Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! The artificial intelligence (AI) boom began in earnest in 2012 when Alex Krizhevsky, in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton (who was Krizhevsky's Ph.D. advisor), created AlexNet, which then won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. The goal of that annual competition, which had begun in 1996, was to classify the 1.3 million high-resolution photographs in the ImageNet training set into 1,000 different classes. In other words, to correctly identify a dog and a cat.

The Australian Government has released the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan in a bid to accelerate the development and adoption of AI technologies. "AI could contribute more than $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and the AI Action Plan will help us leverage opportunities for AI to further strengthen the economy and improve the quality of life of all Australians, while ensuring that the development and adoption of AI is guided by appropriate safeguards, privacy and ethical considerations," said Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Christian Porter. The Action Plan is backed by $124.1 million in funding announced in the May Budget and sets out four key focus areas for government that will help to position Australia as a global leader in AI. Focus one: Developing and adopting AI to transform Australian businesses -- support to help businesses develop and adopt AI technologies to create jobs and increase their productivity and competitiveness. Focus two: Creating an environment to grow and attract the world's best AI talent -- support to ensure our businesses have access to talent and expertise.

The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is finally being realized across a wide variety of industries. AI is now viewed as a crucial technology to adopt for enterprises to thrive in today's business environment. Healthcare, in particular, has been one of the industries that AI advocates expect to be revolutionized by AI. Potential use cases paint a clear picture of how healthcare stakeholders stand to benefit from AI in the months ahead. Patient care standards are projected to improve, diagnostic capabilities are expected to expand, and facilities should become far more efficient.

In a whitepaper released last month, the European Commission (EC) unveiled its strategy to promote the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe whilst ensuring the respect of fundamental rights. The whitepaper outlines the institution's plan to develop what it calls an "ecosystem of excellence" and an "ecosystem of trust." The idea here is to create a legal framework that would address the risks for fundamental rights and safety related to AI, all the while introducing initiatives to support and facilitate the adoption of the technology. "AI offers important efficiency and productivity gains that can strengthen the competitiveness of European industry and improve the wellbeing of citizens," the paper says, adding that AI can also contribute to finding solutions to urging societal challenges related to sustainability, demographic changes, democracy and crime. At the same time, AI entails a number of potential risks such as opaque decision-making, discrimination, intrusion in citizens' private lives or can be being used for criminal purposes.

Rep. Will Hurd continues to campaign for an American national strategy around artificial intelligence, and the Texas Republican told FedScoop it's something he hopes to get done before the end of his final term in Congress. After explaining his ideal outline for the strategy during a keynote at the Dell Technologies Forum on Thursday, he told FedScoop, "this is on my list for the next 14 months" before he leaves office. Hurd recently announced he won't run for re-election in 2020. "We have to ensure America leads in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other technologies that are going to define the course of this century," Hurd said. "That's why government should work on things like a national strategy to coordinate across government and academia and the private sector to advance research and development and adoption of artificial intelligence."

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.

While the United States currently has an edge in the race to develop artificial intelligence, China is rapidly gaining ground as Europe falls behind, according to a report released today by the Center for Data Innovation. The study arrives amid a wide-ranging debate about which region has gained AI leadership, and the implications that holds for dominating cutting-edge technologies such as autonomous vehicles and other forms of automation. The winners of an AI arms race could hold a significant economic advantage in the decades to come. There has been growing concern among U.S. tech companies and policymakers that China's initiative to make it dominant in AI by 2030 is allowing it to dictate this critical field. The ability of its central government to allow sweeping data gathering and determine official champions to lead this charge seems to have given its efforts significant momentum.

The European Commission's Joint Research Center released a report that explores the European perspective on artificial intelligence (AI), along with the global AI landscape's state of play. The report recognizes the value of AI across industry, but while acknowledging the fierce competition on AI taking place between the EU, China, and the United States, it ultimately dismisses the need for Europe to win this global race, arguing instead that for the EU, the more important goal is focusing on developing values and ethics in AI. This is a naive perspective, especially given that China is not only fiercely competing on developing AI, but also aspiring to dominate in AI so as to compete in industries where Europe is leading today. Ironically, even if the EU's first priority is to shape the values and ethics of AI, it will be severely limited in its ability to do so if it is not leading the development and adoption of this technology. Europe would be wrong to forget that any competition involves winner and losers--and more often than not, the winners are those who compete with gusto.

If the United States wants to maintain its leadership stance in the world for development and use of artificial intelligence, it's time to adopt a national strategy. That's the conclusion of a report developed by the Center for Data Innovation, a self-described thinktank that studies the "intersection of data, technology and public policy." According to Senior Policy Analyst Joshua New, finding success with AI requires more than a bunch of companies investing in it. It also needs the federal government to support the development and adoption of AI in areas such as research, skills development and data usage. According to New, many other countries, including China, France and the United Kingdom, are setting up "significant initiatives" to grab global market share in AI.