"The initiative of the'Archimedes' centre started as a thought and today is a real project which has guaranteed funding from the recovery fund in order to gather in Greece brilliant minds who work on this subject. I am also looking forward to this", Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Wednesday speaking at an event for the establishment of the research centre'Archimedes' organized by'Greece 2021' on the subject of artificial intelligence, data science and algorithms. The prime minister stated, among others, that many of the issues that arise from the application of artificial intelligence already have direct implications in the field of philosophy and especially ethics. "Artificial intelligence allows us to see connections where the mind cannot easily see and process. I will give three examples. Last summer we used an artificial intelligence algorithm so that we could do an entrance test in Greece with greater accuracy than if we had done it randomly. Consider the possibilities that exist in the field of tax revenue collection in order to make targeted audits. I imagine that there are tools of artificial intelligence to regulate the operation of traffic lights on the streets and to deal with traffic in Athens. There are too many fields", underlined Mitsotakis.

If you live and breathe all things robotics you might want to consider reserving your place in any one of these great events coming up in 2020. We have scoured the internet for some of the best robotics events you might want to consider checking out next year. VEX Worlds 2019 is a robotics competition that was run between the 24th and 27th of October 2019. It was held at the Kentucky Exposition Center, 937 Phillips Lane, Louisville in Kentucky. The VEX IQ Challenge is a fun competition presented by the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation.

Welcome to Data Driven, the podcast where we explore the emerging field of Data Science. We bring the best minds in Data, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence right to you. In a world where Data is the new Oil, Data Science the new Refineries, consider this Car Talk for the Data Age*. Every week we bring the best minds in this emerging field straight to you. Our goal is to educate and inspire our listeners so that they can be prepared to thrive in a Data Driven world.

HDFC Bank, arguably India's best managed bank in terms of risk mitigation and sustained profitability metrics, heavily uses machine learning technologies to create accurate credit risk models. The bank also has to its credit innovations such as 10 second loans, for which it uses algorithms. To boost its machine learning and AI capability, the bank has launched a hackathon on HackerEarth. "Under the Centre of Digital Excellence (CODE), the Bank is organising the Hackathon challenge to hire data scientists. The top talent that emerges out of this challenge will be offered the chance to work in the Bank in the risk analytics team. We are looking at specialisation in coding and machine learning. This initiative is part of the Bank's endeavour to remain at the cutting edge of leading technologies like AI, ML etc. We hope to harness the potential talent that exists outside to enhance our capabilities in digital and technology," said Nitin Chugh, Country Head – Digital Banking, HDFC Bank.

A couple of recent events made me think it would be good to post a brief but (hopefully) balanced summary of the discussion about superintelligence. Our brains are existence proof that ordinary matter organised the right way can generate general intelligence – an intelligence which can apply itself to any domain. They were created by evolution, which is slow, messy and inefficient. It is also un-directed, although non-random. We are now employing the powerful, fast and purposeful method of science to organise different types of ordinary matter to achieve the same result.

Today, I am proud to release something Andy Leonard and I have been working on the last few months: Data Driven, a podcast that explores the emerging fields of Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. Data Driven is the podcast where we explore the emerging field of Data Science. We bring the best minds in Data, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence right to you. In a world where Data is the new Oil, Data Science the new Refineries, consider this Car Talk for the Data Age. Every week we bring the best minds in this emerging field straight to you.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage today in venture capital circles. We've seen spectacular exits in the past few years, from Google absorbing Deepmind in 2014 for $500 million, to Twitter buying TellApart in 2015 for $533 million, and Intel swallowing Nervana in 2016 for $400 million. But these were all IT plays. Berkeley-based Lygos is engineering and designing microbes that convert low-cost sugar into high-value, specialty chemicals. Ultimately, the ability to design and optimize microbes, or program them, is becoming faster and cheaper than ever before.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage today in venture capital circles. We've seen spectacular exits in the past few years, from Google absorbing Deepmind in 2014 for $500 million, to Twitter buying TellApart in 2015 for $533 million, and Intel swallowing Nervana in 2016 for $400 million. But these were all IT plays. Berkeley-based Lygos is engineering and designing microbes that convert low-cost sugar into high-value, specialty chemicals. Ultimately, the ability to design and optimize microbes, or program them, is becoming faster and cheaper than ever before.

Big data is the next big thing, but so far all it seems to do is deliver marginally better spam. And by "marginally better" I really mean "no different from the spam we got a decade ago." Commenting on this disconnect between the potential and reality of big data, former Facebook executive (and current co-founder at Hadoop vendor Cloudera) Jeff Hammerbacher said, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. SEE Are you being exploited by online marketers using "tricks for clicks"? What particularly "sucks" is that these "best minds" don't seem to be very good at it.

In 2011, an entrepreneur named Jeff Hammerbacher summed up the dystopian malaise many people in the tech industry felt about the state of Web and mobile innovation. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads," Hammerbacher, an early Facebook employee and co-founder of Cloudera, said in an interview with BusinessWeek. As it turns out, maybe that was not such a bad thing. To serve more precise ads at targeted audience, engineers and programmers needed to build smarter systems that aggregated massive quantities of data. Sophisticated algorithms were created, application programming interfaces were built to truck data around the Internet and massive server complexes were constructed to store and compute all the bits.