… awards first place to See-Thru-AI, a Chicago startup that helps companies using AI and machine learning to navigate complex regulations.

The British glove manufacturer Cornelia James is often in the public eye. Since 1979, it has provided gloves by royal appointment to the Queen of England, and more recently it has dressed megastars including Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Madonna. All those high-profile customers are great for publicity, but nobody drives sales quite like Kate Middleton, said Genevieve James, the company's creative director. "We get far more of a spike in sales when someone like Kate wears them. But when it's somebody like the Duchess of Cambridge, the public, particularly in the US, can relate to that," James told IBM. James first confirmed that fact in 2012 when, at a ceremony for Remembrance Sunday, Middleton wore a pair of Cornelia James' merino wool gloves.

Imagine if technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI) could help visually impaired people see? Such technology actually exists in the form of a smartphone app called Seeing AI that literally serves as a talking camera that helps visually impaired people see by describing their surroundings at any given moment and can improve the quality of life for millions of people. Massive amounts of data are required to fuel AI and to train the algorithms that are part of AI solutions. As the data privacy laws across the globe continue to evolve (e.g., the European Union General Data Protection Regulation that becomes effective on May 25, 2018), we continue to see significant data loss/access issues involving well-known institutions and the cybercriminals become even more sophisticated, it is of paramount importance that AI systems need to respect privacy and be highly secure. AI solutions ought to widely benefit everyone – not just a select few.

THE idea that we are living in a historic, even apocalyptic, age exerts a powerful pull on the human mind. Eschatology – the theology of end times – is a religious concept, but crops up in many other systems of thought. Marxism and neo-liberalism were both driven by an "end-of-history" narrative. Scientific thinking isn't immune either: the technological singularity has been called eschatology for geeks, and the study of existential risk even has its own centre at the University of Cambridge. You don't have to believe in the four horsemen to see the apocalypse coming.