A new WIPO flagship study has documented a massive recent surge in artificial intelligence-based inventions, with U.S.-based companies IBM and Microsoft leading the pack as AI has moved from the theoretical realm toward the global marketplace in recent years. The first publication in the "WIPO Technology Trends" series defines and measures innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), uncovering more than 340,000 AI-related patent applications and 1.6 million scientific papers published since AI first emerged in the 1950s, with the majority of all AI-related patent filings published since 2013. This inaugural Technology Trends report provides a common information base on AI for policy and decision makers in government and business, as well as concerned citizens across the globe, who are grappling with the ramifications of a new technology that promises to upend many areas of economic, social and cultural activity. "Patenting activity in the artificial intelligence realm is rising at a rapid pace, meaning we can expect a very significant number of new AI-based products, applications and techniques that will alter our daily lives – and also shape future human interaction with the machines we created," said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry. "AI's ramifications for the future of human development are profound. The first step in maximizing the widespread benefit of AI, while addressing ethical, legal and regulatory challenges, is to create a common factual basis for understanding of artificial intelligence. In unveiling the first in our "WIPO Technology Trends" series, WIPO is pleased to contribute evidence-based projections, thereby informing global policymaking on the future of AI, its governance and the IP framework that supports it," said Mr. Gurry.

Your next Amazon package could be delivered on a public bus. The internet giant has filed a patent for a new mobile package pickup system where items are placed in secure containers either inside or affixed to a bus. Users would then be notified of a bus with their package that's closest to them, eliminating the need to walk or drive to a pickup location. Your next Amazon package could be delivered on a public bus. After a package is ordered, users are given an authorization code that they can use to get into the storage compartment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has already stretched its roots in every industry and has become the key player in driving the industrial workflow. Applications of technology have become ubiquitous. Still, AI is in its early stages and has a long path to travel. Scientists delve deeper to understand and upgrade the technology for better and these researches will lead to new outcomes in the proximate future. With the increased use of AI's facial recognition applications in smartphones and other devices, users' biometric data has become highly vulnerable to misuse.

At a New York event celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. held in the Riverside Church last week, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sparked a small firestorm when she argued that algorithms reflect human bias. "Algorithms are still made by human beings, and those algorithms are still pegged to basic human assumptions," she said. And if you don't fix the bias, then you are just automating the bias." "Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claims that algorithms, which are driven by math, are racist," replied Daily Wire reporter Ryan Saavedra, kicking off the latest cycle of online conservative handwringing about something AOC has said. Ocasio-Cortez was right, though, and what she said should not be that controversial.

The employment rate is always a popular topic in nations around the world--often leading to political debates and economic scrutiny. However, the conversation has shifted in recent years as people start to look at things from a different perspective. The critical question very soon may be, "What if I can't find a job because I've been replaced by artificial intelligence (AI)?" As with anything that involves technology and the future, there are a wide range of projections and prognostications, but most of them end with a conclusion that humans need not apply. How come everybody is talking about it all of a sudden?

Organised around the three main pillars that constitute the Council of Europe core values, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, panel discussions will address the challenges and opportunities of AI development for individuals, for societies, and for the viability of our legal and institutional frameworks, and will explore options for ensuring that effective mechanisms of democratic oversight are in place.

NEW DELHI: It faces threats from rising protectionism, data flow curbs and fast-changing technological shifts, but the Indian IT industry is keeping its hopes high for the new year with plans afoot for big investments in automation and artificial intelligence. For the industry body Nasscom, 2018 has been the year of'Digital at Scale' as IT firms focussed on leveraging new technologies and ensuring sustainability by creating right skills with help from innovation, policies and partnerships. The year ahead is "punctuated with several transformative opportunities", Nasscom President Debjani Ghosh said. The industry body has projected exports to grow at 7-9 per cent for 2018-19, almost same as the previous fiscal, but domestic revenue may grow faster at 10-12 per cent and this may make the new year transformative with overseas funds accounting for a lion's share so far. Over years, the industry has graduated from being the back office of the world to being at the forefront of change, helping clients optimise operations and stay ahead of competition.

For example, speech recognition combined with natural language understanding provides the ability for a service like Alexa or Google Assistant to interpret a voice command so that it can execute it. Even more magical is when you can then execute on a request based on a recognized pattern and do something interesting, like play music. Talking to our homes and surroundings is just the beginning of this seemingly magical experience. What we're starting to see is that AI-based services are reaching human-level error rates. Word Error Rates (WER) for speech transcription (in a perfect environment in English) reached human levels about a year ago.

Successfully predicting gentrification could have many social and commercial applications; however, real estate sales are difficult to predict because they belong to a chaotic system comprised of intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics, perceived value, and market speculation. Using New York City real estate as our subject, we combine modern techniques of data science and machine learning with traditional spatial analysis to create robust real estate prediction models for both classification and regression tasks. We compare several cutting edge machine learning algorithms across spatial, semi-spatial and non-spatial feature engineering techniques, and we empirically show that spatially-conscious machine learning models outperform non-spatial models when married with advanced prediction techniques such as feed-forward artificial neural networks and gradient boosting machine models.

Remarks delivered at Artificial Intelligence: Intellectual Property Considerations.