It's the most cunning robocall scam I've encountered -- and the fact that I've fallen for it more than once tells you how successful it can be. You pick it up and say "hello." There's a brief silence and then a woman's voice says, "Oh, hi there!" She offers an embarrassed laugh. "I'm sorry, I was having a little trouble with my headset!"

Up to 30 per cent of UK jobs are at risk of being taken over by robots and Artificial Intelligence by the early 2030s, a new report warns. The study, published by professional services firm PwC, claims that the likelihood of automation is highest in sectors including transport, manufacturing, wholesale and retail. Education, health and social work are less at risk and-- as a result of that-- male workers are more likely to see their jobs taken over by robots than their female counterparts. Despite the threat, though, PwC says that the rise of automation is actually likely to boost productivity and generate additional jobs elsewhere in the economy in the long run. "Automating more manual and repetitive tasks will eliminate some existing jobs, but could also enable some workers to focus on higher value, more rewarding and creative work, removing the monotony from our day jobs," said John Hawksworth, chief economist at PwC. "By boosting productivity - a key UK weakness over the past decade - and so generating wealth, advances in robotics and AI should also create additional jobs in less automatable parts of the economy as this extra wealth is spent or invested," he added.

The recent eruption of Erta Ale volcano in northeastern Ethiopia highlights the speed and impact of space artificial intelligence (A.I.). One of our planet's few exposed lava lakes is changing, and artificial intelligence is helping NASA understand how. On January 21, a fissure opened at the top of Ethiopia's Erta Ale volcano --one of the few in the world with an active lava lake in its caldera. Volcanologists sent out requests for NASA's Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) spacecraft to image the eruption, which was large enough to begin reshaping the volcano's summit. As it turned out, that spacecraft was already busy collecting data of the lava lake.

In an effort to push Canada to the forefront of digital innovation, the federal government committed $125 million in Wednesday's budget to create a Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. "Canada can be a world leader in digital innovation … we can't afford not to be," Finance Minister Bill Morneau said in prepared remarks for his address in the House of Commons. The financial commitment and strategy, which is to be overseen by the Canadian Institute for Advanced research, is intended to attract and retain top academic talent to Canada, and increase the number of researchers studying artificial intelligence and deep machine learning. The government said its strategy would "drive investment and job creation across the country" by bringing together Canada's main centres of artificial intelligence expertise. In the budget document, the government also pledged to support financial technology (fintech) companies that, along with banks, insurers and credit unions, are innovating to make financial services more accessible, useful and affordable. The federal government, through its innovation and skills plan, "will help fintech entrepreneurs realize their full potential by bringing together high-skilled talent, financing solutions, business and advisory services and export support," the document says.

Reuters news agency reported on 16th February 2017 that "European lawmakers called...for EU-wide legislation to regulate the rise of robots, including an ethical framework for their development and deployment and the establishment of liability for the actions of robots including self-driving cars." The question of determining'liability' for decision making achieved by robots or artificial intelligence is an interesting and important subject as the implementation of this technology increases in industry, and starts to more directly impact our day to day lives. Indeed, as application of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technology grows, we are likely to witness how it changes the nature of work, businesses, industries and society. And yet, although it has the power to disrupt and drive greater efficiencies, AI has its obstacles: the issue of'who is liable when something goes awry' being one of them. Like many protagonists in industry, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are trying to tackle this liability question.

As recently as 2014, 87 percent of consumers had never heard of the technology, according to Accenture. In 2016, and 19% of business and government professionals reported that they had never heard of the Internet of Things while 18% were only vaguely familiar with it, according to research from the Internet of Things Institute. Although the technology is getting the most traction in the industrial space, the most promising use cases for the technology are just starting to come to light. To get a sense of what to expect as we head into 2017, we spoke with Stanford lecturer and IoT author Timothy Chou, Ph.D.; Thulium.co IoT's impact will be felt in the marketing world, says Sandy Carter, CEO and founder of Silicon-Blitz, who was named a 2016 Forbes Digital Influencer. "Omnichannel has been a hot topic owing to its focus on a single face to the customer," Carter says. With IoT, presenting a single view of the data becomes easier whether you are a B2B or B2C company.

In a previous post I summarized the tasks and procedures available in SAS Viya Data Mining and Machine Learning. In this post, I'll dive into the unsupervised learning category which currently hosts several tasks: Kmeans, Kmodes, and Kprototypes Clustering, Outlier Detection, and a few variants of Principal Component Analysis. In unsupervised learning there are no known labels (outcomes), only attributes (inputs). Examples include clustering, association, and segmentation. Machine learning finds high density areas (in multidimensional space) that are more or less similar to each other, and identifies structures in the data that separate these areas.

The US Senate has voted to overturn internet privacy rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last October. The rules were put in place to protect web users, banning internet service providers (ISPs) from sharing consumers' web browsing data, including history and financial, health, communications and location information, without their prior approval. ISPs have a lot to gain from the Senate's decision, which will almost certainly lead to them getting the green light to sell people's web data to advertising companies without permission. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Twitter is partnering with IBM to use its AI technology Watson on its continuous fight against online abuse, the site's vice-president of data strategy Chris Moody said at IBM's InterConnect conference this week. Watson can analyze and interpret data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video, which could help Twitter stop trolls. "Watson is really good at understanding nuances in language and intention," said Moody. "What we want to do is be able to identify abuse patterns early and stop this behavior before it starts." Moody said "early testing is super promising" and will return to the conference next year to talk about results of the tool.

In Budget 2017 the Government of Canada announced it will renew and enhance its funding for CIFAR, investing $35 million over the next five years in CIFAR's mission of enabling transformative knowledge by catalyzing global networks of the world's pre-eminent researchers. The government also announced that CIFAR will administer a $125 million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy for research and talent. "I want to thank the Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Navdeep Bains, and the government of Canada for this support," says CIFAR President and CEO Dr. Alan Bernstein. "This government understands the importance of investing in fundamental research, and they understand that the CIFAR model of bringing together some of the best minds to address important global questions benefits both Canada and the world. I'd especially like to thank the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Canada's Minister of Science, for her strong on-going support for CIFAR."