The U.S. and China are locked in an increasingly heated struggle for superpower status. Many perceived this confrontation initially only through the lenses of a trade war. However, the ZTE "saga" already indicated the issue was broader and involved a battle for supremacy over 21st century technologies and, relatedly, for international power (see When AI Started Creating AI – Artificial Intelligence and Computing Power, 7 May 2018). The technological battle increasingly looks like a fight to the death, with the offensive against Huawei, aiming notably to protect future 5G networks (Cassell Bryan-Low, Colin Packham, David Lague, Steve Stecklow And Jack Stubbs, "The China Challenge: the 5G Fight", Reuters Investigates, 21 May 2019). For Huawei and China, as well as for the world, consequences are far reaching, as, after Google "stopping Huawei's Android license", and an Intel and Qualcomm ban, the British chip designer ARM, held notably by Japanese Softbank, now stops relations with Huawei (Paul Sandle, "ARM supply halt deals fresh blow to Chinese tech giant Huawei", Reuters, 22 May 2019; "DealBook Briefing: The Huawei Backlash Goes Global", The New York Times, 23 May 2019; Tom Warren, "Huawei's Android And Windows Alternatives Are Destined For Failure", The Verge, 23 May 2019). The highly possible coming American move against Chinese Hikvision, one of the largest world producers of video surveillance systems involving notably "artificial intelligence, speech monitoring and genetic testing" would only further confirm the American offensive (Doina Chiacu, Stella Qi, "Trump says'dangerous' Huawei could be included in U.S.-China trade deal", Reuters, 23 May 2019; Ana Swanson and Edward Wong, "Trump Administration Could Blacklist China's Hikvision, a Surveillance Firm", The New York Times, 21 May 2019). China, for its part, answers to both the trade war and the technological fight with an ideologically martial mobilisation of its population along the lines of "People's War", "The Long March", and changing TV scheduling to broadcast war films (Iris Zhao and Alan Weedon, "Chinese television suddenly switches scheduling to anti-American films amid US-China trade war", ABC News, 20 May 2019; Michael Martina, David Lawder, "Prepare for difficult times, China's Xi urges as trade war simmers", Reuters, 22 May 2019). This highlights how much is as stake for the Middle Kingdom, as we explained previously ( Sensor and Actuator (4): Artificial Intelligence, the Long March towards Advanced Robots and Geopolitics).

According to Wikipedia, the earliest diagnostic biopsy was conducted by an Arab physician in the 11th century. The term "biopsy" derives from the Greek word bios which means life and the also Greek word "opsis" which means sight. It was first introduced in the 19th century and since then medical researchers and practitioners have developed several techniques to perform biopsies on living organs or tissues needed further observation. Modern instruments such as intestinal biopsy tubes can extract samples from parts of the body where it is difficult to have access or even hazardous. In the cases described above, this histologic procedure is invasive and quite complicated putting a financial burden, not to mention the extra strain on the patient.

This week, I interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, the author of three best-selling books about the history and future of our species, and Fei-Fei Li, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. The event was hosted by the Stanford Center for Ethics and Society, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the Stanford Humanities Center. A transcript of the event follows, and a video is posted below. Nicholas Thompson: Thank you, Stanford, for inviting us all here. I want this conversation to have three parts: First, lay out where we are; then talk about some of the choices we have to make now; and last, talk about some advice for all the wonderful people in the hall. Yuval, the last time we talked, you said many, many brilliant things, but one that stuck out was a line where you said, "We are not just in a technological crisis. We are in a philosophical crisis." So explain what you meant and explain how it ties to AI. Let's get going with a note of ...

California startup Cardinal Analytx Solutions has closed a $22 million Series B funding round led by venture capitalist John Doerr. GuideWell Mutual Holding Corporation, Blue Shield California and Premera Blue Cross participated in the round as well. The company also announced that Doerr, who serves as chairman of Kleiner Perkins, will join its board of directors. The $22 million will be used to support hiring efforts and continued innovation. Cardinal Analytx leverages machine learning to help predict which people are likely to become high-cost members before a high-cost health event occurs.

The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started. One of the continuing problems with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is that humans typically do not understand how they achieve their amazing results. DNN models are trained on massive amounts of data until they surpass human accuracy, but the details of the models themselves are hidden inside thousands of equations. If there is implicit bias - or other flaws - in the training data, those problems will be encoded in the model, with humans none the wiser.

Today, consumers can buy cameras powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that recognize a person at their front door. But they don't have anything close to a robot that can tie their shoelaces. Why? Simply put, because most machine learning algorithms available today in AI applications don't learn very well. Thanks to a branch of AI called unsupervised learning, however, that's about to change. Most machine learning uses a technique called supervised learning.

On 22 May, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international team working on creating stronger policies in order to improve lives, adopted and approved new Artificial Intelligence (AI) principles. RELATED: WHAT IS EXPLAINABLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND IS IT NEEDED? OECD principles on AI focus on AI that is original and trustworthy. Respect for human rights and democratic values are also strong focal points of these principles. This is a first of such principles to be agreed upon and put forward by governments.

Robot gourmands are imminent, it seems, and they might someday craft recipes just as delicious as those from their human counterparts. In a newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org They say that it's not only able to suggest complementary food pairings and to uncover novel ingredient combinations, but that it outperforms other baseline models by a wide margin. "Many chefs, gourmets, and food-related researchers have focused on studying food pairing for decades," wrote the paper's coauthors. "Since food pairings are made based on the experiences of experts, food pairing itself is subjective and difficult to quantify. In this work, we introduce KitchenNette, which … predicts the scores of unknown pairings consisting of food ingredients that have infrequently or never been used in recipes."

Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform healthcare and the pharma industry; making health services more predictive, more effective and more equitable. But can AI's potential be realised, and what can chief information officers and clinical chief information officers do to get the most out of the new technology? The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Executive Leadership summit last month attended by NHS CIOs and CCIOs, leaders from NHS England and NHS Digital and other health IT innovators, expressed the potential AI-driven data analytics has in supporting the NHS's Five Year Forward View, narrowing gaps in health provision. The summit discussed how AI could address the health and wellbeing gap by predicting which individuals most risk illness, allowing the NHS to target treatments accordingly, with AI giving health professionals and patients bespoke diagnostics and treatments. It was also noted that AI could help address the efficiency and funding gap by automating tasks, triaging patients to the most appropriate services and allowing them to self-care.

NEW YORK, May 27, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- TTEK Inc. and Altana Trade today jointly announced their Alliance Agreement to deliver integrated technology solutions in trade risk management. As part of the alliance, TTEK will promote Altana Trade's products for data fusion and artificial intelligence-based risk management to government agencies worldwide. Altana will similarly incorporate TTEK's risk analytics and risk management workflow software in its solutions for financial services providers, multinationals, and logistics providers. TTEK is a rapidly growing provider of customs administration and risk management software and consulting services. With a global customer base and a team comprised of more than 150 of the world's preeminent customs modernization and risk management experts, TTEK helps to facilitate legal trade, enable systems interoperability and inter-agency coordination, and selectively target and inspect high-risk border flows.