Amid a recent explosion of rapid and thrilling advances in consumer-facing artificial intelligence applications, the AI community made up of industry experts, academics and folks who are just plain interested in the tech are looking forward to AI Week. The international event begins Monday, hosted by The Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center and The Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology & Security, in cooperation with TAD Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Tel Aviv University. There, the AI community will gather to discuss the technology's development, potential future application and inherent ethical quandaries, steering the ship of artificial intelligence into the new year by answering the industry's current burning questions, such as where the next breakthroughs will be, how the working class will be impacted by these tools and what kind of fine-tuning is required for current applications. To answer these questions and set the stage for AI Week, The Jerusalem Post spoke with Nadav Cohen, one of the event's many keynote speakers. Cohen is a professor of computer science, a deep learning researcher and the chief scientist at Imubit, which implements deep learning for optimizing manufacturing processes, enabling real time control of large manufacturing facilities and making them run optimally, which is good for both profit and sustainability. It seems as though, in 2023, every Tom, Dick and Harry has their eyes on AI and its development thanks to the meteoric popularity and widespread usage of generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and DALL-E.

A new AI system that was trained to mimic human gaze could soon be used to detect cancer. "Being able to focus our attention is an important part of the human visual system, which allows humans to select and interpret the most relevant information in a particular scene. Scientists all over the world have been using computer software to try and recreate this ability to pick out the most salient parts of an image, but with mixed success up until now. In the study, the team used a deep learning computer algorithm known as a convolutional neural network, which is designed to mimic the interconnected web of neurons in the human brain and is modelled specifically on the visual cortex. This type of algorithm is ideal for taking images as an input and being able to assign importance to various objects or aspects within the image itself. According to the team, they utilised a huge database of images in which each image had already been assessed, or viewed, by humans and assigned so-called'areas of interest' using eye-tracking software. These images were then fed into the algorithm and by using deep learning the system slowly began to learn from the images to a point where it could then accurately predict which parts of the image were most salient. Researchers said their system was tested against seven advanced visual saliency systems already in use, and was shown to be'superior on all metrics'. 'Being able to successfully predict where people look in natural images could unlock a wide range of applications from automatic target detection to robotics, image processing and medical diagnostics,' said Dr Hantao Liu, co-author of the study, from Cardiff University's School of Computer Science and Informatics."

A collaborative effort has led to the creation of a new open source AI language model that anyone can use democratizing access to AI. "Unlike other, more famous large language models such as OpenAI's GPT-3 and Google's LaMDA, BLOOM (which stands for BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) is designed to be as transparent as possible, with researchers sharing details about the data it was trained on, the challenges in its development, and the way they evaluated its performance. OpenAI and Google have not shared their code or made their models available to the public, and external researchers have very little understanding of how these models are trained. BLOOM was created over the last year by over 1,000 volunteer researchers in a project called BigScience, which was coordinated by AI startup Hugging Face using funding from the French government. It officially launched on July 12. The researchers hope developing an open-access LLM that performs as well as other leading models will lead to long-lasting changes in the culture of AI development and help democratize access to cutting-edge AI technology for researchers around the world. The model's ease of access is its biggest selling point. Now that it's live, anyone can download it and tinker with it free of charge on Hugging Face's website. Users can pick from a selection of languages and then type in requests for BLOOM to do tasks like writing recipes or poems, translating or summarizing texts, or writing programming code. AI developers can use the model as a foundation to build their own applications."

Tel Aviv University launched the new, interdisciplinary Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science today, headed by Prof. Meir Feder of the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering. The Center will enhance basic science in these fields, encourage cross-disciplinary research that uses the most advanced methods of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science (DS), and train a new generation of researchers and industrialists who will take Israel to the forefront of the global AI revolution in the coming years. Moreover, it will lay the groundwork for the rapidly growing field of quantum computing. The launch event took place during TAU's annual AI Week. TAU President, Prof. Ariel Porat: "The establishment of the AI Center is one more step toward implementing TAU's vision for advancing groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research that brings together the university's finest researchers, the high-tech industry and the community. Not long ago we launched the interdisciplinary Center for Combating Pandemics and over the coming year we intend to establish more such centers, such as one for climate change and another for healthy aging. TAU's great advantage is its enormous range of disciplines. Our new interdisciplinary centers will further extend the scope of research, combining different disciplines, from engineering and computer science through life sciences, medicine and psychology, to economics, management, humanities, arts and law."

We invite you to participate in the Introduction to Robotics Workshop on Sunday, 11/1/20, 4 pm - 6 pm EDT. It will be lead by Women in Robotics who are part of the Black In Robotics group. The workshop will be capped at 10 participants in order to create an interactive hands on environment with robot building. All participants will be emailed a link to purchase the Hadabot ROS 2 Robot Kit (https://www.hadabot.com/purchase.html) for the special workshop price of $50. All participants will be emailed a Zoom link to join the meeting. For any questions please contact admin@blackwomeninai.com or carlottaberry@gmail.com.

Join us at AI Week this November for an international event with the experts who are reshaping AI innovation. Bringing together over 2,000 technologists, researchers and data-scientists, AI Week will provide an international forum to discuss and reveal state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, data science, applied machine learning and predictive applications.

The British Library on London's Euston Road is probably best known for its oldest items. The longest-surviving pieces among its 200 million-strong collection are Chinese oracle bones believed to date from about 1,500 BC. Other notable items in its ownership include one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and, fittingly for the world's largest library, a copy of what it is recognised as the world's oldest mechanically printed book – the Gutenberg Bible. But for all its ties to the past, the library (pictured above) also houses a growing movement towards the future. Founded in 2015, The Alan Turing Institute is the UK's national research institution for data science and – since 2017 – artificial intelligence.

Government's largest department is among Whitehall's most forward-thinking in its use of robotics and automation. The Department for Work and Pensions established its Intelligent Automation Garage (IAG) in 2017. The goal of the unit, which is based across the DWP's Manchester and Newcastle offices, was exploring how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation could best be used to improve the department's operations. The DWP believed that automating certain processes could improve productivity and outcomes, and free up staff time to be dedicated to things other than fulfilling administrative tasks. As of February 2019, the department had implemented automation in 15 processes and was planning to launch another 11 automations over the course of this year.

Over the course of the next five days, we will be bringing you a wide range of content dedicated to the technology that has surely more potential than any other to transform government and public services. Today we will be making an introduction to artificial intelligence, looking at the journey the public sector has so far taken with the technology, and where it has led. Tomorrow we will profile some existing use cases, then later in the week we will move on to looking at the ethical, legal, and technical challenges, the respective roles of the various stakeholders and, finally, we will examine what the future may hold. AI Week – which is being run by PublicTechnology in association with UiPath – will bring our readers an array of features, interviews, analysis and case studies. From Wednesday, you will also be able to view an exclusive webinar discussion in which an expert panel of public- and private-sector representatives will debate all the major issues.

Welcome to TechRadar's AI week! Over the next few days we'll be bringing you a raft of content dedicated to offering a better understanding as to what artificial intelligence is and how it has permeated the our daily lives. Once the work of science fiction and blockbuster movies, you can now find artificial intelligence embedded in any number of household objects - from your phone, to your speaker... even to your fridge. So this week we've set out to reveal just how powerful AI is, the gadgets you can find the technology working in right now and what the future actually holds for artificial intelligence. To deepen your sense of what artificial intelligence is, head to our AI Week hub now, where you'll find a whole host of exciting articles to read.