The UK government has launched a new skills and talent initiative that will see the creation of a series of industry-backed post-graduate AI courses, with the goal of training thousands of students each year. This marks the first time the country will have a nationwide programme of industry-funded AI Masters courses that are paired with work-based job placements. It comes hot on the heels of new data that shows inward investment to the UK's AI sector increased 17% over the past year - more than the rest of Europe combined. The new package, announced today, is funded by up to £110 million of government investment and will create up to 200 AI Masters places at universities across the UK. Additional funding will also come from the industry, with companies such as BAE Systems, Cisco and DeepMind investing in the initiative, according to a government statement.

The UK government has launched a new skills and talent initiative that will see the creation of a series of industry-backed post-graduate AI courses, with the goal of training thousands of students each year. This marks the first time the country will have a nationwide programme of industry-funded AI Masters courses that are paired with work-based job placements. It comes hot on the heels of new data that shows inward investment to the UK's AI sector increased 17% over the past year - more than the rest of Europe combined. The new package, announced today, is funded by up to £110 million of government investment and will create up to 200 AI Masters places at universities across the UK. Additional funding will also come from the industry, with companies such as BAE Systems, Cisco and DeepMind investing in the initiative, according to a government statement.

An artificial intelligence (AI) programme has the potential to prevent irreversible sight loss by spotting the key signs of eye disease as well as world-leading experts can, a study has found. The system, which draws on data from thousands of NHS patients, could ensure patients with serious eye conditions receive vital early treatment. Early trials of the programme, developed by scientists at Moorfields Eye Hospital, University College London, and Google's DeepMind AI research centre, have been so promising it could be rolled out at 30 UK hospitals within three years. "The number of eye scans we're performing is growing at a pace much faster than human experts are able to interpret them," said Dr Pearse Keane from Moorfields. "There is a risk that this may cause delays in the diagnosis and treatment of sight-threatening diseases, which can be devastating for patients. "The AI technology we're developing is designed to prioritise patients who need to be seen and treated urgently by a doctor or eye care professional.

Epilepsy is among the most common neurological disorders that affects 65 million people of all ages globally. In the United States, 3.4 million Americans have epilepsy according to the CDC. Epilepsy can interfere with a person's ability to drive a car, play sports, swim, or exercise. It is a non-contagious brain disorder where recurrent, unprovoked seizures occur. Epilepsy may be caused by many factors, including traumatic brain injuries, stroke, loss of oxygen to the brain, brain tumor, parasitic brain infections (malaria, neurocysticercosis from tapeworms), viral infections (Zika, dengue, influenza), bacterial brain infections, neurological diseases, genetic predisposition, and other causes.

Levi Strauss & Co. has named Katia Walsh as SVP and Chief Strategy and Artificial Intelligence Officer, effective April 29.

Darktrace helped pave the way for using artificial intelligence to combat malicious hacking and enterprise security breaches. Now a new U.K. startup founded by an ex-Darktrace executive has raised some funding to take the use of AI in cybersecurity to the next level. Senseon, which has pioneered a new model that it calls "AI triangulation" -- simultaneously applying artificial intelligence algorithms to oversee, monitor and defend an organization's network appliances, endpoints and "investigator bots" covering multiple microservices -- has raised $6.4 million in seed funding. David Atkinson -- the startup's CEO and founder who had previously been the commercial director for Darktrace and before that helped pioneer new cybersecurity techniques as an operative at the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense -- said that Senseon will use the funding to continue to expand its business both in Europe and the U.S. The deal was co-led by MMC Ventures and Mark Weatherford, who is chief cybersecurity strategist at vArmour (which itself raised money in recent weeks) and previously Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Others in the round included Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane Venture Partners and CyLon, a security startup incubator in London.

With artificial intelligence being at the brink of conquering our planet, we are now possibly facing the next critical phase of human history. Rarely have we seen a technological advancement that could so radically and irreversibly change the world as we know it. The implications of artificial intelligence are undoubtedly immense, as it would probably affect almost every industry in the world, reshaping businesses and jobs in the process. Before his death in March 2018, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was often quoted for being a dogged critic of artificial intelligence because of the magnitude of destructiveness that might come along with giving computers an intelligence that is equal or even superior to that of a human. However, as reported by CNBC in 2017, Hawking found legislative proposals in the European Union to be hopeful in regulating AI and robots in various ways.

The big picture: For Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, automation's painful effects on labor are a natural target. Other major candidates, like Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, haven't built this issue into their campaign platforms. Why you'll hear about this again: Darrell West, director of the Brookings Center for Technology Innovation, says that bubbling discontent with Big Tech -- the "techlash" -- has launched these issues into the spotlight. Go deeper... Bernie Sanders: Everything you need to know about the 2020 candidate

It's been a big week for 5G, the next generation of wireless networks. Samsung announced its first 5G capable phone, the S10, on Wednesday. Qualcomm announced a new 5G modem on Tuesday. But President Trump is aiming higher. "I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible," Trump wrote in a tweet urging carriers to pick up their pace.

Deep learning has emerged as a compelling solution to many NLP tasks with remarkable performances. However, due to their opacity, such models are hard to interpret and trust. Recent work on explaining deep models has introduced approaches to provide insights toward the model's behavior and predictions, which are helpful for determining the reliability of the model's prediction. However, such methods do not fix and improve the model's reliability. In this paper, we teach our models to make the right prediction for the right reason by providing explanation training signal and ensuring alignment of the models explanation with the ground truth explanation. Our experimental results on multiple tasks and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which produces more reliable predictions while delivering better results compared to traditionally trained models.