Last week the daughter of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, Katerina Tikhonova, was appointed to head the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute located at Moscow State University. The university has produced 13 Nobel prizes, six Fields Medals and one Turing award, so in matters of science, putting the AI institute there is a big deal. In Russian, if a husband's last name is, for instance, Komlev, the wife's surname becomes Komleva. Thinking algorithmically, you add an "a" at the end of the husband's or the father's last name to get the wife's or the daughter's last name. So Katerina's surname is Tikhonova, which means that her husband's or one of her paternal ancestor's last name was Tikhonov.

While the U.S.-China trade issues have dominated recent headlines, the U.S. Government and U.S. industry have been assessing the commercial environment for IPR (patents, trademarks, copyrights, industrial designs, geographical indications, trade secrets) in our trading partners for decades.

Over the past quarter century we have come to realise that through overprescribing, lack of alternatives and lack of understanding, we've used up much of the bandwidth of our existing array of antibiotics. These weary soldiers in the army of medicines, many of which date back decades, have been diminished in their effectiveness by the natural agility of bacterial pathogens which rapidly evolve and develop resistance. Historically, we have looked in the same places to identify replacements for old, decreasingly effective antibiotics. And to no great surprise, we've mostly come up with dead ends or, at best, minor improvements (with very occasional outliers such as Colistin, reserved as weapons of last resort only). And because the pathogens we are facing will evolve to render any new antibiotics ineffective, new approved treatments will have a limited useful life in which to recover the cost of development.

The internationally renowned Dan David Prize, headquartered at Tel Aviv University, annually awards three prizes of $1 million each to globally inspiring individuals and organizations. The total purse of $3 million makes the prize not only one of the most prestigious, but also one of the highest-value prizes internationally. Laureates are selected on the basis of their outstanding achievements and contributions in the year's chosen fields, each representing a time category. This year's fields are Cultural Preservation and Revival (Past category), Gender Equality (Present category) and Artificial Intelligence (Future category). Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CEO of Mobileye, and Dr. Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, have been named the 2020 Dan David Prize laureates in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Does the law of war apply to artificially intelligent systems? The U.S. Department of Defense is taking this question seriously, and adopted ethical principles for artificial intelligence (AI) in February 2020 based on the Defense Innovation Board's set of AI ethical guidelines proposed last year. However, just as defense organizations must abide by the law of war and other norms and values, individuals are responsible for the systems they create and use. Ensuring that AI systems are as committed as we are to responsible and lawful behavior requires changes to engineering practices. Considerations of ethical, moral, and legal implications are not new to defense organizations, but they are starting to become more common in AI engineering teams.

The use of facial recognition technology has been spreading rapidly. Before Clearview AI became the target of public scrutiny earlier this year, the facial recognition app was used freely by the company's investors, clients and friends, according to a report Thursday from The New York Times. The app was reportedly demonstrated at events like parties, business gatherings and even on dates. Clearview identifies people by comparing photos to a database of images scraped from social media and other sites. It came under fire after a New York Times investigation in January.

Building off the Defense Department's recent adoption of five artificial intelligence principles, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will soon release its own public set of AI principles. Ben Huebner, the chief of ODNI's Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency Office, gave a preview of that upcoming strategy Wednesday at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) conference. "None of them will be surprises," Huebner said. "We have been very integrated with the work of the [DoD Joint AI Center] and others, and fundamentally, there's a lot of consensus here." Aside from DoD, other corners of the federal government have begun to roll out their own AI ethics platforms.

The mobile artificial intelligence market is poised to grow by USD 13.26 bn during 2020-2024, according to Technavio The Temptations: Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Replace Broadway Shows? C3.ai Lands IBM Partnership and More Customers for its Artificial Intelligence and IoT Platform ZDNet

To many, Machine Learning may be a new word, but it was first coined by Arthur Samuel in 1952, and since then, the constant evolution of Machine Learning has made it the go-to technology for many sectors. Right from robotic process automation to technical expertise, Machine Learning technology is extensively used to make predictions and get valuable insight into business operations. It's considered as the subset of Artificial Intelligence (intelligence demonstrated by machines). If we go by the books, Machine Learning can be defined as a scientific study of statistical models and complex algorithms that primarily rely on patterns and inference. The technology works independently of any explicit instruction, and that's its strength.

Many companies in the biometric, digital identity, and cybersecurity space have shared predictions for 2020 with Biometric Update, touching on many of the key themes of the past year, and reflecting the wealth of opportunity, as well as the anxieties at play in the industry. Those predictions most closely thematically related to biometrics and our top news stories are collected below. "The global market for mobile biometrics is forecast to grow at an impressive 31.14 percent CAGR, adding $28.45 billion per year in incremental growth between 2018 and 2023, despite the CAGR decelerating by 22 percent in the period," points out Robert Prigge, CEO of Jumio. "The growth forecasts in the latest set of market analyst reports that indicate widespread adoption of biometrics technology: 22 percent for mobile biometrics, 22 percent for 3D sensors, and 19 percent for healthcare biometrics Facial authentication is impacting the physical security market, cloud-based subscription services are becoming more popular for security, and the Pentagon is expected to remain a source of opportunity for companies offering advanced authentication technologies. Although we are still in the early stages of biometric-based identity proofing and authentication, its development will serve as a viable solution for the growing fraud epidemic."