When the weather turns bad, the signs that there's a tornado on the horizon are always ominous -- but they're rarely obvious. "The sky turned the weirdest color of gray I'd ever seen," Mark Ausbrooks, survivor of a 2014 tornado in Mayflower Arkansas, told NBC News. "You always hear how still it gets, and there was not a leaf moving." An average person with no knowledge of meteorology can pick up on these abnormalities, but they will have difficulty processing this information into a clear message: "DANGER AHEAD! In the same way, telltale signs of an impending major IT incident may be everywhere, but they will be ignored if they are not assembled together in a way that can indicate and anticipate risk. What IT needs to predict, and possibly avert, these incidents is a system like the one the National Weather Service uses to predict and alert people to possible severe weather activity.

The world did take notice when China was laying out plans for becoming the worldwide leader in artificial intelligence by the end of 2029. While the clear figure has not been mentioned by Beijing regarding the scope of its total Artificial Intelligence investment, assumptions are being made by many that the 2nd largest economy of the world would be backing its national artificial intelligence plan with the necessary resources. Two years back, when Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan was published by China, it was decided by the country to account for 48% of the total equity funding for Artificial Intelligence start-ups as compared with 38% funded by the United States and 13% by the rest countries of the world. However, according to the estimates by the United States think tank, the reports of China's investment on artificial intelligence might be exaggerated, and that it has likely not been greatly outspending the United States government on artificial intelligence research and development since it revealed the national plan. This month, researchers at the Centre for Security and Emerging Technology examined in an issue brief that public investment of China in Artificial intelligence research and development was in the order of a couple of billion US dollars a year ago, just like the United States' planned spending for the financial year 2020, instead of the tens of billions earlier suggested in a few quarters.

In a surprise announcement, Indonesia's president Joko Widodo has ordered government agencies to replace top civil servants with artificial intelligence (AI) during 2020. The president announced the decision to a room of business leaders as he set out plans for his second five-year term after winning an election in April, Reuters reported. Widodo said that the top four tiers of civil servants would be condensed into two. "I have ordered my minister [of administrative and bureaucratic reform] to replace them with AI. Our bureaucracy will be faster with AI," he said.

A new generation of global inequalities fuelled by climate change and technology could trigger violence and political instability if left unchecked, the United Nations warned on Monday. Climate change and technology rather than wealth and income are the modern-day wedges that are increasingly dividing the haves from the have-nots, said the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its 2019 Human Development Report. These forms of inequality are rising as progress has been made in more traditional measures of inequality such as extreme poverty and disease, it said. "Under the shadow of the climate crisis and sweeping technological change, inequalities in human development are taking new forms," the report said. "The climate crisis is already hitting the poorest hardest, while technological advances such as machine learning and artificial intelligence can leave behind entire groups of people, even countries."

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has published a new report titled Understanding the Dynamics of Artificial Intelligence in Intellectual Property. Designed to provide technologists, academicians, entrepreneurs, professionals and policymakers with insights on the frontiers in AI-related research and IP management and protection, the report was released today in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at the 5th International Conference on IPR, organized by CII in collaboration with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Government of India, and the Intellectual Property Office, India, said a press release from the company. The report captures trends in AI-related research globally, noting for example that while machine learning is the most common AI technique, mentioned in 89% of the patents filed, deep learning (DL) is the fastest-growing technique mentioned in patent filings. Another finding is that the highest number of patent families is in computer vision (49%), NLP (14%) and speech processing (13%). While it is no surprise that the US and China lead the world in AI-related patents, it comes as an eye-opener that China leads the world in deep learning, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences owning the largest DL-related patent portfolio and Baidu leading the pack among corporates globally.

Israel-based Medial EarlySign and Geisinger Health System have partnered to apply advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to Medicare claims data to predict and improve patient outcomes. An EarlySign-Geisinger proposal has been selected as one of 25 participants to advance to Stage 1 of a technology challenge from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to accelerate the development of AI and machine learning solutions for healthcare. "Approximately 4.3 million hospital readmissions occur each year in the U.S., costing more than $60 billion, with preventable adverse patient events creating additional clinical and financial burdens for both patients and healthcare systems," says David Vawdrey, Geisinger's chief data informatics officer. "Together with our partner EarlySign, we have forged a dynamic team that is rapidly developing novel solutions to achieve the Quadruple Aim of improving the patient experience of care, improving the health of populations, reducing cost and improving clinical care provider satisfaction," adds Vawdrey. The AI vendor and Danville, Penn.-based regional healthcare provider intend to develop models that predict unplanned hospital and skilled nursing facility admissions within 30 days of discharge and adverse events such as respiratory failure, postoperative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, as well as postoperative sepsis before they occur.

The business landscape is currently facing a period of uncertainty and unrest. Ongoing Brexit tensions have cut the productivity of UK companies and created a crucial need for increased productivity – which Robotic Process Automation (RPA) could help provide. New technologies like RPA are becoming more common in offices, resulting in an increase in business process efficiency. Specifically, RPA's ability to execute rules-based office tasks is resulting in employee time being freed up for more meaningful, strategic tasks, ultimately helping boost engagement, productivity and happiness. RPA and new technologies are also ushering in a new world of work: according to the World Economic Forum, 65% of children now entering primary school will hold jobs that currently don't exist.

Organisations are becoming so overwhelmed with data relating to cybersecurity that they are having to turn to artificial intelligence (AI) in order to keep abreast of it all. More than half of them reported that they were using or looking to use AI because their organisations had too much data to deal with. The machine-learning systems can help by processing huge volumes of data in a way that would be impossible for human analysts. Some cyber-attacks can be identified and blocked automatically. The AI can also alert human analysts to areas of data that they should be paying particular attention to, allowing them to respond to threats more effectively.

There will be a "new world disorder" if nations don't adapt to artificial intelligence (AI), a top government official told a digital conference in Abu Dhabi. Speaking at the Digital Next Summit which kicked off on Sunday, Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, said the world is witnessing a shift in all aspects of society. "AI is now being used in all spheres and it is transforming every walk of life. This requires all governments to adapt to new technologies as fast as possible to cope with the changing world," Al Olama said. "AI is applied in national security, finance, healthcare, education, criminal justice, transportation, smart cities, and elsewhere."

Kim Il Sung University set up specialist Japanese language and literature courses in the spring of 2017, it was learned Saturday from the university. The training course for Japanese researchers was established at the prestigious institution in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, at a time when the rogue state was repeatedly testing nuclear weapons and launching ballistic missiles. That period continued until the fall of 2017 and led to heightened tensions with the United States. There is a possibility that it was judged necessary to strengthen the development of such experts in view of future diplomacy with Japan. Japan and North Korea maintain no diplomatic relations.