TALLINN (Reuters) - Finland, which holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of the year, said on Tuesday it aims to teach 1% of all Europeans basic skills in artificial intelligence through a free online course it will now translate into all official EU languages. The European Union is pushing for wide deployment of artificial intelligence across the bloc, to help European companies catch up with rivals in Asia and the United States. "Our investment has three goals: we want to equip EU citizens with digital skills for the future, we wish to increase practical understanding of what artificial intelligence is, and by doing so, we want to give a boost to the digital leadership of Europe," said Finnish Minister of Employment Timo Harakka. "As our Presidency ends, we want to offer something concrete. It's about one of the most pressing challenges facing Europe and Finland today: how to develop our digital literacy," Harakka said in a statement. The course, conducted by the University of Helsinki and originally launched in 2018, already has enrolled more than 220,000 students from more than 110 countries.

The central government aims to stop net population inflows into the greater Tokyo area by fiscal 2024, it was learned Tuesday. The goal was included in a draft of the government's second five-year comprehensive strategy for regional revitalization from fiscal 2020. The government hopes to gain Cabinet approval for the new strategy, the successor to the first strategy covering fiscal 2015-2019, by the end of this month. In the second strategy, the government will scrutinize steps taken under the first strategy and show a direction for new measures for accelerating regional revitalization. To alleviate the concentration of people in Tokyo and the three neighboring prefectures of Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa, the government will make efforts to increase the number of people who have side jobs in rural areas or visit the countryside while living in urban areas.

Global health care expenditure has been projected to grow from US $7.7 trillion in 2017 to US $10 trillion in 2022 at a rate of 5.4% [1]. This translates into health care being an average of 9% of gross domestic product among developed countries [2,3]. Some key global trends that have led to this include tax reform and policy changes in the United States that could impact the expansion of health care access and affordability (Affordable Care Act) [4], implications on the United Kingdom's health care spend based on the decision to leave the European Union [5], population growth and rise in wealth in both China and India [6-8], implementation of socioeconomic policy reform for health care in Russia [9], attempts to make universal health care effective in Argentina [10], massive push for electronic health and telemedicine in Africa [11], and the impact of an unprecedented pace of population aging around the world [12]. From clinicians' perspective there are many important trends that are affecting the way they deliver care of which the growth in medical information is alarming. It took 50 years for medical information to double in 1950. In 1980, it took 7 years. In 2010, it was 3.5 years and is now projected to double in 73 days by 2020 [13].

Ten years ago, I invited the community to envision the future of Data, AI and Analytics (I called it then:"BI 2020"). From the Museum of Information in Paris, I asked: what could the world of AI, Data and Analytics look like by 2020?! Many predicted the advent of natural interfaces like search and voice for analysis. Conversational AI or Big Data weren't common industry terms back then but many saw that such trends would be transformative over the next decade. And we are far from having achieve the ambitious goals of the past decade.

TALLINN (Reuters) - Finland, which holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of the year, said on Tuesday it aims to teach 1% of all Europeans basic skills in artificial intelligence through a free online course it will now translate into all official EU languages. The European Union is pushing for wide deployment of artificial intelligence across the bloc, to help European companies catch up with rivals in Asia and the United States. "Our investment has three goals: we want to equip EU citizens with digital skills for the future, we wish to increase practical understanding of what artificial intelligence is, and by doing so, we want to give a boost to the digital leadership of Europe," said Finnish Minister of Employment Timo Harakka. "As our Presidency ends, we want to offer something concrete. It's about one of the most pressing challenges facing Europe and Finland today: how to develop our digital literacy," Harakka said in a statement.

At IGF 2019, several policy initiatives, reports, and publications were launched or used as background material for discussions.

Such is the ideal scenario for every manager everywhere, right? Just assign that task to a trusted colleague and watch as the magic happens. Well, maybe that's a reality best expressed in a famous sci-fi TV series, but ... Science fiction often predicts the future quite accurately; and the 1990s future is, well, today! In other words, the vision espoused by Star Trek: Next Generation, in many ways can now be qualified as realistic, at least with respect to the dynamic use of data. Let's face it: Data drives the Information Economy, especially when modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are trained on it.

Me: "Alexa, tell me what will happen in 2020." Amazon AI: "Here's what I found on Wikipedia: The 2020 UEFA European Football Championship…[continues to read from Wikipedia]" Me: "Alexa, give me a prediction for 2020." Amazon AI: "The universe has not revealed the answer to me." Well, some slight improvement over last year's responses, when Alexa's answer to the first question was "Do you want to open'this day in history'?" As for the universe, it is an open book for the 120 senior executives featured here, all involved with AI, delivering 2020 predictions for a wide range of topics: Autonomous vehicles, deepfakes, small data, voice and natural language processing, human and augmented intelligence, bias and explainability, edge and IoT processing, and many promising applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies and tools. And there will be even more 2020 AI predictions, in a second installment to be posted here later this month. "Vehicle AI is going to be ...

The Veterans Affairs Department recently launched a National Artificial Intelligence Institute to coordinate and advance strategic vet-focused research and development efforts to harness the budding technology. "VA has a unique opportunity to be a leader in artificial intelligence," Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement. "VA's artificial intelligence institute will usher in new capabilities and opportunities that will improve health outcomes for our nation's heroes." Home to America's largest integrated health care system, the VA trains more doctors and nurses than any other entity in the nation and also houses the largest genomic knowledge base linked to health care information in the world. Throughout 2019, the agency unveiled a variety of deliberate investments and projects to leverage artificial intelligence to better meet veterans' needs.