BUENOS AIRES – Artificial intelligence can facilitate trade negotiations and add one additional percentage point of growth to Latin American and the Caribbean economies, according to a study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The study – put together by the IDB's Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (INTAL) – predicts artificial intelligence could boost regional GDP in the mid-term to 4 percent from current 3 percent projections. Brazil, for instance, could grow 4.1 percent a year instead of 3.2 percent. Colombia's economy could hit 4.5 percent growth instead of 3.7 percent. Overall, economic growth of countries that embrace artificial intelligence is expected to be 25 percent higher, on average, than those that do not, the report finds.

Artificial intelligence (AI), according to a recent executive order, is essential to maintaining the economic and national security of the United Sates. It is also the foundation for a new generation of applications that are changing how the Department of Defense and other agencies manage their operations and carry out their missions. And that change is happening fast. The 2018 National Defense Strategy identifies AI as one of the key technologies needed to ensure that the United States will be prepared to fight and win the wars of the future, with defense leaders saying it will penetrate every corner of DoD operations.

Nationwide is the latest financial services firm to lean on AI, as interest in the technology continues to gain momentum among companies in the sector. Last week, Nordic financial services giant Danske Bank enlisted machine learning tech from IBM to help it predict and fix IT systems failures before they impact customers, for example. And this interest is only going to continue picking up pace, with AI-enabled savings in the industry expected to total upwards of $1 trillion by 2030, per Autonomous. However, while the promise of the technology is substantial, we expect to see firms taking a progressive approach in deployment of the tech rather than instant transformation, not least because of the challenges and heavy costs associated with implementing new technologies: Last week, we reported on Bank of Ireland's struggles to rein in the costs of its IT revamp, for instance. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally.

Robots demoralise their human colleagues leaving them'disheartened' and less motivated, a new study has revealed. Automatons are increasingly replacing people in workplaces where simple jobs can easily be done almost for free by replacing costly staff. Engineers designed a game pitting man vs machine to measure the effect of this process, and found people lost heart the longer the game went on. Humans who played the game against robots for cash prizes became demoralised because they were beaten so badly that they saw themselves as less competent. Humans who played a game against robots for cash prizes became demoralised because they found themselves less competent.

Sony Santa Monica's God of War has received 10 nominations for this year's Bafta game awards, leading a diverse pack of nominees. Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2 also picked up six nominations, as did Florence – a game about a relationship played from the perspective of a young woman – and Return of the Obra Dinn, a lo-fi monochrome mystery set on an abandoned ship. The contenders for best game are Assassin's Creed Odyssey, PlayStation VR game Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, Celeste, God of War, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Return of the Obra Dinn. Last year's winner was What Became of Edith Finch, an emotionally charged magical-realist game about the fate of an ill-fortuned family. The games beyond entertainment category, introduced to recognise games whose impact extends into the real world, comprises Celeste, Aardman Studios' first world war game 11-11 Memories Retold, Life is Strange 2, My Child Lebensborn, and Nintendo Labo.

Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world's largest technology companies, intensifying scrutiny of the social media giant's business practices as it seeks to rebound from a year of scandal and setbacks. A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters. Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Marketing automation has become the lynchpin of successful marketing campaign management, yet many brands struggle to fully maximize their marketing automation ROI. We settle for automating manual tasks -- like lead management, email campaign development and landing page creation –because we're too busy to learn what marketing automation can really do for campaign effectiveness. The time has come to move from simply running campaigns automatically to running them intelligently. For more about marketing stacks, watch the on-demand webinar MarTech Madness: How to evaluate your marketing stack. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), a new breed of marketing automation solutions can "mimic" human intelligence and recommend marketing actions.

Deep learning involves a highly iterative process where data scientists build models and test them on GPU-powered systems until they get something they can work with. It can be expensive and time-consuming, often taking weeks to fashion the right model. New startup Determined AI wants to change that by making the process faster, cheaper and more efficient. It emerged from stealth today with $11 million in Series A funding. The round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with help from Amplify Partners, Haystack and SV Angel. The company also announced an earlier $2.6 million seed round from 2017, for a total $13.6 million raised to date.

Researchers from TU Berlin, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have tackled this question and have provided a glimpse into the diverse "intelligence" spectrum observed in current AI systems, specifically analyzing these AI systems with a novel technology that allows automatized analysis and quantification. The most important prerequisite for this novel technology is a method developed earlier by TU Berlin and Fraunhofer HHI, the so-called Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) algorithm that allows visualizing according to which input variables AI systems make their decisions. Extending LRP, the novel Spectral relevance analysis (SpRAy) can identify and quantify a wide spectrum of learned decision making behavior. In this manner it has now become possible to detect undesirable decision making even in very large data sets. This so-called'explainable AI' has been one of the most important steps towards a practical application of AI, according to Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller, Professor for Machine Learning at TU Berlin.

The first five days or so of SXSW in Austin are always dedicated to the "interactive" portion of the festival. The city's downtown streets swell with lanyard-laden "entrepreneurs" and "founders" wearing that familiar uniform of T-shirts screen-printed with their company's clever logo, an outfit made professional by throwing a blazer over the ensemble. They bounce from panel to panel and branded "house" to branded "house" (this year, on scooters, so many scooters) hawking their new apps and software products, each promising to be more revolutionary and life-changing and utterly necessary than the next. For years, the unspoken question at the conference seemed to be which company will become SXSW famous, like Persicope, Foursquare, or, most memorably, Twitter? But this year, on the opening Friday of SXSW, Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren unleashed a manifesto titled "Here's How We Can Break Up Big Tech," and a new question burst onto the scene: What do you think of Warren's proposal?