As the new year draws near, healthcare organizations are thinking about where to focus their resources. Matt Mellen, security architect and healthcare solution lead at Palo Alto Networks, predicts that, in 2018, machine learning capabilities will not only enhance a healthcare organization's cybersecurity program, but improve patient outcomes as well. AI in healthcare goes beyond IBM Watson. In this e-guide, discover 4 uses for AI in healthcare – particularly how it can help improve patient engagement – and whether we can overcome security and interoperability concerns surrounding the technology. You forgot to provide an Email Address.

The government must intervene to stop automation driving up wage inequality, a think tank has warned. The Institute for Public Policy Research said robots would not necessarily be bad for the economy. However, it warned lower-skilled jobs were much more likely to be phased out in the coming decades, and only higher-skilled workers would be able to command better wages. The government said it was committed to making automation work for everyone. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) - a centre-left think tank - automation could raise UK productivity growth by between 0.8 to 1.4% annually, and boost GDP by 10% by 2030.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's GOOGL.O Google said on Wednesday it is opening an artificial intelligence (AI) research center in China to target the country's local talent, even as the U.S. search firm's products remain blocked in the country. Google said in a statement the research center is the first of its kind in Asia and will comprise a small team operating out of its existing office in Beijing. Chinese policy makers have voiced strong support for AI research and development in the country, but have imposed increasingly strict rules on foreign firms in the past year, including new censorship restrictions. Google's search engine is banned in the Chinese market along with its app store, email and cloud storage services. China's cyber regulators say restrictions on foreign media and internet platforms are designed to block influences that contravene stability and socialist ideas.

Unmanned surface vessels (USVs), which can patrol Singapore waters autonomously, have been on trial since late last year said the Singapore Police Coast Guard (PCG). Two of the USVs - one measuring 9m long and the other 16m - were showcased to the media yesterday, in the open water off Marina Bay. Leveraging on technology, USVs are part of Singapore's "multi-layered" defence, which also includes sophisticated land-based CCTV cameras and sensors, to protect its maritime borders. Said Superintendent Lin Zhenqiang, head of operations and security at the Police Coast Guard: "These USVs are able to conduct autonomous patrols. And this will help us project police presence."

Nearly half of British jobs are at risk of being taken over by robots, a report warned last night. Technological advances mean 44 per cent of current roles could be automated, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think-tank found. Employees working in catering, retail and agriculture are most under threat by the march of machines. Nearly half of British jobs are at risk of being taken over by robots, a report warned last night. The report raised the example of how Amazon has used sensors in its warehouses to monitor productivity.

Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, certainly raised the profile of quantum computing a few notches last year, when he gamely--if vaguely1--described it for a press conference. But we've heard a lot about quantum computers in the past few years, as Google, I.B.M., and N.A.S.A., as well as many, many universities, have all been working on, or putting money into, quantum computers for various ends. The N.S.A., for instance, as the Snowden documents revealed, wants to build one for codebreaking, and it seems to be a common belief that if a full-scale, practical quantum computer is built, it could be really useful in that regard. A New Yorker article early this year, for example, stated that a quantum computer "would, on its first day of operation, be capable of cracking the Internet's most widely used codes." But maybe they won't be as useful as we have been led to believe.

We have been hearing a lot lately on the topic of American greatness, where it went, and how to reclaim it. But greatness is complicated, and our ideas of what is great and what is not have changed over time. In this column, I ask what the history of one mighty corporation--IBM--can tell us about the rise and fall of a particular kind of American greatness. Decade after decade, IBM has been one of the world's largest, most profitable, and most admired companies. Of all American businesses, only General Electric, Apple, Microsoft, and Exxon-Mobile have generated more wealth.a Despite recent troubles, it has been ranked in the 2010s as the number one company for leaders (Fortune), the greenest company (Newsweek), the second most valuable global brand (Interbrand), the second most respected company (Barron's) and the fifth most admired (Fortune). IBM technical contributions to computing are second to none. Its researchers won six Turing awards and, more startling, four Nobel prizes. Its engineers produced the first hard disk drive, the first floppy disk drive, the first architecture implemented over a range of diverse but compatible machines, the first widely used high-level programming language, the relational database, the first scientific supercomputer, the first RISC designs, and the first DRAM chip. As recently as 2014, IBM ranked ahead of its old adversary Microsoft on Fortune's lists of the largest U.S. companies (20th place) and of the firms most admired by managers (16th place). In ways good and bad, IBM has been at the forefront of changes in American business and in America's relationships with the world.

I think often of Ender's Game these days. In this award-winning 1985 science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card (based on a 1977 short story with the same title), Ender is being trained at Battle School, an institution designed to make young children into military commanders against an unspecified enemy (http://bit.ly/2hYQMDF). Ender's team engages in a series of computer-simulated battles, eventually destroying the enemy's planet, only to learn then that the battles were very real and a real planet has been destroyed. I got involved in computing at age 16 because programming was fun. Later I discovered that developing algorithms was even more enjoyable.

Over 13 months in 2016–17 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission conducted an "incentive auction" to repurpose radio spectrum from broadcast television to wireless internet. In the end, the auction yielded $19.8 bn, $10.05 bn of which was paid to 175 broadcasters for voluntarily relinquishing their licenses across 14 Ultra High Frequency (UHF) channels. Stations that continued broadcasting were assigned potentially new channels to fit as densely as possible into the channels that remained. The government netted more than $7 bn (used to pay down the national debt) after covering costs (including retuning). A crucial element of the auction design was the construction of a solver, dubbed SAT-based Feasibility Checker (SATFC), that determined whether sets of stations could be "repacked" in this way; it needed to run every time a station was given a price quote.

The rise of the machine economy risks social disruption by widening the gap between rich and poor in Britain, as automation threatens jobs generating £290bn in wages. Jobs accounting for a third of annual pay in the UK risk being automated, according to the study by the IPPR thinktank. Warning that low-paid roles are in the greatest danger, it urged ministers to head off the prospect of rising inequality by helping people retrain and share in the benefits from advances in technology. The study for the IPPR's commission on economic justice, which features senior business and public figures including the archbishop of Canterbury, called on the government to take a greater role in managing the adoption of robotics, artificial intelligence and other methods of job automation in the workforce. Mathew Lawrence, a senior research fellow at the IPPR, said: "Managed badly, the benefits of automation could be narrowly concentrated, benefiting those who own capital and highly skilled workers. The IPPR estimates that 44% of jobs in the UK economy could feasibly be automated, equating to more than 13.7 million people who together earn about £290bn. Although it doesn't give a forecast for how long this would take, it cited US research which estimates the changes could occur over the next 10 or 20 years. From the collective pay pool worth £290bn, middle-income jobs such as call-centre workers, secretaries and factory workers are likely to be hollowed out. Low-skilled workers could also lose their jobs or face fewer hours from greater levels of automation. At the same time the highest earners and workers able to retrain will gain higher pay thanks to rising productivity – which means more output being generated per hour worked. The research follows similar studies warning of the risks arising from the current rapid advances in technology, which have enabled machines to take on work that was once the preserve of humans. The Bank of England has said as many as 15m jobs in Britain are under threat. Measures called for in the IPPR report include a UK skills system to help retrain those affected by the introduction of machines into the workforce, as well as an ethics watchdog to oversee the use of automating technologies modelled on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which regulates embryo research. Ministers are also being urged to consider new models of company ownership in the face of increasing returns to asset owners, because rising automation could result in higher profits for those who own companies - at the expense of workers' salaries. Carys Roberts, a research fellow at the IPPR, said: "Some people will get a pay rise while others are trapped in low-pay, low-productivity sectors.