Munich Re has announced a new partnership with re/insurance industry consortium the Geospatial Intelligence Center (GIC) to provide its members with access to automated damage classification analytics following major catastrophe events. The GIC provides its members with access to imagery and data that enhance underwriting assessments, expedite claims, and improve fraud detection following hurricanes and other disaster events. By collaborating with Munich Re, the consortium will now be able to provide its members with a damage assessment heat map layer to complement its imagery and improve situational awareness post-disaster. Munich Re's analytics solutions can process the GIC's aerial imagery with machine learning models to detect building shapes and damage to individual properties, as well as to impacted geographic areas at large. In the lead up to a catastrophe event, the reinsurer's model can also predict estimated losses using data on property characteristics, weather forecasts, and weather stations.

We expect the landscape to be an integrated edge-to-core-to-cloud solution enabling what today is called IoT, Big Data, Fast Data and AI. Each time a promising new technology emerges, we seem to go through a period where it is proposed to be the solution to everything--until we reconcile how that technology fits into the bigger picture. Such is the case with artificial intelligence (AI). Clearly the advancements in deep learning will create new classes of solutions but rather than being a standalone solution, we are just now beginning to see how it fits into our IT landscape. AI emerges at a time when several other shifts in analytics technology are occurring.

Within two years there will be more voice assistants on the internet than there are people on the planet. Another, possibly more helpful, way of looking at these statistics is to say that there will still be only half a dozen assistants that matter: Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and Amazon's Alexa in the west, along with their Chinese equivalents, but these will have billions of microphones at their disposal, listening patiently for sounds they can use. Voice is going to become the chief way that we make our wants known to computers – and when they respond, they will do so with female voices. This detail may seem trivial, but it goes to the heart of the way in which the spread of digital technologies can amplify and extend social prejudice. The companies that program these assistants want them to be used, of course, and this requires making them appear helpful. That's especially necessary when their helpfulness is limited in the real world: although they are getting better at answering queries outside narrow and canned parameters, they could not easily ever be mistaken for a human being on the basis of their words alone.

AI offers exceptional opportunities particularly in digital marketing while irrefutably revolutionizing and propelling the industry. AI is the ability of a computer or computer-enabled robotic systems to process massive amounts of in-depth data and produce outcomes similar to the thought processes of humans in learning, analysing, decision making, and problem-solving. Hence, AI has enabled marketers to comprehend vast data to gain valuable consumer insights, and in turn, improve digital marketing strategies. The applications of AI are essentially limitless, and the field of computer science is on a stark ascendance. The global AI market was worth $7.35 billion in 2018, where the largest portion of revenue was stirred from enterprise applications.

Maybe it stems from science fiction's depiction of malevolent robots overtaking humanity. To get to the bottom of this, Pega surveyed 5,000 consumers from North America, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and France about their views on empathy and AI. Get our report and discover how you can combine AI with human ethics for better engagement.

May Masoud is a Solution Specialist at SAS Canada, as part of the Data Sciences team. Leveraging her analytics background, she helps businesses visualize the potential of their data, and surface insights using modern data mining and machine learning techniques. With a Master of Business Analytics following a Bachelor in Statistics & Economics, May aims to create value at every step of the analytics lifecycle: data discovery, model build, model deployment, and business strategy. She has touched the analytics landscape in a variety of industries, whether it is oil production models for the energy sector or solving churn problems in the telecom industry. May's aim is to ubiquitize self-serve analytics and enable citizen data scientists.

When we began our 14-week tech health sprint in October 2018, we did not realize the profound lessons we would learn in just a few months. Together with federal agencies and private sector organizations, we demonstrated the power of applying artificial intelligence (AI) to open federal data. Through this collaborative process, we showed that federal data can be turned into products for real-world health applications with the potential to help millions of Americans have a better life. Joshua Di Frances, the executive director of the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program, says that this collaboration across agencies and private companies represents a new way of approaching AI and federal open data. "Through incentivizing links between government and industry via a bidirectional AI ecosystem, we can help promote usable, actionable data that benefits the American people," Di Frances said.

Artificial intelligence is set to transform global productivity, working patterns and lifestyles and create enormous wealth. Research firm Gartner expects the global AI economy to increase from about $1.2 trillion last year to about $3.9 Trillion by 2022, while McKinsey sees it delivering global economic activity of around $13 trillion by 2030. By the same year, PricewaterhouseCoopers reckons on $15.7 trillion - more than the current combined output of China and India. Tech investor Tej Kohli, however, believes the impact will be much faster and exponentially larger, however, potentially worth $150 trillion by 2025. That's nearly double the IMF's forecast of $88 trillion for global gross domestic product this year but Kohli is undaunted.

This story was co-published with ProPublica. Ariella Russcol specializes in drama at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York, and the senior's performance on this April afternoon didn't disappoint. While the library is normally the quietest room in the school, her ear-piercing screams sounded more like a horror movie than study hall. But they weren't enough to set off a small microphone in the ceiling that was supposed to detect aggression. A few days later, at the Staples Pathways Academy in Westport, Connecticut, junior Sami D'Anna inadvertently triggered the same device with a less spooky sound--a coughing fit from a lingering chest cold.

Ex-prime minister David Cameron has taken a job at Affiniti, one of the world's largest artificial intelligence companies, which specialises in the use of AI in sales. As chair of the company's advisory board, Mr Cameron says he will be helping support its work to transform the future of customer service and interpersonal communications. While Mr Cameron may not have predicted the UK's future in Europe, there's no doubt that backing the use of AI in sales is a better bet. "AI and machine-learning are the next evolution of the digital revolution," says Brendan Dykes, director of product marketing at customer experience and call centre technology vendor Genesys. "Like the incoming tide, you can ignore it, but it will continue to come and you can either ride the wave or be swept away by it."