The European Commission and European Investment Fund (EIF) are launching a €2bn fund to invest in fundamental technologies amid fears that the US and China are pulling ahead in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. The fund is expected to invest around €300-€400m in these areas in 2020, with €100m of that money coming from the EU and EIF and the rest from independent venture capital funds. From 2021 the plan is to scale up the fund to €1bn to €2bn under the InvestEU Programme. This is an attempt to help Europe catch up with investment in the US and China. The EU pulled in a record $34bn in venture capital funding this year, but this is still only half the amount invested in Asian companies and a third of US investment.

The European Commission and European Investment Fund (EIF) are launching a €2bn fund to invest in fundamental technologies amid fears that the US and China are pulling ahead in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. The fund is expected to invest around €300-€400m in these areas in 2020, with €100m of that money coming from the EU and EIF and the rest from independent venture capital funds. From 2021 the plan is to scale up the fund to €1bn to €2bn under the InvestEU Programme. This is an attempt to help Europe catch up with investment in the US and China. The EU pulled in a record $34bn in venture capital funding this year, but this is still only half the amount invested in Asian companies and a third of US investment.

We live in a data society. Journalists are becoming data analysts and data curators, and computation is an essential tool for reporting. Data and computation reshape the way a reporter sees the world and composes a story. They also control the operation of the information ecosystem she sends her journalism into, influencing where it finds audiences and generates discussion. So every reporting beat is now a data beat, and computation is an essential tool for investigation. But digitization is affected by inequities, leaving gaps that often reflect the very disparities reporters seek to illustrate. Computation is creating new systems of power and inequality in the world. We rely on journalists, the "explainers of last resort"[1], to hold these new constellations of power to account. We report on computation, not just with computation. While a term with considerable history and mystery, artificial intelligence (AI) represents the most recent bundling of data and computation to optimize business decisions, automate tasks, and, from the point of view of a reporter, learn about the world. The relationship between a journalist and AI is not unlike the process of developing sources or cultivating fixers. As with human sources, artificial intelligences may be knowledgeable, but they are not free of subjectivetivity in their design -- they also need to be contextualized and qualified. Ethical questions of introducing AI in journalism abound. But since AI has once again captured the public imagination, it is hard to have a clear-eyed discussion about the issues involved with journalism's call to both report on and with these new computational tools. And so our article will alternate a discussion of issues facing the profession today with a "slant narrative" -- indicated because these sections are in italics. The slant narrative starts with the 1964 World's Fair and a partnership between IBM and The New York Times, winds through commentary by Joseph Weizenbaum, a famed figure in AI research in the 1960s, and ends in 1983 with the shuttering of one of the most ambitious information delivery systems of the time. The simplicity of the role of computation in the slant narrative will help us better understand our contemporary situation with AI. But we begin our article with context for the use of data and computation in journalism -- a short, and certainly incomplete, history before we settle into the rhythm of alternating narratives. Reporters depend on data, and through computation they make sense of that data. This reliance is not new. Joseph Pulitzer listed a series of topics that should be taught to aspiring journalists in his 1904 article "The College of Journalism."

Conventional DDNs are "growing wider and deeper, with the complexity growing from millions to hundreds of millions of parameters in the last few years," a DARPA presolicitation document says. "The basic computational primitive to execute training and inference functions in DNN is the multiply and accumulate (MAC) operation. As DNN parameter count increases, SOA networks require tens of billions of MAC operations to carry out one inference." This means that the accuracy of DNN "is fundamentally limited by available MAC resources," DARPA says. "Consequently, SOA high accuracy DNNs are hosted in the cloud centers with clusters of energy hungry processors to speed up processing. This compute paradigm will not satisfy many DoD applications which demand extremely low latency, high accuracy artificial intelligence (AI) under severe size, weight, and power constraints."

Theoretically, AI could keep reprogramming and upgrading itself without human interference until it becomes more intelligent than us. At that point, experts warn, it could view humanity as a hinderance – and will use its intelligence to replace us at the top. Ultimately, the smarter AI becomes, the easier it will be able to develop itself until its growth massively outpaces humanity's.

For example, OSTP pointed to the Department of Homeland Security's work, writing that to "keep ahead of the curve and ensure that use of AI does not unfairly or illegally disadvantage individuals" it is "applying and extending" its existing tools and frameworks, but offering no real insight into how those frameworks were applied, considered successful, or enhancing research. It also wrote that DHS' Science and Technology Directorate had "identified bias and fairness in AI systems as priority issues," without elaborating on how specifically that's guided research and development.

One of the effects of the ongoing trade war between the US and China is likely to be the accelerated development of what are being called "artificial intelligence chips", or AI chips for short, also sometimes referred to as AI accelerators. AI chips could play a critical role in economic growth going forward because they will inevitably feature in cars, which are becoming increasingly autonomous; smart homes, where electronic devices are becoming more intelligent; robotics, obviously; and many other technologies. AI chips, as the term suggests, refers to a new generation of microprocessors which are specifically designed to process artificial intelligence tasks faster, using less power. Obvious, you might think, but some might wonder what the difference between an AI chip and a regular chip would be when all chips of any type process zeros and ones – a typical processor, after all, is actually capable of AI tasks. Graphics-processing units are particularly good at AI-like tasks, which is why they form the basis for many of the AI chips being developed and offered today. Without getting out of our depth, while a general microprocessor is an all-purpose system, AI processors are embedded with logic gates and highly parallel calculation systems that are more suited to typical AI tasks such as image processing, machine vision, machine learning, deep learning, artificial neural networks, and so on. Maybe one could use cars as metaphors. A general microprocessor is your typical family car that might have good speed and steering capabilities.

Deep Learning based AI systems have shown great promise in various domains such as vision, audio, autonomous systems (vehicles, drones), etc. Recent research on neural networks has shown the susceptibility of deep networks to adversarial attacks - a technique of adding small perturbations to the inputs which can fool a deep network into misclassifying them. Developing defenses against such adversarial attacks is an active research area, with some approaches proposing robust models that are immune to such adversaries, while other techniques attempt to detect such adversarial inputs. In this paper, we present a novel statistical approach for adversarial detection in image classification. Our approach is based on constructing a per-class feature distribution and detecting adversaries based on comparison of features of a test image with the feature distribution of its class. For this purpose, we make use of various statistical distances such as ED (Energy Distance), MMD (Maximum Mean Discrepancy) for adversarial detection, and analyze the performance of each metric. We experimentally show that our approach achieves good adversarial detection performance on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets irrespective of the attack method, sample size and the degree of adversarial perturbation.

In the area of credit risk analytics, current Bankruptcy Prediction Models (BPMs) struggle with (a) the availability of comprehensive and real-world data sets and (b) the presence of extreme class imbalance in the data (i.e., very few samples for the minority class) that degrades the performance of the prediction model. Moreover, little research has compared the relative performance of well-known BPM's on public datasets addressing the class imbalance problem. In this work, we apply eight classes of well-known BPMs, as suggested by a review of decades of literature, on a new public dataset named Freddie Mac Single-Family Loan-Level Dataset with resampling (i.e., adding synthetic minority samples) of the minority class to tackle class imbalance. Additionally, we apply some recent AI techniques (e.g., tree-based ensemble techniques) that demonstrate potentially better results on models trained with resampled data. In addition, from the analysis of 19 years (1999-2017) of data, we discover that models behave differently when presented with sudden changes in the economy (e.g., a global financial crisis) resulting in abrupt fluctuations in the national default rate. In summary, this study should aid practitioners/researchers in determining the appropriate model with respect to data that contains a class imbalance and various economic stages.

For many NLP applications, such as question answering and summarisation, the goal is to select the best solution from a large space of candidates to meet a particular user's needs. To address the lack of user-specific training data, we propose an interactive text ranking approach that actively selects pairs of candidates, from which the user selects the best. Unlike previous strategies, which attempt to learn a ranking across the whole candidate space, our method employs Bayesian optimisation to focus the user's labelling effort on high quality candidates and integrates prior knowledge in a Bayesian manner to cope better with small data scenarios. We apply our method to community question answering (cQA) and extractive summarisation, finding that it significantly outperforms existing interactive approaches. We also show that the ranking function learned by our method is an effective reward function for reinforcement learning, which improves the state of the art for interactive summarisation.