UAE nationals including government officials, employees and students will soon get the opportunity to receive specialised training on artificial intelligence at the Oxford University. The MoU was signed by Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and Roger L. Michel, founder …

A new three year agreement between the UAE and Oxford University will see Emirati officials, employees and students trained to build their skills in artificial intelligence technology through an array of specialised training courses.

The next breakout star in Hollywood might be an AI named Arraiy. Arraiy is a computer vision and machine learning platform specifically designed for film and television effects. Arraiy's creators are training the system to rotoscope -- the process of separating certain parts of footage from the background (for example) separating an actor from the green screen behind them) with years' worth of human-created visual effects as training tools. The ultimate goal, though, is to do it more quickly and cheaply than humans can, and just as effectively. Rotoscoping by hand can take dozens of hours, but Arraiy can do it in a fraction of the time.

Hype over artificial intelligence reached its zenith in 2017, with CIOs, consultants and academics touting the technology as potentially automating anything from business and IT operations to customer connections. Yet through the first calendar quarter of 2018 several media organizations reported on the dangers of AI, which involves training computers to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence. "There's been so much hype in the media about it and this is just journalists trying to extend the hype by talking about the negative side," says Thomas Davenport, a Babson College distinguished professor who teaches a class on cognitive technologies. Perhaps, but the concerns are hardly new and very persistent, ranging from fears about racial, gender and other biases to automated drones running amok with potentially lethal consequences. Get the latest insights with our CIO Daily newsletter.

Across the many fields artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to, from journalism and translation to self-driving cars, AI is often seen by people as either a great solution or a terrible problem. However the truth lies somewhere in the middle, said Lisa-Maria Neudert, D.Phil. At the International Journalism Festival in Italy today (14 April), Neudert, who has been researching propaganda in the digital age, spoke on a panel that highlighted some of the ways in which AI is being used to both spread and tackle misinformation. "Propaganda now is automated, data-driven and it is also often user-generated and very easy to launch over social media, so it has become more impactful and more targeted," she said. "The spread of misinformation through social media is often very much like an oil spill: it will impact the entire information ecosystem and make it a difficult environment for people who are trying to navigate it." "Now the money is going into conversational AI to make it smart and human-like, but the problem is those technologies are often developed without anyone thinking of the social implications.

Transitioning from hype to reality, artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining momentum across industries thanks to an explosion in computing power and storage, the emergence of IoT (Internet of Things) and big data, and algorithmic advances.

In a very deep network such as a conv net with lots of filters and/or full layers, it seems to me that not all filters/weights are equally important - some could even be useless. Is there a scheme that removes these from the network (to save computation time)? I'm not talking about dropout which temporarily takes them out, I mean permanently take them out based on small gradients, high varience, etc. If anyone knows anything I'd appreciate some links/papers (sorry I'm new to NN).

Subrata Rakshit, a scientist at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, said the DRDO is trying to develop a set of robots for surveillance. He said services need to come to a certain level of digitalisation. "We are developing these large applications software and putting in Artificial Intelligence …

Chinese police have used facial recognition technology to locate and arrest a man who was among a crowd of 60,000 concert goers. The suspect, who has been identified only as Mr Ao, was attending a concert by pop star Jacky Cheung in Nanchang city last weekend when he was caught. Police said the 31-year-old, who was wanted for "economic crimes", was "shocked" when he was caught. China has a huge surveillance network of over 170 million CCTV cameras. Mr Ao was identified by cameras at the concert's ticket entrance, and apprehended by police after he had sat down with other concert goers.