One of the major practices AI is turning upside-down is how government should exercise its regulatory role to provide public protection and equity while also supporting private innovation and economic growth. Much careful thought and LOTS of discussion, perspective and ideas are required. The U.S. federal government is continuing that discussion with an upcoming set of guidelines for federal agencies on how to incorporate AI into their regulatory responsibilities. I certainly don't expect this to be definitive, but it advances our understanding of how we want to use AI at least by being non-theoretical - I hope these guidelines will be practical and applicable to day-to-day work. We will test them, see the impacts and hopefully change them rapidly.

Neural networks have helped scientists monitor the Sun's extreme ultraviolet outbursts after an instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory suffered an electrical malfunction, making it difficult for scientists to monitor a portion of extreme ultraviolet energy (EUV) being spewed by our star. EUV rays ejected from solar flares are particularly worrisome. The surge of highly energetic particles bombarding Earth can cause radio communication blackouts, knock satellites out of place, and disturb GPS signals. Space agencies around the world keep a close eye on the Sun's activity in an attempt to study and predict these outbursts. NASA's SDO is just one of the many spacecrafts currently orbiting our planet's star.

There is currently keen interest amongst tech companies, investors, and research institutes in both artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. The buzz has reached corporations and financial institutions looking to tailor these technologies for their own businesses in order to keep pace in our increasingly digitized economy. This excitement has implications for securing patent protection – Canada and the United States (as well as many other countries) operate on a "first to file" basis. That means you will want to file a patent application before other inventors monopolize protection for the technology in your area, potentially curtailing your competitive business advantage. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued revised guidelines on what constitutes subject-matter that is eligible for patent protection (under 35 U.S.C. § 101), effective January 7, 2019. These guidelines will likely have the largest impact in the area of computer-implemented inventions, including artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies, and may make it easier to patent some of these inventions.

It's estimated that over 17,500 new spinal cord injuries occur each year in the U.S., meaning 54 people out of every million Americans experience one. Patients regain the majority of function within the first six months after the injury, but any remaining loss present after a year is much more likely to become permanent. That's why engineers and neurosurgeons at Brown University, Rhode Island Hospital, Intel, and Micro-Leads Medical have committed to spending the next two years designing and building an Intelligent Spine Interface (ISI), which they say will record motor and sensory signals from spinal cord neurons and learn to stimulate those neurons using AI. Now, with a $6.3 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), they're preparing to implant electrodes in a test to see if severed nerves can be made to communicate. Their work expands on that of teams in Switzerland and at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center at the University of Louisville, which found that spinal cord stimulation can help restore voluntary muscle control post-injury.

The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days. It is offered both as a way for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workplace, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently commented that humans can escape being outmoded by AI by "having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence."1 To this end, he's founded a company, Neuralink. One of its first aims is to develop "neural lace," an injectable mesh that connects the brain directly to computers. Neural lace and other AI-based enhancements are supposed to allow data from your brain to travel wirelessly to one's digital devices or to the cloud, where massive computing power is available.

The FDA has approved a mobile chest x-ray system that helps detect pneumothorax – a type of collapsed lung – by flagging critical cases for triage. According to the manufacturer, GE Healthcare, Critical Care Suite is the first system of its kind to get approved by the FDA, offering a series of artificial intelligence algorithms embedded on a mobile X-ray device. Pneumothorax, the presence of gas within the pleural space between the lung and chest wall, is a problem in hospitals across the world. But the challenge is to quickly identify real cases from the suspected ones, which can be difficult in busy hospitals. But missing cases of pneumothorax can lead to total lung collapse and other potentially fatal complications, with misdiagnosis or late diagnosis affecting around 74,000 people in the US annually.

On 6-7 May 2019, the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its partners UNICEF and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) hosted a workshop in San Francisco on the joint "Generation AI" initiative. This workshop identified deliverables in two key areas: 1) public policy guidelines that direct countries on creating new laws focused on children and 2) a corporate governance charter that guides companies leveraging AI to design their products and services with children in mind.

The government has launched the National AI strategy today, with Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and Parliamentary Secretary for the Digital Economy Silvio Schembri both delivering speeches during the Delta Summit. The document, called'Malta the Ultimate AI Launchpad: A Strategy and Vision for Artificial Intelligence in Malta 2030', aims to ensure that benefits brought about by this next wave of innovation delivers benefits across all segments of Maltese society. Speaking at the Summit, Muscat highlighted that this year's summit doubled in size, from 4,500 people registering last year, to 10,000 this year. "This summit is one of the best opportunities for Malta to showcase our progress, our achievements and our dedication in areas of emerging technology to the world," Muscat said. "We made great strides compared to other countries as we were ambitious in our initiatives."

A Danish R&D project is developing an automatic sea ice product service, which can meet the increased demands for better and more timely sea ice information, using the extensive amount of free and available data from the Copernicus Sentinel satellites, along with novel machine learning techniques for satellite data fusion and sea-ice information retrieval. Manual ice-charting from multi-sensor satellite data has been used for decades, but it is a time-consuming process and delays the delivery of satellite based information to end users. There is a need for automated ice observations from satellite data delivered directly to users or assimilated into ice forecast models, in order to meet the increased demands for better and more timely sea ice information, to improve efficiency and safety of marine operations in polar regions. The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), the Technical University of Denmark and Harnvig Arctic & Maritime have initiated the project Automated Sea Ice Products (ASIP) – funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark. The ASIP vision for designing an automatic and robust sea ice classification scheme is to merge imagery from the Sentinel-1 satellites of the European Union's Copernicus programme with other satellite sensor data that have complementary capabilities, such as passive microwave data from AMSR2 (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2) and in the future the Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR), to better resolve the ambiguities that can occur in SAR imagery of sea ice.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the large accounting and management consulting firm, released a startling report indicating that workers will be highly impacted by the fast-growing rise of artificial intelligence, robots and related technologies. Banking and financial services employees, factory workers and office staff will seemingly face the loss of their jobs--or need to find a way to reinvent themselves in this brave new world. The term "artificial intelligence" is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. AI includes well-known applications, such as Siri, GPS, Spotify, self-driving vehicles and the larger-than-life robots made by Boston Robotics that perform incredible feats. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, speaks about Siri during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 4, 2018, in San Jose, Calif.