The "Agricultural Techniques Hackathon" will be held from September 26-28, 2019 in the Al- Qassim region and is open for participation by programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, web developers, owners of innovative Ideas and specialists from GCC and Middle East markets. The Hackathon will consist of three tracks comprising marketing and growth, management and follow-up of agricultural projects, and use of Artificial Intelligence and data in pest and agricultural control. A jury will review the most prominent ideas and solutions provided for solving the challenges facing the agricultural sector. The outstanding projects within the three tracks of the Hackathon will be included into Badir's dedicated plan with its accelerators program, who will be provided with a range of advisory services and intensive programs such as training, workshops, guidance to develop entrepreneurial innovations and transform them into real projects within 90 working days, and up to the incubation of the projects to ensure their success. Nawaf Al-Sahaf, the CEO of Badir Program, commented: "Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 program aims to adopt a more sustainable, productive, and efficient food system. Our joint'Agricultural Techniques Hackathon' with Mujtami will help generate fresh innovative ideas and solutions to transform the existing food system in the Kingdom, which will lead to reduction of natural resources waste, increase in the efficiency and quality of production, and higher economic return."

Faced with spending cuts by clients, stiffer competition from upstart legal services providers, and the rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), law firms' traditional model of the billable hour may have had its time in the sun. "Law firms are looking for different ways to charge for their services, especially in the corporate market where clients are just not accepting the old way of billing," says Dani McCormick, director of solutions at Lexis Nexis. The billable hour has long been the bedrock of how the legal profession works out how much to charge clients for their services. Fee earners log the time they spend on client work each day, usually in six-minute increments, and this helps them to provide clients with accurate bills and keep track of annual billing targets. While this model was effective in the past, critics say its rigid structure is incompatible with the current market, where clients are more price conscious, and see more value in project-based pay and success fees.

In this July 30, 2019, photo, Paul Hildreth, emergency operations coordinator for the Fulton County School District, works in the emergency operations center at the Fulton County School District Administration Center in Atlanta. Artificial Intelligence is transforming surveillance cameras from passive sentries into active observers that can immediately spot a gunman, alert retailers when someone is shoplifting and help police quickly find suspects. Schools, such as the Fulton County School District, are among the most enthusiastic adopters of the technology. Paul Hildreth peered at a display of dozens of images from security cameras surveying his Atlanta school district and settled on one showing a woman in a bright yellow shirt walking a hallway. A mouse click instructed the artificial intelligence-equipped system to find other images of the woman, and it immediately stitched them into a video narrative of where she was currently, where she had been and where she was going. There was no threat, but Hildreth's demonstration showed what's possible with AI-powered cameras.

To paraphrase 1984's The Terminator, the artificial intelligence developed by residential real estate company HouseCanary will absolutely not stop, ever, until your house is properly valued. The robot appraiser takes advantage of new federal regulations raising the threshold value of homes exempt from human evaluation. In doing so, it's allowed to do a job that once required a flesh-and-blood human to perform. Namely, it will determine the current value of a property by inspecting its exterior condition and amenities. Before you start picturing an inspection robot like the quadruped ANYmal, which carries out inspection tasks on oil rigs, this job is largely carried out remotely. The A.I. bases its decisions and predictions on images, using a neural network that's trained to recognize the different qualities of a home that influence its valuation.

Innovate UK and the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have announced a £3.5m funding competition for projects that can improve data access. The funding is for projects that will fast track development and adoption of artificial intelligence and data technologies in accountancy, insurance and legal services through better access to data. Open to businesses of any size, the competition opens on 14 October 2019 with the deadline for applications being 20 November 2019 midday. According to the agencies, the competition will be funded by the government's £20m Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund Next Generation Services Challenge, which has an objective of exploring how new technologies can transform the services. Innovate UK said that the service sector accounts for 80% of the country's economy.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting lots of industries right now. According to Quartz, 37% of companies are using or are planning to use AI tech this year -- a far cry from 10% back in 2015. This number is only expected to skyrocket thanks to the companies who are currently utilizing AI innovations. Below we've listed some of the most important industry leaders: Kicking off this list is one of the biggest players. Amazon is leading the AI revolution on both the consumer-side and in terms of backend applications.

Paul Hildreth peered at a display of dozens of images from security cameras surveying his Atlanta school district and settled on one showing a woman in a bright yellow shirt walking a hallway. A mouse click instructed the artificial intelligence-equipped system to find other images of the woman, and it immediately stitched them into a video narrative of where she was currently, where she had been and where she was going. There was no threat, but Hildreth's demonstration showed what's possible with AI-powered cameras. If a gunman were in one of his schools, the cameras could quickly identify the shooter's location and movements, allowing police to end the threat as soon as possible, said Hildreth, emergency operations coordinator for the Fulton County School District. AI is transforming surveillance cameras from passive sentries into active observers that can identify people, suspicious behavior and guns, amassing large amounts of data that help them learn over time to recognize mannerisms, gait and dress.

On 12 February 2019, the European Parliament adopted a Resolution on a comprehensive European industrial policy on artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics1. After describing AI as "one of the strategic technologies of the 21st century"2, the European Parliament presented several recommendations to the Member States. This Resolution underlines the need to close the European gap with North America and Asia-Pacific, and promotes a coordinated approach at the European level "to be able to compete with the massive investments made by third countries, especially the US and China"3. Europe is well behind in private investments in AI, with €2.4 to €3.2 billion in 2016, as opposed to €6.5 to €9.7 billion in Asia-Pacific and €12.1 to €18.6 billion in North America. To address this challenge, the European Parliament develops a general approach based on a strategic regulatory environment for AI and encourages strong user protections.

With the advent of Artificial Intelligence in every imaginable sphere that matters, it is hardly surprising that innovators are now in a rush to build their Intellectual Property portfolio in AI. The popularity of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, neural networks and all other things related to Intelligent machines has been on the rise for quite some time now. A similarly whopping growth has been observed in the number of machine learning or AI-related patents/applications which have been filed in recent years. A recently published article revealed that patent applications based on machine learning have nearly quadrupled in the last few years, owing to the widespread use of the same in all major technological fields. Since the formal conception of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, way back in the 50s, more than 300,000 patent applications and over a million scientific journals have been published.