By 2021, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will more than double the rate of innovation improvements (x2.2 times) and employee productivity gains (x2.3 times) in India, according to the country's business leaders. The study from Microsoft and IDC Asia/Pacific, Future Ready Business: Assessing Asia Pacific's Growth Potential Through AI[1] surveyed 200 business leaders and 202 workers in India. While 77% of business leaders polled agreed that AI is instrumental for their organization's competitiveness, only one-third of organizations in India have embarked on their AI journeys. Those companies that have adopted AI expect it to increase their competitiveness by 2.3 times in 2021. "Today, every company is a software company, and increasingly, every interaction is digital. To be successful in this new world, organizations need to be fast adopters of best-in-class technology, including AI. In addition, they need to start building their own unique digital talent and ensure that all of this is based on trust and security," said Dr. Rohini Srivathsa, National Technology Officer, Microsoft India.

What is the future of work in the investment industry? How do we, as providers of human capital prepare for the evolution of this profession? What does it mean for employers seeking to engage and motivate staff over the long term? It is widely accepted that, like most other industries, the financial services industry is in a state of flux. Unlike other episodes of change in recent decades, the current context is often characterised as an "industrial revolution" creating continual disruption of a structural nature. On that backdrop, the prudent approach is to prepare, not predict.

This week, Oxford University announced that American billionaire and philanthropist Stephen A. Schwarzman had gifted the university with its largest cash donation ever--£150 million--to fund (among other things) an institution to investigate the ethics of artificial intelligence. Mr. Schwarzman said that universities need to serve as advisers on the ethics of artificial intelligence and technological advances. While it is certainly true that the technology has moved rapidly ahead of the legislation that patrols it, this is hardly the first time people have thought about the ethics of AI. As any sci-fi buff will tell you, we have been mulling over the ethical ramifications of technologies we didn't possess for a century. What they might not know, however, is that people have been thinking about the potentials and pitfalls of the robot world for thousands of years.

WASHINGTON - U.S. military cyberforces launched a strike against Iranian military computer systems on Thursday as President Donald Trump backed away from plans for a more conventional military strike in response to Iran's downing of a U.S. surveillance drone, U.S. officials said Saturday. Two officials told The Associated Press that the strikes were conducted with approval from Trump. A third official confirmed the broad outlines of the strike. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the operation. The cyberattacks -- a contingency plan developed over weeks amid escalating tensions -- disabled Iranian computer systems that controlled its rocket and missile launchers, the officials said.

New research from the University of Kansas shows machine learning is capable of identifying insects that spread the incurable disease called Chagas with high precision, based on ordinary digital photos. The idea is to give public health officials where Chagas is prevalent a new tool to stem the spread of the disease and eventually to offer identification services directly to the general public. Chagas is particularly nasty because most people who have it don't know they've been infected. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 20 percent to 30 percent of the 8 million people with Chagas worldwide are struck at some later point with heart rhythm abnormalities that can bring on sudden death; dilated hearts that don't pump blood efficiently; or a dilated esophagus or colon. The disease is caused most often when triatomine bugs -- more commonly known as "kissing bugs" -- bite people and transmit the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi into their bloodstreams.

A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long-overdue future of artificial intelligence. This was the home of Watson, the electronic genius that conquered Jeopardy! in 2011. The original Watson is still here--it's about the size of a bedroom, with 10 upright, refrigerator-shaped machines forming the four walls. The tiny interior cavity gives technicians access to the jumble of wires and cables on the machines' backs. It is surprisingly warm inside, as if the cluster were alive. Today's Watson is very different. It no longer exists solely within a wall of cabinets but is spread across a cloud of open-standard servers that run several hundred "instances" of the AI at once. Like all things cloudy, Watson is served to simultaneous customers anywhere in the world, who can access it using their phones, their desktops, or their own data servers. This kind of AI can be scaled up or down on demand.

Telecom companies are currently scrambling to implement fifth-generation cellular network technology. But the world of 5G is a world where all objects are wired and constantly communicating data to one another. The dark truth is that the development of 5G networks and the various networked products that they will give rise to in the global smart city infrastructure, represent the greatest threat to freedom in the history of humanity. STEVE MOLLONKOPF: 5G will upgrade the human experience at home and across industries as we connect virtually everything. By 2020, analysts estimate that there will be more than 20 billion installed IoT devices around the world, generating massive amounts of data. With access to this kind of information, industries of all kinds will be able to reach new levels of efficiency as they add products, services, and capabilities. As you may have heard by now, telecom companies are currently scrambling to implement fifth-generation cellular network technology.

Tuesday of this past week was quite fortuitous: In my Data Science Cohort at Lambda School, we are working a predictive maintenance competition on Kaggle regarding Water pumps in Tanzania. And, I went to a Data Science networking event at a defense contractor who spoke of the importance of Predictive Maintenance Solutions -- in their case, they were predicting the failure rates of parts of the F35 Joint Strike Fighter. According to IoT world, The Predictive Maintenance report forecasts a compound annual growth rate for Predictive Maintenance of 39% between 2016–2022, with annual technology spending reaching US$10.96 This has a large positive impact on Data Science and Machine Learning if the industry can keep up with the needs of predictive maintenance problems. What is predictive maintenance and why is it so important to different domains?

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds tremendous promise to benefit nearly all aspects of society, including the economy, healthcare, security, the law, transportation, even technology itself. On February 11, 2019, the President signed Executive Order 13859, Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence. This order launched the American AI Initiative, a concerted effort to promote and protect AI technology and innovation in the United States. The Initiative implements a whole-of-government strategy in collaboration and engagement with the private sector, academia, the public, and like-minded international partners. Among other actions, key directives in the Initiative call for Federal agencies to prioritize AI research and development (R&D) investments, enhance access to high-quality cyberinfrastructure and data, ensure that the Nation leads in the development of technical standards for AI, and provide education and training opportunities to prepare the American workforce for the new era of AI.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a brand new AI that can feel objects just by seeing them – and vice versa. The new AI can predict how it would feel to touch an object, just by looking at it. It can also create a visual representation of an object, just from the tactile data it generates by touching it. By looking at the scene, our model can imagine the feeling of touching a flat surface or a sharp edge. By blindly touching around, our model can predict the interaction with the environment purely from tactile feelings.