Location data has been a sore subject for Google. In 2018, an Associated Press investigation found that Google continued storing phone location data even when users turned off a "location history" setting in Android. The company also revealed plans to overhaul Chrome to let users rein in so-called tracking cookies, which are bits of software that follow people around on the web. The move, which could have major repercussions for the digital advertising industry, would require companies to identify cookies used by third-party websites and advertisers to track users. "Unimpressive," declared Princeton computer scientist Jonathan Mayer, who said the scheme would be easy for advertisers to evade.

UBS Card Center, which processes roughly 25 percent of all credit cards in Switzerland, has won the Security Innovation of the Year award at the Retail Banker International Awards, presented in London. UBS Card Center's fraud team used the the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in the FICO Falcon Platform to stop 84 percent more fraudulent transactions last year than in 2015. The need to optimise costs in the face of fierce competition meant UBS Card Center had to keep fraud write-offs to the very minimum. They were facing new fraud attack volumes but needed to uphold the highest standards for customer experience and satisfaction. This required the use of machine learning to minimize consumer interruptions while investigating more potential cases of fraud, all without adding staff.

The optimal insurance company has three "employees": a computer, a dog and an actuary. The computer runs the insurance company, the actuary feeds the dog and the dog bites the actuary if they try to touch the computer. This joke has supposedly been making the rounds among insurtech companies, which are shaking up an industry that has traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies. Granted, you can easily compare quotes online these days. But there are still forms to fill in, policies to print out.

Several years ago Vinod Khosla, the Silicon Valley investor, wrote a provocative article titled "Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms?" Khosla argued that doctors were no match for artificial intelligence. Doctors banter with patients, gather a few symptoms, hunt around the body for clues, and send the patient off with a prescription. This sometimes (accidentally, maybe) leads to the correct treatment, but doctors are acting on only a fraction of the available information. An algorithm, he wrote, could do better. I'm a pediatric and adolescent physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, where entrepreneurs like Khosla have been knocking on the doors of doctors for years with their pilot technologies and software and hardware.

American University of Beirut is developing a tool that farmers in the Middle East and Africa can use to irrigate fields at the optimum times to save water. At Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, a university in Colombia, researchers will use satellite images to detect illegal mines that are polluting community drinking water. Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit that connects people experiencing a crisis with volunteer counselors by text message, uses AI to evaluate messages and move the people who are in most danger to the front of the line. In Australia, a public health service called Eastern Health will use AI to comb through clinical records from ambulances and find patterns in suicide attempts–and ways to intervene earlier. Full Fact, an independent fact-checking organization in the U.K., is using AI to help human fact-checkers more quickly assess claims made by politicians and the media.

In this special guest feature, Dirk Kanngiesser, co-founder and CEO of Cryptowerk, discusses how vendors implement Verifiable AI into their products to ensure that their AI algorithms are not handling data that has been tampered with, and how companies build Verifiable AI into their systems to verify that they are using safe data. Cryptowerk is a provider of data integrity solutions using blockchain technology. With more than 25 years of technology leadership experience, Dirk has led new product and business launches at multiple companies in both the U.S. and Europe. Businesses are increasingly using AI to automate processes to gain efficiencies, be more competitive and avoid disruption in their markets. According to a recent Accenture survey, 82% of executives say that their organizations are using data and algorithms based on that data to drive critical and automated decision-making at unprecedented scale.

A genome is the body's instruction manual. It's made of DNA and there is a copy in almost every cell. Through genome sequencing and genomics, clinicians can better understand how cancer cells might evolve and what treatments will be most responsive, known as precision and personalised medicine. Furthermore, genomics combined with technologies such as machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has huge, as yet untapped, potential for determining a healthy person's future risk of cancer. To sequence the first genome cost $3 billion and took 13 years.

Despite major advances in genetics and modern imaging, the diagnosis catches most breast cancer patients by surprise. For some, it comes too late. Later diagnosis means aggressive treatments, uncertain outcomes, and more medical expenses. As a result, identifying patients has been a central pillar of breast cancer research and effective early detection. With that in mind, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has created a new deep-learning model that can predict from a mammogram if a patient is likely to develop breast cancer as much as five years in the future.

AI set to take the strain in the search for new talent. The volume of candidates for jobs is increasing dramatically as employees often only stay with companies for short periods; they seek new opportunities to develop their skills and careers, with the aim of moving onwards and upwards quickly. The result is that the revolving door of vacancies and recruitment is speeding up. Recruiters' time is increasingly taken up with a process that seems never ending. According to a 2018 report from recruitment specialists Hays Ireland, 46 per cent of new employees have left a job within the first 12 months.

Recent years have seen the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the marketing and media industries. While often a buzzword for marketers to make their work sound more exciting, the real benefits to brands center on the use of machines to carry out deep learning and make humans' jobs easier. AI is certainly growing in notoriety, with up to 85% of UK businesses said to be set to invest in the field by 2020. In addition, studies have shown the gradual uptake of soft robotics in the home – 23-32% of households in the US and 18% of households in the UK have at least one voice assistant, the most popular models being either Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant. Moreover, Apple claimed in 2018 that a staggering 500 million of its users now frequently make use of Siri, its pre-installed voice assistant.