitments.

Elon Musk's secretive "brain-machine interface" startup, Neuralink, stepped out of the shadows on Tuesday evening, revealing its progress in creating a wireless implantable device that can – theoretically – read your mind. At an event at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Musk touted the startup's achievements since he founded it in 2017 with the goal of staving off what he considers to be an "existential threat": artificial intelligence (AI) surpassing human intelligence. Two years later, Neuralink claims to have achieved major advances toward Musk's goal of having human and machine intelligence work in "symbiosis". Neurolink says it has designed very small "threads" – smaller than a human hair – that can be injected into the brain to detect the activity of neurons. It also says it has developed a robot to insert those threads in the brain, under the direction of a neurosurgeon.

Summary: Despite our concerns about China taking the lead in AI, our own government efforts mostly through DARPA continue powerful leadership and funding to maintain our lead. Here's their plan to maintain that lead over the next decade. Think all those great ideas that have powered AI/ML for the last 10 years came from Silicon Valley and a few universities? Hard as it may be to admit it's the seed money in the billions that our government has spent that got pretty much all of these breakthroughs to the doorway of commercial acceptability. Dozens of articles bemoan the huge investments that China is making in AI with the threat that they will pull ahead.

According to the new market research report "Artificial Intelligence Market by Offering (Hardware, Software, Services), Technology (Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Context-Aware Computing, Computer Vision), End-User Industry, and Geography - Global Forecast to 2025", published by MarketsandMarkets, the Artificial Intelligence Market is expected to be valued at USD 21.5 billion in 2018 and is likely to reach USD 190.6 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 36.6% during the forecast period. Major drivers for the market are growing big data, the increasing adoption of cloud-based applications and services, and an increase in demand for intelligent virtual assistants. The major restraint for the market is the limited number of AI technology experts. Critical challenges facing the AI market include concerns regarding data privacy and the unreliability of AI algorithms. Underlying opportunities in the artificial intelligence market include improving operational efficiency in the manufacturing industry and the adoption of AI to improve customer service.

#Megvii, a Chinese #AI #startup that supplies facial recognition software for the Chinese government's Wsurveillance program, is expanding its technology beyond humans to recognize different faces of pets.

Goonhilly Earth Station opened its new data center and launched a managed High Performance Computing (HPC) platform for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) computing on demand. Goonhilly's goal is to create a U.K. hub for AI and ML services that acts as a marketplace and allows academia and enterprise to collaborate and share ideas. One of the first organizations in the U.K. to deploy a liquid immersion cooling system from Submer Technologies to mitigate the power demands of HPC, Goonhilly's platform is designed to meet the data-intensive needs of the automotive, life sciences and space/aerospace marketplaces. Additionally, its onsite array of solar panels can support the data center's full power requirements of 500 Kilowatts (KW). The new managed platform delivers high performance GPU-based compute and storage for decentralised and centralised AI and machine learning applications to meet the data-intensive needs of the automotive, life sciences and space/aerospace marketplaces.

A new portable device that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and biosensors can rapidly detect if cancer cells thrive after chemotherapy treatment. A team of researchers at Rutgers University has designed a new portable device that is up to 95.9 percent effective and accurate in counting living cancer cells when they pass through certain electrodes. This way, doctors can see if the targeted chemotherapy treatment was effective. Published in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering, the study aims to devise a new and simple method to rapidly assess drug efficacy in targeted chemotherapy cancer therapy, where anticancer drugs are conjugated to antibodies that target surface markers on cancer cells. Cancer continues to be one of the leading causes of mortality and death across the globe.

Monsoon CreditTech has become one of the seven fintech companies from across the world and the only one from India selected by Mastercard Start Path, part of Mastercard Labs, to be part of its startup engagement program. Start Path is designed to help later stage startups scale their business. This puts Monsoon in an elite club of companies and will give Monsoon access to Mastercard's global network of customers and subject matter experts, bringing Monsoon's machine learning technology to global markets outside India. Monsoon says it has also recently closed a new round of undisclosed amount in funding from strategic institutional and individual investors from across the globe ranging from geographies such as USA, UK, UAE and India. The digital shift As the volume of data available for analysis grows and computational power becomes cheaper, banks and financial institutions are beginning to realize the potentially transformational benefits of embracing Artificial Intelligence (of which machine learning is a subset).

Elon Musk, the futurist billionaire behind SpaceX and Tesla, outlined his plans to connect humans' brains directly to computers on Tuesday night, describing a campaign to create "symbiosis with artificial intelligence." He said the first prototype could be implanted in a person by the end of next year. Arriving at that goal "will take a long time," Musk said in a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, noting that securing federal approval for implanted neural devices is difficult. But testing on animals is already underway, and "a monkey has been able to control the computer with his brain," he said. Musk founded Neuralink Corp. in July 2016 to create "ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers."

Researchers have developed an AI algorithm which can solve a Rubik's cube in a fraction of a second, according to a study published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. The system, known as DeepCubeA, uses a form of machine learning which teaches itself how to play in order to crack the puzzle without being specifically coached by humans. "Artificial intelligence can defeat the world's best human chess and Go players, but some of the more difficult puzzles, such as the Rubik's Cube, had not been solved by computers, so we thought they were open for AI approaches," Pierre Baldi, one of the developers of the algorithm and computer scientist from the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. According to Baldi, the latest development could herald a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) deep-learning systems which are more advanced than those used in commercially available applications such as Siri and Alexa. "These systems are not really intelligent; they're brittle, and you can easily break or fool them," Baldi said.