Simultaneous interpretation (SI) has been described by research scientists as "an extremely difficult job […] requiring careful concentration and having very little margin for error." Enhancing the difficulty is the fact that the practice of interpretation, per se, is "as much interpersonal as it is linguistic," as one professional interpreter put it. Little surprise then that interpretation -- heretofore largely unchanged by software advances -- would be a highly attractive target for AI research. Hoping for a shot at the brass ring of automated SI is the Japanese government, which will fund the development of AI-powered software that can deliver SI in 15 languages in time for the 2025 World Expo in Osaka, according to an August 28, 2019 article in Nikkei Asian Review. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will ask for JPY 2bn (USD 18.9m) in the fiscal 2020 budget to fund the program, the same article said.

This document presents the contributions presented at the first internal workshop on Artificial Intelligence (AI), organized by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. This workshop was held on 23rd May at the premises of the JRC in Ispra (Italy), with video-conference to all JRC's sites. The workshop aimed to gather JRC specialists on AI to share their experience, to identify opportunities for meeting the EC demands on AI, and explore synergies among different JRC's working groups on AI. The full-day session workshop was organized around three main topical strands entitled Policy support, New Initiatives and Technology Development. Contributions covered a wide range of areas, including applications of AI to Cybersecurity, Transport, Environment, Health and other specific issues.

Lionfish are voracious eaters and can expand their stomachs 30 times their original volume to accommodate that appetite. One of the most notorious invasive species around, the lionfish, is known for its voracious appetite and can literally eat its competitors out of an ecosystem. And that's what the striking fish is doing, feasting its way through waters that stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to the Eastern Seaboard. Now, scientists and startups are crafting methods for capturing and killing the hungry invaders. But while these new ideas show promise, tried-and-true spearfishing seems to be the most effective way to eradicate lionfish, scientists told Live Science. "It's actually hard to describe how a lionfish eats because they do it in a split second," said Kristen Dahl, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida.

Inside a sunny conference room on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., a small team of employees is describing how technology can save the world. Microsoft's Digital Diplomacy unit consists of two dozen policy experts who work on everything from the ethical use of artificial intelligence to protecting the 2020 presidential election from foreign cyberinterference. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, sits in the middle of the table, sipping coffee from a mug bearing the name of his hometown, Appleton, Wis. The group updates Smith on a tech-industry initiative co-founded by Microsoft to combat terrorist messaging on the Internet. Smith pushes for more ideas. "We need something that will create a new mold," he says.

The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasing more day by day in our lives. AI has invaded almost in every field, improvising it with new inventions and solutions benefiting our society to a significant extent. Where, on the one hand people are getting more addicted to the technology, industries, on the other hand, are involving AI-based technologies to promote their ideas. Industries have grown to provide solutions for such troublesome situations. AI is now being used widely in an array of fields, increasing its significance in more than one way.

In the same month it was announced that computer pioneer, codebreaker and the father of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Alan Turing, will feature on the new design of the Bank of England's £50 note, a report from IDC suggests that spending across Europe will hit $5.2 billion in 2019 up from 2018 by 49 percent and expected to rise to $13.5bn by 2022. The race to build machines capable of matching and beating human vision, language understanding, intelligence, and movement is on. Change management and business transformation is one area of business operations where AI could make an exciting impact. In this article, three experts share their thoughts to help to better understand what AI is, how much of what we know is real, what it can and should do, and, most importantly, how it might affect business transformation programs around the world. BN: We often see the terms AI mixed with automation, deep learning and machine learning, what do they all mean?

In little over a decade, AI has moved out of the laboratories and into the consumer's hands. AI has already begun to make big waves in military and strategic affairs too. Almost all defence experts agree that the application of AI in the armed forces could impact every sphere and degree of warfare. This draft report focuses on the key opportunities, challenges and uncertainties AI presents for defence and security. It takes some deep dives into: • AI's impact on information and decision support and robotic autonomous systems; • crucial technical and non-technical challenges – including the debate about lethal autonomous weapons systems, and; • some potential strategic implications.

In the last decade, artificial intelligence ("AI") applications have exploded across various research sectors, including computer vision, communications and medicine. Now, the rapidly developing technology is making its mark in weather prediction. The fields of atmospheric science and satellite meteorology are ideally suited for the task, offering a rich training ground capable of feeding an AI system's endless appetite for data. Anthony Wimmers is a scientist with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) who has been working with AI systems for the last three years. His latest research investigates how an AI model can help improve short-term forecasting (or "nowcasting") of hurricanes.

The recent surveys, studies, forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the health and progress of AI highlighted the role of AI in cybersecurity defense and in scoring standardized tests, the relationships between data migrating to the cloud and data modernization, lax security standards for IoT devices, and that the U.S. still leads the global race for AI domination but that China is making more rapid progress. Written essays on standardized tests in 18 states in the U.S. are currently graded by natural language processing (NLP) software ("automated essay scoring engines") with only a small percentage of students' essays--it varies between 5% to 20%--randomly selected for a human grader to double check the machine's work [VICE] Based on a 100-point scale, the U.S. leads the global AI race with 44.2 points, followed by China with 32.3 points and the European Union with 23.5 points; The U.S. came out on top in talent, research, development, and hardware, while China led in adoption and data. Airbus Americas has been using AI from AppZen to review expense reports and determine if they are in compliance with company policies; in the first partial year of the technology's implementation Airbus paid off its initial investment of $50,000 and pocketed about $50,000 more; the division expects to save $100,000 this year and at least $200,000 in 2020 in the Americas; worldwide implementation is expected to result in several millions of dollars in savings [The Wall Street Journal]

In July 2017, China published its Next Generation AI Development Plan. As analysts such as Jeff Ding of Oxford University point out, it was not a green-field programme. It rather sought to gather and focus a diverse set of existing initiatives in response to what local academics called a'Sputnik moment': the 2016 defeat of the world's best Go player, Lee Sedol, by a Google-owned AI. For context, China's AI industry was estimated to be worth around RMB15bn (£1.7bn) when the plan was released. The plan often provokes sceptical responses outside China but the country has made significant advances toward the 2020 goal (indeed large parts of it have arguably already been achieved).