Today, we're happy to announce our newest white paper, "The Inevitability of AI Law & Policy: Preparing Government for the Era of Autonomous Machines," by Public Knowledge General Counsel Ryan Clough. The paper argues that the rapid and pervasive rise of artificial intelligence risks exploiting the most marginalized and vulnerable in our society. To mitigate these harms, Clough advocates for a new federal authority to help the U.S. government implement fair and equitable AI. "Any individual can be misjudged and mistreated by artificial intelligence," Clough explains, "but the record to date indicates that it is significantly more likely to happen to the less powerful, who also have less recourse to do anything about it." The paper argues that a new federal authority is the best way to meet the profound and novel challenges AI poses for us all. "As artificial intelligence begins to transform our daily lives, it is critical to build an accountability structure that enables the marketplace to harness the vast promises of this technology, while also empowering the public, safeguarding our autonomy and fundamental rights, and protecting against discriminatory mistreatment of historically-vulnerable groups. By establishing an expert authority that coordinates federal engagement on behalf of citizens, we can begin to build public confidence in this technology and its enormous potential benefits, without opening the door to systematic disempowerment and exploitation."

Israel's Airobotics today announced it has raised a $30 million round of funding as the company continues to build out its U.S. operations. Founded in 2014, the company has developed a commercial pilotless drone that self-deploys and then returns to its base, where robotic arms handle chores like changing the battery and various components. No human intervention is needed. The drones have proven to be particularly popular with mining companies, but are targeting a wide range of industries such as utilities and warehouses. In late September, the company announced it was opening a North American headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona to oversee its business in South America and Central America as well.

Waymo just became the first company allowed to test fully self-driving cars--the kind with no carbon-based beings behind the wheel--in the state of California. The outfit that started life as Google's self-driving car project has been running driver-free cars in Arizona for almost a year, where the state testing rules are far more lax than in California, and where it plans to launch a commercial robo-taxi service by the end of the year. But securing the right to do the same in its home state is still a milestone, and evidence it can win over even comparatively wary regulators to the way of the robot. To begin, the truly driverless cars will test only at up to 65 mph in the southern Bay Area, in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Palo Alto. The company said it will inform local governments before expanding its tests any further.

It is driven by proprietary quantum machine learning algorithms and methodologies and provides technology services to address complex AI optimization problems. Based on the Quantum Intelligence as a Service (QIaaS) hybridized platform architecture, QIT supports quantum computers, classical computers, and digital quantum simulators on the hardware layer. Current providers include D-Wave, AWS and AliCloud, etc. With QIT in place, business users will be able to conduct R&D and effectively build applications online through QIaaS. Inside QIT, they can interact directly with API layers for authentication, modeling and prediction, and evoke machine learning algorithms from classical models and Qindom's QI-enhanced ones.

BERLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 30, 2018--omni:us, the only AI company of its kind fully focused on insurance, has today announced the closure of a Series A round, bringing its total funding to date to USD 22,5 million. The investment has been led by Berlin-headquartered VC firm Target Global, followed by MMC Ventures and Talis Capital. Existing investors, Unbound and Anthemis, also participated in the round, demonstrating their continued commitment to the company's ambitions. This funding reinforces omni:us' position as a market leader in enabling insurers to become more data-driven and adapt to today's customer expectations. As a key player in the major digital revolution currently taking place in the insurance industry, omni:us has developed cutting-edge AI technology that empowers all kinds of organisations within the sector: many of the top global insurance companies - such as Allianz, Baloise and AmTrust – count on its deep digital transformation expertise in order to innovate and meet growing customer needs.

Compared to a few years ago, the AI market is starting to solidify around real-world applications with the pace of change being faster than it has ever been before, as startups and technology providers rush to create platforms and targeted niche solutions for solving specific enterprise problems. The industry is churning and evolving quickly as merger and acquisition (M&A) activities abound, and it is homing in on areas of focus. Tractica's 2018 AI ecosystem report covers a wide range of companies in the growing AI space, drawing on Tractica's internal knowledge base of the competitive environment, as well as external sources. Tractica has identified and categorized a total of 1,000 AI companies and provided more in-depth profiles of 200 key industry players that our analysis has revealed to be the most notable and representative examples of AI technology providers, solution providers, platforms, service providers, hardware vendors, and other players who each in their own way are helping to propel the sector forward. These companies span the globe and cover a spectrum of technologies and end-market segments.

Google has rolled out updates to its Analytics platform designed to help marketers better understand and identify their core audiences. Included in these updates is Google Analytics Intelligence, a machine learning algorithm that predicts website traffic patterns and behaviors. When patterns fall outside of what Analytics Intelligence predicts, the tool triggers an alert. This feature is a step away from passive reporting and a step in the right direction towards meaningful analysis. The most significant update, however, is the new Google InMarket Leads tool, powered by Fastbase.

One of the biggest hurdles in the field of artificial intelligence is preventing it from developing the same intrinsic faults and biases as its human creators, and in using AI to solve social issues instead of simply automating tasks. Now, Google, one of the world's leading organizations developing AI software today, is launching a global competition to help spur the development of applications and research that have positive impacts on the field and society at large. The competition, called the Google AI Impact Challenge, was announced today at an event called AI for Social Good held at the company's Sunnyvale, California office. Google is positioning it as a way to integrate nonprofits, universities, and other organizations not within the corporate and profit-driven world of Silicon Valley into the future-looking development of AI research and applications. The company says it will award up to $25 million to a number of grantees to "help transform the best ideas into action."

Stephen A. Schwarzman, chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone Group LP, is making his mark on the future with a $350 million grant to MIT to study artificial intelligence. Mr. Schwarzman's gift is providing the seed funding for a $1 billion commitment by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology "to address the global opportunities and challenges presented by the prevalence of computing and the rise of artificial intelligence," according to an MIT news release. It is not the first time that Mr. Schwarzman's has given a gift to further the study of artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, he donated $5 million to the Harvard Business School for case studies and other programs exploring the implications of artificial intelligence on industries and business. At MIT, Mr. Schwarzman's foundational gift will help establish the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, to be headquartered in a new building on MIT's campus in Cambridge, Mass.

WASHINGTON – Microsoft said Friday it is prepared to provide its technology to the U.S. military, including for a massive cloud computing project, despite ethics concerns among some of its employees and others in Silicon Valley. "All of us who live in this country depend on its strong defense," Microsoft president Brad Smith said in a blog post. The statement came two weeks after Google dropped out of the bidding for the huge Pentagon cloud computing contract that could be worth up to $10 billion. The company said the deal would be inconsistent with its principles, which left Amazon and Microsoft as the two leading contenders. Smith said Microsoft has been a long-standing supplier of technology for the U.S. military, and added that the company was aware of the potential ethical concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in warfare.