Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, has become more accurate than human medical professionals in predicting incidence of heart attack or death in patients at risk of coronary artery disease. Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, was more accurate than human medical professionals in predicting myocardial infarction (MI) or death among patients suspected of having coronary artery disease (CAD), according to an abstract presented at the 2019 International Conference on Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT, held May 12-14 in Lisbon, Portugal. Physicians routinely make treatment decisions using risk scores, which are based on few variables and are typically only moderately accurate for individual patients. Machine learning can use repetition and adjustment to exploit large quantities of data and identify complex patterns that may go unnoticed by humans. "Humans have a very hard time thinking further than three dimensions (a cube) or four dimensions (a cube through time)," said the study's lead researcher, Luis Eduardo Juarez-Orozco, MD, PhD, in a statement.

Mind Foundry, a technology spin-out from the University of Oxford's Machine Learning Research Group (MLRG), today announced the commercial launch of a revolutionary humanised machine learning platform. For the first time the new cloud-based platform allows anyone, of any technical ability and in any size of organisation, to swiftly unlock the full value of ever increasing volumes of data to make decisions on complex business issues without the need for data scientists. The platform was developed through work with some of the world's largest investment firms, telecommunications providers, manufacturers and heavy industry companies. Organisations can proactively solve business problems by easily leveraging the predictive power of their existing data. The platform automatically builds appropriate machine learning solutions for business problems in minutes or hours, rather than weeks or months, and provides full transparency and auditability of solutions.

Merchants want to make a sale. Consumers want a fast checkout experience without false declines. Financial institutions want to mitigate fraud. The A.I. technology powering Visa Advanced Authorization can help.

In recent years, art-creating AI has pushed the boundaries of how we define art. AI Expo Africa, the largest business focused AI event in Africa, have launched a grand challenge to create an original piece of artwork or music that leverages AI. There will be one winner for each category (visual art & music) and winners must be citizens of an African country and must be living in Africa. Awards will be presented to the winner at the exclusive AI Expo Africa VIP event on the opening night of AI Expo Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, on 3 September 2019 – with the winning music track(s) being played during the event and art work on display. Both works will be auctioned during an exclusive event on 4 September.

The MTN Group has launched Africa's first Mobile Money (MoMo) Artificial Intelligence (AI) service or "chatbot". A statement issued by the Group's Corporate Affairs on Tuesday said the chatbot went live in Ivory Coast in May and would be rolled out across MTN's MoMo footprint in the next few months. The AI mobile money "assistant" enables customers to engage with MTN's MoMo services, including payments on various social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and via SMS. The statement said the service would also be included over time, in MTN's own newly released advanced instant messaging service "Ayoba". It said the chatbot was an AI guide that assists users to navigate MTN's MoMo services and provide other useful information.

Artificial intelligence can already help make medical diagnoses and weed out terrorists. Now Microsoft wants AI to make our planet greener. Ranked the No. 1 environmentally friendly company by the nonprofit Just Capital, the tech giant is finding innovative ways to combat climate change. Chief among them: a grant launched in 2017 that funds the use of AI to address global warming. The tech company also released code that can aid developers building such algorithms.

Facebook is working closely with key non-profit and research partners to use artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to address large-scale social, health and infrastructure challenges in sub Saharan Africa. These efforts range from rural electrification in Tanzania to vaccinating people in remote corners of Malawi. Facebook is applying the processing muscle of its compute power, its extensive data science skills and its expertise in AI and machine learning to create the world's most detailed and accurate maps of local populations. Facebook also partners with Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN (http://www.ciesin.org/)) to ensure that this effort leverages the best available administrative data for all countries involved. The Boston-based Facebook team uses advanced computer vision and machine learning to combine satellite imagery from Digital Globe with public census data and other sources to create detailed population density maps of Africa.

The myth that modern wheat varieties are more heavily reliant on pesticides and fertilisers than older varieties has been debunked by new research. The University of Queensland's Dr Kai Voss-Fels said modern wheat varieties have out-performed older varieties in side-by-side field trials under both optimum and harsh growing conditions. "There is a view that intensive selection and breeding, which has produced the high-yielding wheat cultivars used in modern cropping, has also made them less resilient and more dependent on chemicals to thrive," Dr Voss-Fels said. "However, the data published today unequivocally shows that modern wheat out-performs older varieties, even under conditions of reduced amounts of fertilisers, fungicides and water. "We also found that genetic diversity within the relatively narrow modern wheat gene pool is rich enough to potentially generate a further 23 per cent increase in yields."

The world's biggest companies are coming to India for data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) skills. But renowned mathematicians believe the country needs to significantly improve its mathematics capabilities to be able to use these technologies to create really innovative and robust solutions – both for itself and the world. Manjul Bhargava, mathematics professor at Princeton University and winner of the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in math, says India can't hope to lead the fourth industrial revolution, "if we don't have strong mathematical talent coming up very soon." Srinivasa Varadhan, mathematics professor at New York University, agrees. He says if you want to provide some guarantee that a certain machine learning algorithm will work the way it's supposed to, then you have to do the math.

Standing in a wood-paneled room at the University of Oxford, surrounded by her artwork, Ai-Da looks out at her creations. "I want people to know that our times are powerful times," she says slowly, pausing between sentences. Like many artists, she wants her work to promote discussion. And yet unlike other artists, Ai-Da tells us with a blank expression and glassy eyes that only blink occasionally, she does not have consciousness, thoughts and feelings. Ai-Da's creators bill her as the world's first robot artist, and she's the latest AI innovation to blur the boundary between machine and artist; a vision of the future suddenly becoming part of our present.